Me and Kim went to a beach town called Playas for a night this week, here's us in the hammock area:
Here's Kim and the sea:
Another view of the beach:
Us and the sea:
Me with some super glue to fix my glasses which broke:
Thursday 4 September 2014
Monday 1 September 2014
Nariz del diablo
Hi again
To continue about the Devil's Nose train in Alausi. In Spanish this is called Nariz del Diablo, and basically the mountain that it goes up, looks a little bit like a devil with a nose. The train was built originally in the 1800s, to make the journey from the coast to the sierra easier - it previously took about 2 weeks to do that journey. The Devil's Nose is just one small section of the whole train route that originally existed, it's possible to do other parts of the whole train line too in other parts of Ecuador. It had closed for some time as I mentioned previously. We got up super early, at 6am, to get to the station at 7am for the 8am train, which meant we had time for breakfast too, which is always my favourite part of the proceedings. I do love trains, and remember being a little bit upset when I first discovered you couldn't travel all through South America by train - I think you used to be able to as Paul Theroux wrote that Old Patagonia Express book about it, but I think gradually they all closed down, probably due to costs of maintaining them.
The train leaves Alausi and goes to a station about 20k away, called Sibambe. Which I kept mispronouncing Zimbabwe. The train goes slowly and the views are actually amazing, of canyons and rivers and fields and typical Andean things. We basically chatted lots, about things that were nothing to do with the train or the scenery, and then kept remembering we should be looking at the scenery and would stand up and look out of the window. There was a lady talking about various historical / geographical things to do with the journey, and she translated it all into English, especially for us, but we still didn't fully listen. I am probably the worst tourist ever at the moment. We then got paranoid that a man across the carriage from us was angry that we were eating crisps, but it turned out later when we got chatting back at Alausi station that his wife was very interested in Kim's lovely pink hat that she'd put on around the same time as the crisps got eaten. Isn't it funny how you can completely misconstrue a situation, is what we thought. We nearly offered the hat to the woman for 5 dollars as we thought it might make her really happy, but after trying it on she seemed satisfied with the whole transaction and gave it back to Kim.
At Sibambe we looked round a little museum about the train. There used to be lots of condors in the area but the dynamite they used to create the train track in the rock scared them away. There is 600m altitude difference between Sibambe and Alausi train stations, and the engineers therefore decided to make 2 switchbacks to get up there. This means the train goes up one way then goes back on itself and up the next switchback if you see what I mean. There were also very difficult weather conditions when they were building the train track and apparently the rock they had to cut through was very difficult to work with, so it earned the name of the most difficult train track in the world to build. We watched some traditional Andean panpipe dancers doing some dancing and looked at a llama and a horse, and at the views from the little cafe. We ate some really really good chocolate too. Then you get back on the train and go back to Alausi, pretty much exactly the same way you've come. The whole experience was very sedate and definitely enjoyable but absolutely not what I was expecting. I was expecting to be scared as we climbed up a cliff edge precariously on a train, maybe like when you get the funicular trains in places like Switzerland and Austria and you feel like you're going vertically upwards and it's all a bit frightening. Not that I like being frightened particularly, but I suppose I didn't feel any strong emotions about this train and we had been quite excited about it beforehand.
Anyway, we went back to Alausi and bought a few artesanial (if that's a word) items in the local shops. like rings and earrings, and then got our stuff from the hostel and chatted to Victor, who owns the hostel. He's lived there for 5 years and is US/Ecuadorean, his father owned the farm before him. It's really stunning there, and I can imagine how nice and calm life must be there. Me and Kim had talked about all the beautiful landscape and the difference in ways of life between our hectic citiy life (whether that's London or Guayaquil), and the sedate countryside farming life. But I think we romanticise it, like the old painters did like Gainsborough and those others that painted haywains and cattle lowing - it's actually probably really tough, you never get to take a holiday if you're a farmer, and you must always be worrying about weather, and soil, and slugs (or the Andean equivalent) eating your crops, and then natural disasters wiping things out too. I'd love a slower/simpler way of life, as I think most people that live in cities would, but are our brains just too deeply used to having to have all that stimulation all day that it would actually feel really difficult to make that change for the long term? I suppose the only way to find out is to try it one day and see what happens. It's like town mouse country mouse.
After a 2 dollar lunch, we got the bus back to Guayaquil. The last bus to Guayaquil leaves Alausi at 1pm, which is an early last bus. We chatted a bit then both fell asleep for a while. The journey is about 4.5 hours, and the last 3 hours of that are really really hot as you are going lower down and into jungley country again towards Guayaquil. If you remember last time I arrived in Guayaquil I was wearing 7 layers of clothing and that was too many. This time I had just 1 layer on and that was still too much too, but at least I was expecting the heat this time. We got back to Kim's and basically didn't do too much as we were really tired and hot, but we did eat some strawberry cheesecake as a treat for the long journey. Tyrone came round and we went to a really good street stall for tacos. It reminded me of the hamburger stall we used to go to in Mexico when I was there doing my TEFL course, that place was just incredible, I've never had burgers like that before or ever again. These tacos were great, full of beans (literally), and then you choose from a long list of other things, I had chicken and mozarella in mine, and loads of guacamole and onion/tomato stuff. We had planned on getting up at 5am on Sunday for our cycling, but changed our mind when we got home and realised how tired we were.
After the cycling yesterday we went for some seafood dinner at the Malecon, with Becky (Kim's flatmate that I'd met in Cuenca that weekend), and then went to las Penas (there should be a squiggle on the n here and it's pronounced las Pen-yas), which is where we'd gone last time I was here - where all the steps are and the lighthouse at the top. This time we went up the lighthouse, in all there are about 500 steps (only about 50 in the actual lighthouse). Tyrone explained some things to us about the lighthouse and the forts and the pirates that had landed in Guayaquil, and we drank some really strong cocktails on a pretend pirate ship near the lighthouse. I had a white russian which was really nice but as I don't drink much anymore it knocked me out a bit, which was also quite nice. The pretend pirate ship was pretty weird as there was no one on it apart from us and some weird pirate statues and really loud music. After another taco on the street that was the end of that day. Today our plans changed as Kim had to go to work unexpectedly and I have a cold, so I've been catching up on blogging and reading / blowing my nose etc, but hopefully tomorrow we're going to the beach for the day/night.
Over and out pepinillos from pepinillo in Guayaquil xx
To continue about the Devil's Nose train in Alausi. In Spanish this is called Nariz del Diablo, and basically the mountain that it goes up, looks a little bit like a devil with a nose. The train was built originally in the 1800s, to make the journey from the coast to the sierra easier - it previously took about 2 weeks to do that journey. The Devil's Nose is just one small section of the whole train route that originally existed, it's possible to do other parts of the whole train line too in other parts of Ecuador. It had closed for some time as I mentioned previously. We got up super early, at 6am, to get to the station at 7am for the 8am train, which meant we had time for breakfast too, which is always my favourite part of the proceedings. I do love trains, and remember being a little bit upset when I first discovered you couldn't travel all through South America by train - I think you used to be able to as Paul Theroux wrote that Old Patagonia Express book about it, but I think gradually they all closed down, probably due to costs of maintaining them.
The train leaves Alausi and goes to a station about 20k away, called Sibambe. Which I kept mispronouncing Zimbabwe. The train goes slowly and the views are actually amazing, of canyons and rivers and fields and typical Andean things. We basically chatted lots, about things that were nothing to do with the train or the scenery, and then kept remembering we should be looking at the scenery and would stand up and look out of the window. There was a lady talking about various historical / geographical things to do with the journey, and she translated it all into English, especially for us, but we still didn't fully listen. I am probably the worst tourist ever at the moment. We then got paranoid that a man across the carriage from us was angry that we were eating crisps, but it turned out later when we got chatting back at Alausi station that his wife was very interested in Kim's lovely pink hat that she'd put on around the same time as the crisps got eaten. Isn't it funny how you can completely misconstrue a situation, is what we thought. We nearly offered the hat to the woman for 5 dollars as we thought it might make her really happy, but after trying it on she seemed satisfied with the whole transaction and gave it back to Kim.
At Sibambe we looked round a little museum about the train. There used to be lots of condors in the area but the dynamite they used to create the train track in the rock scared them away. There is 600m altitude difference between Sibambe and Alausi train stations, and the engineers therefore decided to make 2 switchbacks to get up there. This means the train goes up one way then goes back on itself and up the next switchback if you see what I mean. There were also very difficult weather conditions when they were building the train track and apparently the rock they had to cut through was very difficult to work with, so it earned the name of the most difficult train track in the world to build. We watched some traditional Andean panpipe dancers doing some dancing and looked at a llama and a horse, and at the views from the little cafe. We ate some really really good chocolate too. Then you get back on the train and go back to Alausi, pretty much exactly the same way you've come. The whole experience was very sedate and definitely enjoyable but absolutely not what I was expecting. I was expecting to be scared as we climbed up a cliff edge precariously on a train, maybe like when you get the funicular trains in places like Switzerland and Austria and you feel like you're going vertically upwards and it's all a bit frightening. Not that I like being frightened particularly, but I suppose I didn't feel any strong emotions about this train and we had been quite excited about it beforehand.
Anyway, we went back to Alausi and bought a few artesanial (if that's a word) items in the local shops. like rings and earrings, and then got our stuff from the hostel and chatted to Victor, who owns the hostel. He's lived there for 5 years and is US/Ecuadorean, his father owned the farm before him. It's really stunning there, and I can imagine how nice and calm life must be there. Me and Kim had talked about all the beautiful landscape and the difference in ways of life between our hectic citiy life (whether that's London or Guayaquil), and the sedate countryside farming life. But I think we romanticise it, like the old painters did like Gainsborough and those others that painted haywains and cattle lowing - it's actually probably really tough, you never get to take a holiday if you're a farmer, and you must always be worrying about weather, and soil, and slugs (or the Andean equivalent) eating your crops, and then natural disasters wiping things out too. I'd love a slower/simpler way of life, as I think most people that live in cities would, but are our brains just too deeply used to having to have all that stimulation all day that it would actually feel really difficult to make that change for the long term? I suppose the only way to find out is to try it one day and see what happens. It's like town mouse country mouse.
After a 2 dollar lunch, we got the bus back to Guayaquil. The last bus to Guayaquil leaves Alausi at 1pm, which is an early last bus. We chatted a bit then both fell asleep for a while. The journey is about 4.5 hours, and the last 3 hours of that are really really hot as you are going lower down and into jungley country again towards Guayaquil. If you remember last time I arrived in Guayaquil I was wearing 7 layers of clothing and that was too many. This time I had just 1 layer on and that was still too much too, but at least I was expecting the heat this time. We got back to Kim's and basically didn't do too much as we were really tired and hot, but we did eat some strawberry cheesecake as a treat for the long journey. Tyrone came round and we went to a really good street stall for tacos. It reminded me of the hamburger stall we used to go to in Mexico when I was there doing my TEFL course, that place was just incredible, I've never had burgers like that before or ever again. These tacos were great, full of beans (literally), and then you choose from a long list of other things, I had chicken and mozarella in mine, and loads of guacamole and onion/tomato stuff. We had planned on getting up at 5am on Sunday for our cycling, but changed our mind when we got home and realised how tired we were.
After the cycling yesterday we went for some seafood dinner at the Malecon, with Becky (Kim's flatmate that I'd met in Cuenca that weekend), and then went to las Penas (there should be a squiggle on the n here and it's pronounced las Pen-yas), which is where we'd gone last time I was here - where all the steps are and the lighthouse at the top. This time we went up the lighthouse, in all there are about 500 steps (only about 50 in the actual lighthouse). Tyrone explained some things to us about the lighthouse and the forts and the pirates that had landed in Guayaquil, and we drank some really strong cocktails on a pretend pirate ship near the lighthouse. I had a white russian which was really nice but as I don't drink much anymore it knocked me out a bit, which was also quite nice. The pretend pirate ship was pretty weird as there was no one on it apart from us and some weird pirate statues and really loud music. After another taco on the street that was the end of that day. Today our plans changed as Kim had to go to work unexpectedly and I have a cold, so I've been catching up on blogging and reading / blowing my nose etc, but hopefully tomorrow we're going to the beach for the day/night.
Over and out pepinillos from pepinillo in Guayaquil xx
Pictorial update
Me at the equator - not looking overly impressed, and seemingly with both feet in one hemisphere:
Me and Kim and the Devil's Nose train:
The first llama to appear on my blog:
A view from the train (this isn't the best picture I admit but I don't know how to delete it from this blogpost now it's there):
The Wild West town of Alausi:
Drinking a coconut in a plastic bag in Quito wth Danny:
Sunday 31 August 2014
Latacunga to Quito to Alausi to Guayaquil
Hola todos
Here I am in Guayaquil again, at Kim's house. Today we went cycling, this is exciting for many reasons - the main one being that I didn't bring my cycling clothes and helmet and shoes and pedals all the way to Ecuador for no reason. I borrowed Tyrone's single speed bike, called La Negra, as it's black (and gold), and Kim went on La Flamma, which is the road bike that Tyrone built for her. If you're not a cyclist, this basically means I went on a bike that has no gears, and Kim went on a bike that has lots of gears. We went on a pretty flat route however, so lack of gears wasn't a huge issue at all. Having shunned the idea of getting up at 5am to miss the heat, we set off at 1030ish, meaning we were out cycling in the midday heat, like mad dogs and Englishmen. It was so nice to be on a bike again after around a month of not cycling or doing anything involving exercise, and the traffic was surprisingly calm on the carreterra, which it tends to be on Sundays. We went around 25k, then stopped in a park and ate biscuits and an apple, then cycled back to Guayaquil and drank cups of tea. We didn't take cameras so I have no proof we actually did this, but I'm sure you'll believe me as it would be an odd thing to make up.
We were going to go to the beach tomorrow, to a place called las Playas to see some dolphins, but this would have meant getting up at 5am to get the first bus there, so we could do it all and be back for the night bus to Esmereldas, in the North on the coast. We have however, shunned the idea of getting up at 5am (a theme is emerging), and after our excitement of cycling today, we're going to also cycle tomorrow, to the island in Guayaquil where there are some animals apparently, including iguanas. Then we're going to go to the non-Starbucks-but-very-similar-to-Starbucks cafe as a reward for all our exercise, and then the plan is to get the night bus still to Esmereldas. Kim is a little bit perturbed by the fact that my overriding memory of Ecuador when I get home might be a Starbucks-esque cafe in Guayaquil.
Here's the update since last Tuesday when I was in Latacunga. On the Wednesday I wandered round Latacunga in the morning, looking at the cultural things there. This involved a strange one-room museum, with some paintings and little re-enactments of Andean people dancing round maypoles and things. I then looked for another museum but couldn't find it, and also felt a little bit ill so instead took a few paracetamols to pass the time and drank some tea back at the hostel. The pavements in Latacunga are annoyingly narrow, which I was also finding stressful. I then got the bus back to Quito. This was an adventure in itself. I got a taxi to where you get the bus to Quito, which isn't a bus staion, just a corner of a street where all the Quito-bound buses stop. En route the taxi driver asked me loads of questions, which included 'are there trees in England?'. Yes, I answered, as there definitely were last time I was there. He wanted to know how the landscape compared, so I was explaining we don't really have huge mountains like they do here, and that our tallest mountain is probably 1500m, so not really a mountain, more of a small Andean hill. He was very nice and seemed genuinely pleased I had chosen to spend 5 weeks in Ecuador.
I got out of the taxi and straight onto a Quito bus. A man grabbed my rucksack off me and trotted alongside the still moving bus and threw it on the luggage bit. I then got on and sat down, next to a sleeping man to my right, and a man reading a book to my left across the aisle. The man to my left immediately started asking me questions about where I was from, and what I was doing - the usual stuff basically. He was reading a psychology book so we talked about psychology a bit, and by the end of the bus journey he wanted my number and to be my friend and to call me and talk in English. I told him I didn't know what my phone number was, sorry. The sleeping man to my right woke up during the journey and asked me the usual set of questions too. He was going back to Quito after visiting his parents somewhere further south from Latacunga. He worked as a security guard in Quito, for a factory. I told him I was going to Quito for a few days, to see my boyfriend Danny. He asked me some more questions about Danny and then told me that Danny must definitely be married, as he is 34 and Ecuadorean, and that's just how it is here in Ecuador, it's totally normal to be married and then have lots of girlfriends too. I said ok, and that I'd check when I got to Quito. I asked him if he was married and had lots of girlfriends, but he said no to both. I didn't know what to believe by this point, so we talked about the landscape. I explained (again) that there weren't any big mountains in England, and he asked if it was just totally flat then. Not really, no, I said, but in parts yes.
The little girl on the seat in front of me kept turning round to give me sweets and talk to me too, she was on her way back to Quito as she had to go back to school the week after, she'd been in the countryside, I think helping her family on a farm somewhere, but I might have got that all wrong. She also wanted my phone number but I told her I didn't know it. She was really really sweet and only asked me a few questions, so she was my favourite of the 3 people I was surrounded by. I asked the men what time we would get to Quito, one of them said 1 more hour, the other said 10 more minutes. I think they often just invent things here, when it's to do with time related things. It was around 30 minutes more, so on average they were about right. When I got to Quito I met Danny and we went to look for a Panama hat for my friend Melissa. She bought one here last year and needs one that is a bit bigger, so I said I'd find the same hat shop and get her one if I could. I did find the same hat shop, in Plaza San Francisco, run by Homero Ortega, who wasn't there at the time, but I did find a very similar hat, which I'll go back to get on Friday before I go to the airport there. I then went to buy tickets for the Devil's Nose train, which me and Kim had planned to do on Saturday (ie yesterday) in Alausi. This is a train that goes up a mountain, and looked pretty exciting, you used to be able to ride on the roof of it and then it closed for quite a while due to maintenance etc and possibly because somebody fell of the roof and died. You're not allowed to travel on the roof anymore. We wanted to go on the 11am train, but there were just 2 tickets left on the 8am train, one at either end of the train. They sell out like 2 weeks in advance usually. Eek. I left the shop to ring Kim and check what she thought. In the meantime lots of people went in the shop to buy train tickets, so when I went back in I had to wait for ages, and hope that none of the people in front of me were buying the last 2 tickets on the 8am train. Luckily they weren't, and I got them, and we figured we'd just ask people to move when we got there so we could sit together rather than at opposite ends of the train.
That was both tasks achieved for the day, which was nice. On Thursday I went to el Museo de la Ciudad (the museum of the city), as I wanted to see if I could learn some things about Quito and had heard it was a good museum. It was a good museum in fact, and I tried really hard to read all the information, especially as it was all in Spanish. It's hard to read fluently when you have to look up every 10th word, but I did learn some new vocab, including gremio=trade, and cofradia=brotherhood, and prendas=garments. There was a reenactment of a hospital, as the museum was on the site of an old hospital, and there were lots of interesting black and white pictures of the hospital back in the days. This made me suddenly think a lot about death and illness and how precious life is, so I was grateful to that section of the museum for reminding me about the shortness of life and how important it is to do things you enjoy/that are useful for the world. I can't remember any of the factual things I may have read about whilst there, but overall it was nice to be in a museum and momentarily feel like I knew some more things about Quito.
After the museum, me and Danny went to la Mitad del Mundo - the equator. This was such a touristy experience, it actually made me feel a little bit sick. That's not a fair thing to say really about an interesting tourist attraction that's also an important part of Ecuador's heritage, but I have been trying to avoid doing anything that makes me feel like a tourist here, and here it was utterly impossible as I was in a group of tourists from New Zealand, on a little tour in English, around a very touristy tourist attraction. The start of the tour was all about the Amazonian tribes, and the animals that live in the jungle, like snakes and tarantulas. The longest ever snake found in the jungle was 12m long. Our tour guide showed us some shrunken heads from the Amazon too - some of these used to sell for 50,000 US Dollars. The Amazon tribes have a secret recipe that means the heads they shrink and the most shrunken in the whole world. This was all very interesting, apart from I didn't understand why we were being told about the Amazon tribes, when we were in the mountains at the equator. Anyway, then we got to the equator, and our guide explained some things about the equator and how gravity doesn't apply there, and you weigh 2.2 pounds less. Ho ho, everyone laughed, let's go and live at the equator. Then we did some eggsperiments, such as balancing an egg on a nail (because the yolk goes straight down in the egg, it therefore can stand straight upright), and watching some water go straight down a plughole instead of swirling to the right of left, both of which it did on either side of the equator. I got my passport stamped with an equator stamp and bought some postcards, and then promptly left. There's a 2nd equator museum, just down the road, which is the first ever place they found the equator, but then they decided it was a bit up the road, ie where I had been. I couldn't bring myself to visit this 2nd touristy place so just looked at the monument from afar, and then we got back on the local bus back to Quito, which at least cancelled out any more touristy activities for the day.
On Friday I didn't do anything touristy, but we did sit in the square and drink coconut juice from a coconut. Coconut juice is really really good for you, if you ever get a dodgy stomach you should drink it. I then got the bus to Alausi to meet Kim for our train ride. Getting to the bus terminal in Quito was really stressful as all the buses and taxis were full, as it was Friday afternoon, so I got really stressed thinking I was going to miss the 5.30 Alausi bus, which was the last one, and then not be able to do the train ride and then the world might end etc. I managed to find a taxi that wasn't full, so everything was fine, as usual. There was a sleeping man to my left, he did wake up at some point, but he didn't ask my any questions. The bus took 5 hours, and then I got stressed as I couldn't find a taxi that knew where my hostel was, but I did in the end, and met up with Kim at the hostel down the road, which is also a really lovely farm. Alausi is a really nice small peaceful town in the mountains, with lots of painted colourful houses. It reminded me of a wild west film, kind of like the place where that person ends up from that famous Western film, thought I think that's in Bolivia somewhere - is it Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where they steal all that money and go to Bolivia and there's a huge shoot out at the end? I pictured myself living there and sitting outside on the pavement smoking cigars and playing the guitar and watching tourists arrive and get stressed trying to find where to get a taxi from ha ha.
Saturday morning we went on the Devil's Nose train, which was pretty cool, but not as thrilling as you would expect, maybe because you can't sit on the roof, or maybe because it goes pretty slowly, or maybe because we were exhausted as we'd stayed up chatting until about 1.30 and had to get up at 6am. Talking of which I have to go to sleep now as I'm exhausted, but will write more soon.
Adios for now pepinilllos xx
Here I am in Guayaquil again, at Kim's house. Today we went cycling, this is exciting for many reasons - the main one being that I didn't bring my cycling clothes and helmet and shoes and pedals all the way to Ecuador for no reason. I borrowed Tyrone's single speed bike, called La Negra, as it's black (and gold), and Kim went on La Flamma, which is the road bike that Tyrone built for her. If you're not a cyclist, this basically means I went on a bike that has no gears, and Kim went on a bike that has lots of gears. We went on a pretty flat route however, so lack of gears wasn't a huge issue at all. Having shunned the idea of getting up at 5am to miss the heat, we set off at 1030ish, meaning we were out cycling in the midday heat, like mad dogs and Englishmen. It was so nice to be on a bike again after around a month of not cycling or doing anything involving exercise, and the traffic was surprisingly calm on the carreterra, which it tends to be on Sundays. We went around 25k, then stopped in a park and ate biscuits and an apple, then cycled back to Guayaquil and drank cups of tea. We didn't take cameras so I have no proof we actually did this, but I'm sure you'll believe me as it would be an odd thing to make up.
We were going to go to the beach tomorrow, to a place called las Playas to see some dolphins, but this would have meant getting up at 5am to get the first bus there, so we could do it all and be back for the night bus to Esmereldas, in the North on the coast. We have however, shunned the idea of getting up at 5am (a theme is emerging), and after our excitement of cycling today, we're going to also cycle tomorrow, to the island in Guayaquil where there are some animals apparently, including iguanas. Then we're going to go to the non-Starbucks-but-very-similar-to-Starbucks cafe as a reward for all our exercise, and then the plan is to get the night bus still to Esmereldas. Kim is a little bit perturbed by the fact that my overriding memory of Ecuador when I get home might be a Starbucks-esque cafe in Guayaquil.
Here's the update since last Tuesday when I was in Latacunga. On the Wednesday I wandered round Latacunga in the morning, looking at the cultural things there. This involved a strange one-room museum, with some paintings and little re-enactments of Andean people dancing round maypoles and things. I then looked for another museum but couldn't find it, and also felt a little bit ill so instead took a few paracetamols to pass the time and drank some tea back at the hostel. The pavements in Latacunga are annoyingly narrow, which I was also finding stressful. I then got the bus back to Quito. This was an adventure in itself. I got a taxi to where you get the bus to Quito, which isn't a bus staion, just a corner of a street where all the Quito-bound buses stop. En route the taxi driver asked me loads of questions, which included 'are there trees in England?'. Yes, I answered, as there definitely were last time I was there. He wanted to know how the landscape compared, so I was explaining we don't really have huge mountains like they do here, and that our tallest mountain is probably 1500m, so not really a mountain, more of a small Andean hill. He was very nice and seemed genuinely pleased I had chosen to spend 5 weeks in Ecuador.
I got out of the taxi and straight onto a Quito bus. A man grabbed my rucksack off me and trotted alongside the still moving bus and threw it on the luggage bit. I then got on and sat down, next to a sleeping man to my right, and a man reading a book to my left across the aisle. The man to my left immediately started asking me questions about where I was from, and what I was doing - the usual stuff basically. He was reading a psychology book so we talked about psychology a bit, and by the end of the bus journey he wanted my number and to be my friend and to call me and talk in English. I told him I didn't know what my phone number was, sorry. The sleeping man to my right woke up during the journey and asked me the usual set of questions too. He was going back to Quito after visiting his parents somewhere further south from Latacunga. He worked as a security guard in Quito, for a factory. I told him I was going to Quito for a few days, to see my boyfriend Danny. He asked me some more questions about Danny and then told me that Danny must definitely be married, as he is 34 and Ecuadorean, and that's just how it is here in Ecuador, it's totally normal to be married and then have lots of girlfriends too. I said ok, and that I'd check when I got to Quito. I asked him if he was married and had lots of girlfriends, but he said no to both. I didn't know what to believe by this point, so we talked about the landscape. I explained (again) that there weren't any big mountains in England, and he asked if it was just totally flat then. Not really, no, I said, but in parts yes.
The little girl on the seat in front of me kept turning round to give me sweets and talk to me too, she was on her way back to Quito as she had to go back to school the week after, she'd been in the countryside, I think helping her family on a farm somewhere, but I might have got that all wrong. She also wanted my phone number but I told her I didn't know it. She was really really sweet and only asked me a few questions, so she was my favourite of the 3 people I was surrounded by. I asked the men what time we would get to Quito, one of them said 1 more hour, the other said 10 more minutes. I think they often just invent things here, when it's to do with time related things. It was around 30 minutes more, so on average they were about right. When I got to Quito I met Danny and we went to look for a Panama hat for my friend Melissa. She bought one here last year and needs one that is a bit bigger, so I said I'd find the same hat shop and get her one if I could. I did find the same hat shop, in Plaza San Francisco, run by Homero Ortega, who wasn't there at the time, but I did find a very similar hat, which I'll go back to get on Friday before I go to the airport there. I then went to buy tickets for the Devil's Nose train, which me and Kim had planned to do on Saturday (ie yesterday) in Alausi. This is a train that goes up a mountain, and looked pretty exciting, you used to be able to ride on the roof of it and then it closed for quite a while due to maintenance etc and possibly because somebody fell of the roof and died. You're not allowed to travel on the roof anymore. We wanted to go on the 11am train, but there were just 2 tickets left on the 8am train, one at either end of the train. They sell out like 2 weeks in advance usually. Eek. I left the shop to ring Kim and check what she thought. In the meantime lots of people went in the shop to buy train tickets, so when I went back in I had to wait for ages, and hope that none of the people in front of me were buying the last 2 tickets on the 8am train. Luckily they weren't, and I got them, and we figured we'd just ask people to move when we got there so we could sit together rather than at opposite ends of the train.
That was both tasks achieved for the day, which was nice. On Thursday I went to el Museo de la Ciudad (the museum of the city), as I wanted to see if I could learn some things about Quito and had heard it was a good museum. It was a good museum in fact, and I tried really hard to read all the information, especially as it was all in Spanish. It's hard to read fluently when you have to look up every 10th word, but I did learn some new vocab, including gremio=trade, and cofradia=brotherhood, and prendas=garments. There was a reenactment of a hospital, as the museum was on the site of an old hospital, and there were lots of interesting black and white pictures of the hospital back in the days. This made me suddenly think a lot about death and illness and how precious life is, so I was grateful to that section of the museum for reminding me about the shortness of life and how important it is to do things you enjoy/that are useful for the world. I can't remember any of the factual things I may have read about whilst there, but overall it was nice to be in a museum and momentarily feel like I knew some more things about Quito.
After the museum, me and Danny went to la Mitad del Mundo - the equator. This was such a touristy experience, it actually made me feel a little bit sick. That's not a fair thing to say really about an interesting tourist attraction that's also an important part of Ecuador's heritage, but I have been trying to avoid doing anything that makes me feel like a tourist here, and here it was utterly impossible as I was in a group of tourists from New Zealand, on a little tour in English, around a very touristy tourist attraction. The start of the tour was all about the Amazonian tribes, and the animals that live in the jungle, like snakes and tarantulas. The longest ever snake found in the jungle was 12m long. Our tour guide showed us some shrunken heads from the Amazon too - some of these used to sell for 50,000 US Dollars. The Amazon tribes have a secret recipe that means the heads they shrink and the most shrunken in the whole world. This was all very interesting, apart from I didn't understand why we were being told about the Amazon tribes, when we were in the mountains at the equator. Anyway, then we got to the equator, and our guide explained some things about the equator and how gravity doesn't apply there, and you weigh 2.2 pounds less. Ho ho, everyone laughed, let's go and live at the equator. Then we did some eggsperiments, such as balancing an egg on a nail (because the yolk goes straight down in the egg, it therefore can stand straight upright), and watching some water go straight down a plughole instead of swirling to the right of left, both of which it did on either side of the equator. I got my passport stamped with an equator stamp and bought some postcards, and then promptly left. There's a 2nd equator museum, just down the road, which is the first ever place they found the equator, but then they decided it was a bit up the road, ie where I had been. I couldn't bring myself to visit this 2nd touristy place so just looked at the monument from afar, and then we got back on the local bus back to Quito, which at least cancelled out any more touristy activities for the day.
On Friday I didn't do anything touristy, but we did sit in the square and drink coconut juice from a coconut. Coconut juice is really really good for you, if you ever get a dodgy stomach you should drink it. I then got the bus to Alausi to meet Kim for our train ride. Getting to the bus terminal in Quito was really stressful as all the buses and taxis were full, as it was Friday afternoon, so I got really stressed thinking I was going to miss the 5.30 Alausi bus, which was the last one, and then not be able to do the train ride and then the world might end etc. I managed to find a taxi that wasn't full, so everything was fine, as usual. There was a sleeping man to my left, he did wake up at some point, but he didn't ask my any questions. The bus took 5 hours, and then I got stressed as I couldn't find a taxi that knew where my hostel was, but I did in the end, and met up with Kim at the hostel down the road, which is also a really lovely farm. Alausi is a really nice small peaceful town in the mountains, with lots of painted colourful houses. It reminded me of a wild west film, kind of like the place where that person ends up from that famous Western film, thought I think that's in Bolivia somewhere - is it Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where they steal all that money and go to Bolivia and there's a huge shoot out at the end? I pictured myself living there and sitting outside on the pavement smoking cigars and playing the guitar and watching tourists arrive and get stressed trying to find where to get a taxi from ha ha.
Saturday morning we went on the Devil's Nose train, which was pretty cool, but not as thrilling as you would expect, maybe because you can't sit on the roof, or maybe because it goes pretty slowly, or maybe because we were exhausted as we'd stayed up chatting until about 1.30 and had to get up at 6am. Talking of which I have to go to sleep now as I'm exhausted, but will write more soon.
Adios for now pepinilllos xx
Tuesday 26 August 2014
More random pictures
This appears to be a trig point dad, but it had 4 sides to it so I'm not sure:
The hostel I'm at - stairs to the roof terrace:
Me and Kim in Guayaquil drinking an enormous beer at las Penas:
Retro Hotel Cotopaxi in Latacunga; I'm not sure how new the new fashion mentioned actually is:
Street in Banos plus mountain behind it:
Getting a bit carried away at having enough wifi signal to put pictures up. This is the last one, it made us laugh, the preciseness of the distance in a country where precision isn't exactly commonplace:
Lake quilotoa pictures
Me at the lake - it was cold:
The lake:
Some men passed us with donkeys. They asked where we were going which I misheard as where are you from, and answered Inglaterra. They looked at me blankly and carried on walking:
Some sheep in a line, oblivious of the amazing view behind them:
Another amazing view:
A man with a bike in latacunga. I followed him for a bit to take this picture as I was excited to see a drop handle bike:
Quilotoa lake
Hi!
I´ve just eaten my body weight in pasta and tomato salad at a local Italian place that I found recommended online here in Latacunga. Which makes me think of 2 things - the internet is really useful, and why do we have so many different weighing systems? I went to Quilotoa lake today with a German couple (Christoph and Irini), who obviouly both spoke perfect English and it was really nice to meet some new people and have some random chat that wasn´t just about where I was going, or where I´d been, or whether I was married etc etc. We were trying to figure out stones / pounds / ounces / kilos, in terms of weighing things. I literally have no idea, and had just recovered from trying to explain to them what a furlong was ha ha (something to do with horse racing....?). Are there 13 pounds in a stone, or 13 ounces in a pound, or both? Or neither? I´m convinced I´ve asked this same question on a South American blog before. Incidentally the lake was about 350m deep in the middle, and 3km in diameter. We walked for approx 2.5 hours, possibly covering 4km. The altitude was 3900m which makes your heart beat approx 3 times faster (some of these statistics are made up but the gist of them is true). I decided not to go to Cotopaxi tomorrow, as it goes to 4800m, which might make my brain explode, and I´ve had my fill of day trips to Andean countryside now.
We also chatted about school systems in England and Germany - in Germany private schools are where you go if you´re rich but a bit thick, kind of the opposite of England. Irini is a teacher and had spent a year in Sunderland of all places as a German teaching assistant. They are here for 3 weeks which seems like nothing when most people you meet are here for 6 months or more. Talking of which, much to my chagrin, I had to talk to some other guests in my hostel this morning at breakfast. I do love hostels, mainly as I love a bargain, and some hostels, like this one, are actually really nice and very well managed and full of information. However, as you know, I don´t like the hostel chat, so I tend to just ignore it / walk off. Someone invited me to sit with them this morning though so I had to go along with it. He was Irish and has been in South America since January and next he´s going t.........
oh sorry I actually just fell asleep on to the computer
So I was very pleasantly surprised to have the day at the lake with a genuinely interesting and friendly couple, who were MY AGE and had similar feelings re hostel chat. I recommended the hostel in Banos that me and Danny had stayed at and also gave them the number to get a taxi safely in Guayaquil, so that´s some good karma saved up for me in terms of useful information. Which is maybe why I just found the nice Italian restaurant, so maybe I´ve already cashed it in. Perhaps in my case my karma is as fast as my metabolism, ie very. Which interestingly reminds me that I recently dreamt about fighting and swords and being a bit scared, and very soon that day had an argument with someone. I also once dreamt that I went back in time and met Paul Mcartney and Ringo Starr on a park bench and they gave me some of their records. I don´t remember what happened that particular day, but definitely not that.
So our driver, Alex, seemed like the last thing he could be bothered doing today was driving 3 Europeans to a lake that he´s probably been to about a million times. On the way back he drove like he was expecting an important phone call and had left his mobile at home, ie too fast, and kept checking his watch. The road was curvy (but so well paved, thanks to the president), and fairly empty, but the few times we veered to the other side on sharp corners, there unfortunately seemed to be large lorries or buses coming towards us. Nothing bad happened, and it turned out he had in fact left his mobile at home. Anyway all that aside, it was really lovely to get out into the hills and countryside and see some typical Andean villages, and typical Andean people, and llamas, and lots of dogs. Which reminds me (this is a very desultory blog, apologies) - yesterday a dog adopted me in the park and followed me round the streets for ages, and it really really stressed me out. Psychologically I can´t explain quite why, but I think it was something to do with fear of responsibility. I honestly thought he was going to be there waiting for me for the next 2 days everywhere I went, and people would start asking why I´d brought a dog to Ecuador with me, and I´d have to start paying for his dog food, and I don´t even like dogs. I tried to shoo him away and I wasn´t remotely moved by his little dog face looking up at me (ok maybe I was a little bit, but the fear of buying dog food outweighed any compassion). I managed to lose him on a corner somewhere and now writng about it I feel a bit bad and hope he´s ok. I then had a small pizza in a totally empty pizza restaurant - it was 4.30 which might explain the emptiness, that´s not exactly pizza time. The man appeared to find it a little bit inconvenient that I wanted to eat a pizza in his pizza restaurant, so perhaps his hostility was my dog karma coming back to get me, which again proves how fast it works.
Whilst walking round part of the lake today, we chatted about Ecuador, and decided that Ecuador is kind of a more grown up version of Peru and Bolivia. It´s kind of slightly more modern and with better infrastructure, and clearly has more money than Peru and Bolivia, but is still of the same origins. We feel that the government here probably has done things a bit more wisely, and involved foreign investment whilst protecting its own resources - perhaps it is a little bit less extreme than the socialist Bolivia under Morales, which kicked out all the foreign NGOs and really tries to limit if not totally ban foreign investment, to the detriment of the mining industry. It´s funny, but whilst I´ve absolutely loved being here, it hasn´t had the kind of effect on me that Peru or Bolivia ever did. This could be because I´m older now, and it´s hard for anything to be as hugely overwhelmingly impressive as it was years ago, or it could be because there is something genuinely different about Ecuador. I don´t feel that I´m in an Incan country, though it definitely is, and whilst everywhere I´ve been is really lovely, none of it has had a `feeling´ as such. I remember first being in Peru, particularly Cuzco for example, and feeling a really strong sense of foreign-ness and fascination at the culture, and that I was inside something very different. Even in Bolivia last year on my very restricted volunteering progamme, I felt I was in a really different place sometimes in terms of culture and landscapre. I can´t explain it very well, and I can´t work out if it´s something in me, or something in Ecuador. The towns and cities I´ve been to here are really nice - Quito´s really great for a capital city, and Banos was really relaxing and surrounded by mountains, and Cuenca was old and colonial, and Guayaquil was totally different and all industrial and more modern. Perhaps there is a limit to how many Plazas you can look at, or statues of independence day heroes, or colonial cobbled streets, and then they all become the same. Or perhaps it is a desire in me to be in one place now, and get to know things on a different level. I suspect it is the latter, and that I am seeing things with different eyes - and it´s not that the things I´m seeing are not beautiful and interesting because they still are.
The other thing of note, to me anyway (and I am in fact the most avid reader of my blog - sometimes I read it back to myself before going to sleep and chuckle at the bits I think are funny) - is that in the last few days I´ve been truly on my own, which is actually the first time since I got here. Because I met Danny and hung out with him in Quito quite a bit, and then in the jungle, and then hung out with Kim in Cuenca and Guayaquil, and then with Danny again in Banos, it wasn´t until Sunday afternoon that I was on my own for the first time properly. Here´s what I noticed being on my own, and looking only with my own eyes - there are loads of shoe shops here in Ecuador, seriously loads, I don´t know what´s going on with that. Lots of men spit on the street. And suddenly taxi drivers / other random men whistle at you, or say ´hola preciosa´as you walk past. And you have to feel a teeny weeny bit awkward when you go to eat somewhere as you´re always on your own, but it´s always fine and I usually sit there writing notes such as these ones that then get turned into a blog. I love that the smallest thing becomes a reason for being really happy, like tonight - finding a place to eat, walking to it, ordering in Spanish, eating (in Spanish), getting the bill and talking to the owner - it gives me such a sense of achievement to do all that all on my own in a really far away country in a foreign language.
Yesterday I had to ask the police for help. This wasn´t as serious as it sounds. Basically the address of the hostel in my out of date guidebook was wrong, and I couldn´t find the hostel anywhere. I wandered up and down some streets getting a little bit stressed as my bag was heavy. Then I saw about 8 armed policeman on a street corner - which at the time didn´t strike me as anything other than extremely fortuitous. I smiled and said buenas tardes, and asked them if they knew where hostel tiana was. One of them said a few English words, like hello, and then some Spanish words, then got on his walkie talkie, then wandered up the street with me, then some random pedestrian got involved and he seemed to know where the hostel was so I followed his instructions and thanked the policeman. Turns out Banco de Sudamerica had gone bankrupt yesterday, and that´s why there were so many armed policemen outside it on that corner, today I walked past and there was a big notice up about all this, and still some policemen around. I´m not sure of the details, but it worked out well for me finding the hostel - that´s an interesting bit of global / financial karma I´ve got saved up, wonder how that will manifest itself - hopefully in an international lottery win.
So then yesterday there was the Garcia Marquez funereal moment, and the man with the missing teeth in the square, and then the dog that adopted me. I saw the man with the missing teeth again today near the square and we had another chat. Or rather he asked me some stuff, and I said some sentences that may or may not have satisfactorily answered his questions. I then went to the laundry to pick up my washing. I had dropped it off yesterday, it was literally just my underwear, and probably weighed not very much (they charge 1 USD per 1 kilo of washing), so I was expecting it to cost 1 USD maximum. They charged me 3 USD because it still had to go in a big machine to be washed. It came back one sock less, so I reckon that´s not a great return rate on investment. It had taken ages to find the laundry so I wasn´t willing to shop around, or go back to get more stuff to wash just for the sake of it.
Anyway, this blog is meant to about the lake, not my underwear. The lake was stunning, a volcanic crater lake. The volcano is still active, but obviously not hugely active - perhaps deep down inside it there is some lava and perhaps one day it will explode again, but for now it´s a lake. I´ll post some pictures from my iphone. It´s very very blue and greeny-blue, and flat as a pancake lake, but with ripples where the wind blows on it. The wind at the top, which is where we were was quite strong too, and I had my 7 layers of clothing on, and gloves that I´d bought in Cuenca at the park with the religious statues and the canelazo. Then I got too hot. Then too cold again. Then out of breath. Then we got to a small area called Shalala. There were a few really new buildings, one was a restaurant-cafe, and one was an artesan museum thing, but it was closed. We had a really really good coffee and wondered what the deal was with us being the only people around that day, and howcome this was the best coffee all 3 of us had had in Ecuador so far.. Shalala, it turns out, is a typical Andean village nearby, but this was the swanky new bit for the tourists. Which, despite the coffee, I could do without, and would rather have seen a traditional village. We did talk to a traditional Andean lady which was nice.
We walked back the way we´d come, with the lake to our right now, still beautiful, and with some small boats on it. On the way there we´d said how nice it would be to see boats on the lake, and now there they were. When we met up with Alex (our driver) again, he said actually they´re only little canoes and not very safe due to the wind on the lake. Oh well, they looked nice from the top of the crater where we were. We had some lunch - soup and omelettes with plantain and rice - then set off back to Latacunga, via the curvy roads and near misses. The Germans got out at the bus stop to go to Banos, and I came back to the hostel to do some more avid avoiding of other guests, and go out for dinner on my own and then write my blog.
I haven´t updated about Banos yet, so I´ll do that now too. Basically I got the night bus there from Guayaquil last Wednesday night and met up with Danny there. We hung out in the square and ate some brownies and generally wandered around for quite a while. Banos is a place to go and do things like rafting, bungee jumping, mountain biking etc, or also just do nothing as it´s really relaxing and chilled out and a really nice size and surrounded by lovely mountains you can just look at. On day 2 we hired mountain bikes and got a lift up a big long hill that goes to this treehouse and tree swing, called Casa de Arboles, with a great view of mountains and really peaceful, apart from the American tourists screaming about how awesome the treeswing is - it´s not, ha ha ha. We then mountain biked back down the big long hill, stopping at various viewpoints along the way to look at Banos. Then we carried on and cycled along the Ruta de Cascadas (route of the waterfalls), where you can stop at various points to look at waterfalls on the other side of the valley, and watch tourists do zip lines across the valley, and generally look at nice scenery. We finished in a little place called Pailon de Diablo and had some lunch. Actually I didn´t as I´d had an enormous breakfast in the local market - eggs and rice and avocado and plantain and coffee - but Danny did and I stole some of it whilst diverting him by chatting in my terrible Spanish to him ha ha. We then waited for a pickup truck to take us and the bikes back to Banos - we had to wait until 4 other people with bikes also needed a lift, as they wouldn´t take just the 2 of us.
The next day we hired a quad bike thingy, not sure what you call them but I´ll put a picture up when I can. Like a little buggy thing you would drive in the desert I guess. And we drove up some steep roads and looked at some mountains and then to look at waterfalls again. I had to get out of the buggy at some points as it wouldn´t go up the hills with us both in. I did drive it too but not all the time, and I wasn´t overly keen on driving it on the actual roads there, alongside the traffic. Seems a bit nuts, but lots of other people were doing it, so it must be fine. Danny used to live in Banos so he knows where all the places to go are. We looked at a big reservoir / dam that produces electricity and it reminded me of the dam in Belize that caused all the controversy for being built on not very safe ground and making all the wildlife have to migrate. On our way back into Banos, the engine suddenly started making a really loud strange squealy noise. We got out and looked at it. Then got back in and set off again. Then stopped and looked at it again. Then decided it did not sound good, and we didn´t have an option to drive really slowly if we were going to be on the actual roads. So we decided to call the tour company we´d hired it from. But we had no phone credit so I went to get some. But there was no network for Danny´s phone, so we had to keep driving with me staring at the phone until some signal came along. Then we couldn´t get the phone numbers for the tour place to work for ages, and the signal kept coming and going. We got through and they said to leave it there and they´d come and pick it up. So we pushed it into someone´s driveway (which was quite funny as we had to kind of push it into the oncoming traffic to get it up on to the pavement), and told the people whose house it was that it would be picked up later. They were totally not remotely bothered or interested about this, but I found it all quite hilarious.Then we hopped on the bus and were back in Banos no problem. Amazing.
That night was the panpipe music in the square, which obviously I was over excited about and did some videos of. I tried to find online if there´s anywhere in London where you can learn Andean dancing as I´d love to do that when back. That´ll get me over my post-Ecuador blues, hopefully. I´m going to buy a wooden whistle too and play it all the way home on both flights. After the lovely panpipe music was the other band who played some other traditional music but it was too out of tune for me to handle. I did learn how to say out of tune in Spanish though, which is desafinado. I realised that I´m a bit lazy with Spanish, and need to be more disciplined if I really want to improve. I don´t think I´ll have time for more Spanish lessons whilst here, but am determined to do a class once back. I think I just assume that I´ll improve just by being here, and that isn´t really realistic.
I´m going to actually stop now as my hands are cold. I got an extra duvet as it´s really cold here at night. Wish me luck avoiding any more hostel chat until tomorrow when I leave. I´m off back to Quito to go see the Mitad del Mundo (middle of the world - ie the equator) and find a Panama Hat for my friend Melissa, and book train tickets for me and Kim´s trip on the Devil´s Nose train on Saturday. Exciting.
Ciao pepinillos xx
I´ve just eaten my body weight in pasta and tomato salad at a local Italian place that I found recommended online here in Latacunga. Which makes me think of 2 things - the internet is really useful, and why do we have so many different weighing systems? I went to Quilotoa lake today with a German couple (Christoph and Irini), who obviouly both spoke perfect English and it was really nice to meet some new people and have some random chat that wasn´t just about where I was going, or where I´d been, or whether I was married etc etc. We were trying to figure out stones / pounds / ounces / kilos, in terms of weighing things. I literally have no idea, and had just recovered from trying to explain to them what a furlong was ha ha (something to do with horse racing....?). Are there 13 pounds in a stone, or 13 ounces in a pound, or both? Or neither? I´m convinced I´ve asked this same question on a South American blog before. Incidentally the lake was about 350m deep in the middle, and 3km in diameter. We walked for approx 2.5 hours, possibly covering 4km. The altitude was 3900m which makes your heart beat approx 3 times faster (some of these statistics are made up but the gist of them is true). I decided not to go to Cotopaxi tomorrow, as it goes to 4800m, which might make my brain explode, and I´ve had my fill of day trips to Andean countryside now.
We also chatted about school systems in England and Germany - in Germany private schools are where you go if you´re rich but a bit thick, kind of the opposite of England. Irini is a teacher and had spent a year in Sunderland of all places as a German teaching assistant. They are here for 3 weeks which seems like nothing when most people you meet are here for 6 months or more. Talking of which, much to my chagrin, I had to talk to some other guests in my hostel this morning at breakfast. I do love hostels, mainly as I love a bargain, and some hostels, like this one, are actually really nice and very well managed and full of information. However, as you know, I don´t like the hostel chat, so I tend to just ignore it / walk off. Someone invited me to sit with them this morning though so I had to go along with it. He was Irish and has been in South America since January and next he´s going t.........
oh sorry I actually just fell asleep on to the computer
So I was very pleasantly surprised to have the day at the lake with a genuinely interesting and friendly couple, who were MY AGE and had similar feelings re hostel chat. I recommended the hostel in Banos that me and Danny had stayed at and also gave them the number to get a taxi safely in Guayaquil, so that´s some good karma saved up for me in terms of useful information. Which is maybe why I just found the nice Italian restaurant, so maybe I´ve already cashed it in. Perhaps in my case my karma is as fast as my metabolism, ie very. Which interestingly reminds me that I recently dreamt about fighting and swords and being a bit scared, and very soon that day had an argument with someone. I also once dreamt that I went back in time and met Paul Mcartney and Ringo Starr on a park bench and they gave me some of their records. I don´t remember what happened that particular day, but definitely not that.
So our driver, Alex, seemed like the last thing he could be bothered doing today was driving 3 Europeans to a lake that he´s probably been to about a million times. On the way back he drove like he was expecting an important phone call and had left his mobile at home, ie too fast, and kept checking his watch. The road was curvy (but so well paved, thanks to the president), and fairly empty, but the few times we veered to the other side on sharp corners, there unfortunately seemed to be large lorries or buses coming towards us. Nothing bad happened, and it turned out he had in fact left his mobile at home. Anyway all that aside, it was really lovely to get out into the hills and countryside and see some typical Andean villages, and typical Andean people, and llamas, and lots of dogs. Which reminds me (this is a very desultory blog, apologies) - yesterday a dog adopted me in the park and followed me round the streets for ages, and it really really stressed me out. Psychologically I can´t explain quite why, but I think it was something to do with fear of responsibility. I honestly thought he was going to be there waiting for me for the next 2 days everywhere I went, and people would start asking why I´d brought a dog to Ecuador with me, and I´d have to start paying for his dog food, and I don´t even like dogs. I tried to shoo him away and I wasn´t remotely moved by his little dog face looking up at me (ok maybe I was a little bit, but the fear of buying dog food outweighed any compassion). I managed to lose him on a corner somewhere and now writng about it I feel a bit bad and hope he´s ok. I then had a small pizza in a totally empty pizza restaurant - it was 4.30 which might explain the emptiness, that´s not exactly pizza time. The man appeared to find it a little bit inconvenient that I wanted to eat a pizza in his pizza restaurant, so perhaps his hostility was my dog karma coming back to get me, which again proves how fast it works.
Whilst walking round part of the lake today, we chatted about Ecuador, and decided that Ecuador is kind of a more grown up version of Peru and Bolivia. It´s kind of slightly more modern and with better infrastructure, and clearly has more money than Peru and Bolivia, but is still of the same origins. We feel that the government here probably has done things a bit more wisely, and involved foreign investment whilst protecting its own resources - perhaps it is a little bit less extreme than the socialist Bolivia under Morales, which kicked out all the foreign NGOs and really tries to limit if not totally ban foreign investment, to the detriment of the mining industry. It´s funny, but whilst I´ve absolutely loved being here, it hasn´t had the kind of effect on me that Peru or Bolivia ever did. This could be because I´m older now, and it´s hard for anything to be as hugely overwhelmingly impressive as it was years ago, or it could be because there is something genuinely different about Ecuador. I don´t feel that I´m in an Incan country, though it definitely is, and whilst everywhere I´ve been is really lovely, none of it has had a `feeling´ as such. I remember first being in Peru, particularly Cuzco for example, and feeling a really strong sense of foreign-ness and fascination at the culture, and that I was inside something very different. Even in Bolivia last year on my very restricted volunteering progamme, I felt I was in a really different place sometimes in terms of culture and landscapre. I can´t explain it very well, and I can´t work out if it´s something in me, or something in Ecuador. The towns and cities I´ve been to here are really nice - Quito´s really great for a capital city, and Banos was really relaxing and surrounded by mountains, and Cuenca was old and colonial, and Guayaquil was totally different and all industrial and more modern. Perhaps there is a limit to how many Plazas you can look at, or statues of independence day heroes, or colonial cobbled streets, and then they all become the same. Or perhaps it is a desire in me to be in one place now, and get to know things on a different level. I suspect it is the latter, and that I am seeing things with different eyes - and it´s not that the things I´m seeing are not beautiful and interesting because they still are.
The other thing of note, to me anyway (and I am in fact the most avid reader of my blog - sometimes I read it back to myself before going to sleep and chuckle at the bits I think are funny) - is that in the last few days I´ve been truly on my own, which is actually the first time since I got here. Because I met Danny and hung out with him in Quito quite a bit, and then in the jungle, and then hung out with Kim in Cuenca and Guayaquil, and then with Danny again in Banos, it wasn´t until Sunday afternoon that I was on my own for the first time properly. Here´s what I noticed being on my own, and looking only with my own eyes - there are loads of shoe shops here in Ecuador, seriously loads, I don´t know what´s going on with that. Lots of men spit on the street. And suddenly taxi drivers / other random men whistle at you, or say ´hola preciosa´as you walk past. And you have to feel a teeny weeny bit awkward when you go to eat somewhere as you´re always on your own, but it´s always fine and I usually sit there writing notes such as these ones that then get turned into a blog. I love that the smallest thing becomes a reason for being really happy, like tonight - finding a place to eat, walking to it, ordering in Spanish, eating (in Spanish), getting the bill and talking to the owner - it gives me such a sense of achievement to do all that all on my own in a really far away country in a foreign language.
Yesterday I had to ask the police for help. This wasn´t as serious as it sounds. Basically the address of the hostel in my out of date guidebook was wrong, and I couldn´t find the hostel anywhere. I wandered up and down some streets getting a little bit stressed as my bag was heavy. Then I saw about 8 armed policeman on a street corner - which at the time didn´t strike me as anything other than extremely fortuitous. I smiled and said buenas tardes, and asked them if they knew where hostel tiana was. One of them said a few English words, like hello, and then some Spanish words, then got on his walkie talkie, then wandered up the street with me, then some random pedestrian got involved and he seemed to know where the hostel was so I followed his instructions and thanked the policeman. Turns out Banco de Sudamerica had gone bankrupt yesterday, and that´s why there were so many armed policemen outside it on that corner, today I walked past and there was a big notice up about all this, and still some policemen around. I´m not sure of the details, but it worked out well for me finding the hostel - that´s an interesting bit of global / financial karma I´ve got saved up, wonder how that will manifest itself - hopefully in an international lottery win.
So then yesterday there was the Garcia Marquez funereal moment, and the man with the missing teeth in the square, and then the dog that adopted me. I saw the man with the missing teeth again today near the square and we had another chat. Or rather he asked me some stuff, and I said some sentences that may or may not have satisfactorily answered his questions. I then went to the laundry to pick up my washing. I had dropped it off yesterday, it was literally just my underwear, and probably weighed not very much (they charge 1 USD per 1 kilo of washing), so I was expecting it to cost 1 USD maximum. They charged me 3 USD because it still had to go in a big machine to be washed. It came back one sock less, so I reckon that´s not a great return rate on investment. It had taken ages to find the laundry so I wasn´t willing to shop around, or go back to get more stuff to wash just for the sake of it.
Anyway, this blog is meant to about the lake, not my underwear. The lake was stunning, a volcanic crater lake. The volcano is still active, but obviously not hugely active - perhaps deep down inside it there is some lava and perhaps one day it will explode again, but for now it´s a lake. I´ll post some pictures from my iphone. It´s very very blue and greeny-blue, and flat as a pancake lake, but with ripples where the wind blows on it. The wind at the top, which is where we were was quite strong too, and I had my 7 layers of clothing on, and gloves that I´d bought in Cuenca at the park with the religious statues and the canelazo. Then I got too hot. Then too cold again. Then out of breath. Then we got to a small area called Shalala. There were a few really new buildings, one was a restaurant-cafe, and one was an artesan museum thing, but it was closed. We had a really really good coffee and wondered what the deal was with us being the only people around that day, and howcome this was the best coffee all 3 of us had had in Ecuador so far.. Shalala, it turns out, is a typical Andean village nearby, but this was the swanky new bit for the tourists. Which, despite the coffee, I could do without, and would rather have seen a traditional village. We did talk to a traditional Andean lady which was nice.
We walked back the way we´d come, with the lake to our right now, still beautiful, and with some small boats on it. On the way there we´d said how nice it would be to see boats on the lake, and now there they were. When we met up with Alex (our driver) again, he said actually they´re only little canoes and not very safe due to the wind on the lake. Oh well, they looked nice from the top of the crater where we were. We had some lunch - soup and omelettes with plantain and rice - then set off back to Latacunga, via the curvy roads and near misses. The Germans got out at the bus stop to go to Banos, and I came back to the hostel to do some more avid avoiding of other guests, and go out for dinner on my own and then write my blog.
I haven´t updated about Banos yet, so I´ll do that now too. Basically I got the night bus there from Guayaquil last Wednesday night and met up with Danny there. We hung out in the square and ate some brownies and generally wandered around for quite a while. Banos is a place to go and do things like rafting, bungee jumping, mountain biking etc, or also just do nothing as it´s really relaxing and chilled out and a really nice size and surrounded by lovely mountains you can just look at. On day 2 we hired mountain bikes and got a lift up a big long hill that goes to this treehouse and tree swing, called Casa de Arboles, with a great view of mountains and really peaceful, apart from the American tourists screaming about how awesome the treeswing is - it´s not, ha ha ha. We then mountain biked back down the big long hill, stopping at various viewpoints along the way to look at Banos. Then we carried on and cycled along the Ruta de Cascadas (route of the waterfalls), where you can stop at various points to look at waterfalls on the other side of the valley, and watch tourists do zip lines across the valley, and generally look at nice scenery. We finished in a little place called Pailon de Diablo and had some lunch. Actually I didn´t as I´d had an enormous breakfast in the local market - eggs and rice and avocado and plantain and coffee - but Danny did and I stole some of it whilst diverting him by chatting in my terrible Spanish to him ha ha. We then waited for a pickup truck to take us and the bikes back to Banos - we had to wait until 4 other people with bikes also needed a lift, as they wouldn´t take just the 2 of us.
The next day we hired a quad bike thingy, not sure what you call them but I´ll put a picture up when I can. Like a little buggy thing you would drive in the desert I guess. And we drove up some steep roads and looked at some mountains and then to look at waterfalls again. I had to get out of the buggy at some points as it wouldn´t go up the hills with us both in. I did drive it too but not all the time, and I wasn´t overly keen on driving it on the actual roads there, alongside the traffic. Seems a bit nuts, but lots of other people were doing it, so it must be fine. Danny used to live in Banos so he knows where all the places to go are. We looked at a big reservoir / dam that produces electricity and it reminded me of the dam in Belize that caused all the controversy for being built on not very safe ground and making all the wildlife have to migrate. On our way back into Banos, the engine suddenly started making a really loud strange squealy noise. We got out and looked at it. Then got back in and set off again. Then stopped and looked at it again. Then decided it did not sound good, and we didn´t have an option to drive really slowly if we were going to be on the actual roads. So we decided to call the tour company we´d hired it from. But we had no phone credit so I went to get some. But there was no network for Danny´s phone, so we had to keep driving with me staring at the phone until some signal came along. Then we couldn´t get the phone numbers for the tour place to work for ages, and the signal kept coming and going. We got through and they said to leave it there and they´d come and pick it up. So we pushed it into someone´s driveway (which was quite funny as we had to kind of push it into the oncoming traffic to get it up on to the pavement), and told the people whose house it was that it would be picked up later. They were totally not remotely bothered or interested about this, but I found it all quite hilarious.Then we hopped on the bus and were back in Banos no problem. Amazing.
That night was the panpipe music in the square, which obviously I was over excited about and did some videos of. I tried to find online if there´s anywhere in London where you can learn Andean dancing as I´d love to do that when back. That´ll get me over my post-Ecuador blues, hopefully. I´m going to buy a wooden whistle too and play it all the way home on both flights. After the lovely panpipe music was the other band who played some other traditional music but it was too out of tune for me to handle. I did learn how to say out of tune in Spanish though, which is desafinado. I realised that I´m a bit lazy with Spanish, and need to be more disciplined if I really want to improve. I don´t think I´ll have time for more Spanish lessons whilst here, but am determined to do a class once back. I think I just assume that I´ll improve just by being here, and that isn´t really realistic.
I´m going to actually stop now as my hands are cold. I got an extra duvet as it´s really cold here at night. Wish me luck avoiding any more hostel chat until tomorrow when I leave. I´m off back to Quito to go see the Mitad del Mundo (middle of the world - ie the equator) and find a Panama Hat for my friend Melissa, and book train tickets for me and Kim´s trip on the Devil´s Nose train on Saturday. Exciting.
Ciao pepinillos xx
Monday 25 August 2014
Latacunga
Hola todos
I'm in Latacunga now. Check out the view from my hostel roof:
And here's a church in the main square, from whence came a funeral earlier:
Which I took as a bad sign, but these things happen all the time. A man came to talk to me as I sat there writing, he wanted to know where I was from and what I studied at university. This made a change - seemingly he wasn't interested in marital status or number of children. I felt a bit like I was in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel with the old man with no teeth (seemingly a theme in this town) chatting to me and the funeral procession marching slowly along, accompanied by trumpets and drums. I accidentally caught up with the procession about 20 minutes later when I found myself at the cemetery - another strange sign I thought but quite beautiful and foreboding all at once (I didn't photo the procession in case this is bad taste):
I'm going to keep this blog short in case the technical hitch occurs again whilst trying to post it.
Tomorrow I'm going to see volcano Cotopaxi which is potentially exciting. X
Sunday 24 August 2014
El Vulcan
This is one of the squares in Banos - with some musicians in it last night and then at day time. There was panpipe music and traditional dancing first (I pretty much loved that bit due to my past life as an Andean musician), then this group below who were good at their instruments but sang a bit out of tune and the speakers were too loud so we didn't stay around too long for that.
I also discovered tonight that the room shaking earlier will have been the volcano doing some volcano things, ie rumbling. Wowee.
I've booked my hostel in Latacunga for tomorrow and feel quite proud of myself for actually doing that on the phone as that's always a bit scary. I also am excited as I finally feel like actually doing some sight seeing here. We did some touristy things here in Banos (mountain bikes and a quad bike thingy and looked at waterfalls and people on zip lines), so maybe that's motivated me and got the ball rolling. I'm going to see the crater lake in Quillitoa from Latacunga which sounds pretty exciting.
I found out tonight that banks here don't have money in them on Sundays. This is a bit of an incovenient thing to find out on a Sunday when you've just spent $4 on shampoo which could've waited another few days. But I found really cheap dinner so all was ok. I've been listening to TED talks in my room and generally chilling out.
I'm not sure this blog post is going to work as it's on my phone again which had the technical hitch earlier. If it has worked you'll be reading it now. Xx
Tungurahua
Hola todos
So here I am in Ban~os. I can't get that squiggle to actually go on the letter n like it's meant to, but basically you pronounce it ban-yos. Banos literally means baths, or also bathrooms, or toilets. An English couple I met in Quito actually thought the town was therefore called Toilets. It's Banos due to its natural thermal baths, rather like our English town called Bath. I'm writing this post on my iPhone so we'll see how that goes, it gets kind of tiring but perhaps I'll find new wells of patience. The room just shook and I wondered if it was an earthquake or an eruption from the volcano that watches over the town. The volcano is called Tungurahua, and I believe is due to erupt at some point fairly soon but hopefully not in the next 24 hours. It's pretty windy outside (enough to make the room shake?) and rained a bit this morning. You're probably wondering what the weathers like here in Ecuador, with it being on the equator and all that, and if you're not wondering that then you should be. Basically here in Banos it's temperate I would say (if I was teaching a TEFL class that's the word I would use as technically that's what it is I think), which means it's kind of warm and sometimes cold and a bit breezy - is that what temperate means? - I actually have no idea. There are often clouds as the town is surrounded by mountains/the volcano.
I got here on Thursday morning, after the night bus on Wednesday. I had seat number 38. This was at the back, next to a man I didn't like. I didn't like him because he told me to move out of his seat (37), but told me it in a gesture rather than words, which I found a bit rude. It wasn't a rude gesture though, I just felt that words would have been better. Anyway I listened to Manu Chao on repeat for most of the journey from Guayaquil, and got to Banos at 530am. Luckily the hostel I'd booked was 2 blocks from the bus terminal, so I found it easily and went to sleep on the sofa near the reception until about 9. It was freezing so I put layers of clothing on top of me, and sofa cushions too. When I eventually ventured out for some breakfast my 7 layers of clothing was a bit excessive as it was a really warm day actually.
The last blog I did was about the weekend in Cuenca so I should update about Monday to Wednesday of this week before starting to talk about Banos. I was in Guayaquil with Kim from Sunday night to Wednesday night. As mentioned on the last blog with the pictures etc, she's been putting together the exhibition of all the work she's done with the 3 groups of children she's been working with in Guayaquil since January. The 2 themes were superheroes and community, and they had made superhero outfits and parks and gardens with animals and little people in them to represent their communities. On Monday we put together the community section, and put the pigs and iguanas and snakes in their little houses with the little figures too. There were some workers from the museum there to help us install the various bits and pieces, they brought down screens for us to display all the superhero outfits and stands to put the community stuff on etc. They were a bit resistant to being told what needed doing and Kim was amazingly diplomatic and strong in dealing with them, I was getting stressed just trying to follow the conversation and realising that they didn't seem to want to help that much. We wondered if it was a cultural difference in that they didn't like that Kim was telling them what to do, ie she's a woman, but also a foreign woman. Or perhaps they were just lazy. They needed some wire to hang the screens from the ceiling so we could mount the work on them. They didn´t have any wire, and wanted Kim to provide it, which she didn´t want to. They said she should pay for them to take a taxi to the wire shop, but there was a wire shop just round the corner. Kim said nevermind we´ll get our own wire, they asked how she could possibly walk the 20 blocks to the wire shop, didn´t she know it´s dangerous. But there´s a wire shop just round the corner. Whilst this was going on, one of was asking me how old I was, if I was married, if I had children, if I wanted children, if I was religious, what type of christianity it was (I pretended I was Anglican - it´s way easier at times like this, though I don´t know the details of Anglicanism, it sounds pretty convincing as it sounds something to do with being English - feel free to correct me). At one point the director came down to see how things were going too, and apologised if the men hadn´t been helpful, but we said they had, and then she launched into a kind of diatribe about how little funding the museum gets, and how the worker men are shared between other places in the city and how she works 9 hour days and still there are things that don´t get done and she twizzled around a bit and threw her arms in the air too, and I felt like I was watching a piece of performance art, and I understood very little of it, and then she was gone.
We rewarded ourselves with some cake from the local I´m-not-Starbucks-but-I-appear-to-be-very-similar-to-Starbucks café. The strawberry cheesecake was amazing. Kim´s boyfriend Tyrone then picked us up and we set off back Kim´s house, which is in the north of Guayaquil (I´m actually kind of guessing this fact, but I think it´s right). Here´s something you should know about Guayaquil - there´s a lot of traffic here. We stopped to buy some wire at the wire shop, and then decided the best thing was to let the horrendous traffic pass for a while, so wandered around a mall and ate some mcdonalds for about an hour (we didn´t eat mcdonalds for a whole hour, that´d be a bit like that fast food documentary programme where you eat mcdonalds 3 meals a day for like weeks and see what happens to you - I think the conclusion was you get ill and fat and throw up quite a bit). Apparently, waiting for the traffic to pass meant that instead of it taking 1 hour or more to get home, by waiting around an hour, it now would only take about 20 minutes. Though obviously we´d also spent an hour in the mall. All of this made my head explode a bit, like one of those questions on a maths exam about trains leaving from Norwich. Had we actually saved time by spending an hour waiting for the journey to get quicker, or would the end result be the same if we´d just have stayed in the traffic anyway. Does it depend how you spend the hour waiting for the traffic to pass as to whether you made the right decision? How do you measure something like this, it´s all a bit intangible.
Tuesday we went to the gallery again to finish putting everything together. The worker men were less resistant today, but there was a funny kind of Laurel and Hardy moment when 2 of them were up a ladder and having an argument about something and practically beating each other up and going ´estas loco o que´ (are you mad or what), and get away from me you´re too close, Í´m not gay you know. All whilst trying to change a lightbulb or something that probably demanded a bit of attention in order to not get injured. It was pretty hilarious. Today we had an almuerzo de dos dólar (2 dollar lunch) - I can´t remember if I´ve mentioned these before, but basically they´re amazing bargain lunches where you get a soup and a main course for 2 dollars. In fact I have mentioned these before, so I won´t mention them again now, apart from now it´s too late as I have mentioned them. I love eating at places like this, it´s where the locals eat and you get to do some great people watching. On Monday we had gone for encebollado for breakfast at a local café near the gallery, me and Kim and her co-workers Ronald and Juan Carlos, and Joseph. Encebollado is a very fishy fish soup with potatoes and yucca in it, you add chifles (the platain crisp things) and spicy sauce to it, and have lemonade with it too. It´s really fishy and really really yummy and apparently an amazing hangover cure as it´s full of spices and protein. This morning in Banos we (me and Danny) had jugo de mora y coca (BlackBerry and coconut juice - wow look at that, the word BlackBerry automatically converts to capital letters so it´s the proper trademark BlackBerry phone thingy), and balones con café (a big ball of kind of doughy corn stuff with coffee) in the local market. I actually have a slightly dodgy stomach now, so perhaps I was too keen with eating the local food like a local.
Tuesday was when Kim´s friend Kory showed up from Bolivia, so that evening we just hung out at Kim´s all of us, and Tyrone too. We had plans to go to yoga, or go cycling (Tyrone had lent me his single speed and as you know I have brought my bike helmet and pedals and cycling clothes thinking we would do loads of cycling..... hopefully we still will as we plan on being in Guayaquil again this weekend coming) but instead we did a chocolate taste test, comparing the 3 English chocolates I´d brought (maltesers, caramel, and galaxy), with an Ecuadorean chocolate and from the US (Hershey´s). The end result was the Ecuadorean bar won..... we were not expecting that. We had really good fun doing the test, but I´m not convinced Tyrone and Kory were that into it. Kory refused to give the maltesers a mark out of 5 as they´re not just chocolate he said - this is technically true, but it skewed the data somewhat. Tyrone is a dentist, so I think it´s pretty funny we made him eat loads of chocolate just for our own amusement.
Wednesday was Kim´s big day at the gallery - the opening of the exhibition, to which some press were coming, and the directors of JUCONI (the foundation she´s working for), and a third of the children (there´s 3 groups so one was coming each day for 3 days, as there isn´t space for all 90 of them in one day). Kim had to make a speech (in Spanish obviously) about who she was and what the projects have been about and what the aim of the work has been, which she did amazingly well, so well that I actually cried a little bit as I was so proud of her, and especially when another lady did a speech that mentioned how amazing Kim has been working with the children here. The kids gave her a card to say thank you and after the speeches they all went to look round the gallery. Me and Kory were official photographers for the occasion which was pretty cool too. That night we went for a drink in an area of Guayaquil called las Penas (the n should have a squiggle on it, and be pronounced pen-yas). This was a road with lots of step up it and a lighthouse at the top though I didn´t actually see the lighthouse. We went with most of Kim´s housemates and drank a large beer sitting on some benches. Becky had once muddled up the word for lighthouse ´el faro´, with the word for dickhead ´el foro´, when at the lighthouse and asking a question about the lighthouse. Her question was actually about a dickhead. Sorry for the rude words infiltrating an otherwise very polite blog.
And then I got the nightbus which was a little tiny bit stressful this time mainly because I had no idea what time the buses left and how long the taxi to the bus station would be. Taking a taxi in Guayaquil can be dangerous so we had called one specifically from a safe taxi company and they text you the driver´s number plate so you know to get in just that one. Guayaquil bus station is massive and like a huge mall, really clean, and nothing like what you´d expect a South American bus station to be - normally they´re a little bit dodgy and smelly and in a funny part of town.
So that was the end of my time in Guayaquil. And now I´ve been in Banos since Thursday morning and will most likely leave tomorrow, but I´m not entirely sure where to.... Possibly head back up north to a place called Latacunga where you can see some more mountains, and then possibly have a few more days in Quito because I didn´t see the equator or Otavalo market yet, which I may regret and won´t have chance to see the following week as me and Kim are planning on travelling up the coast, after taking the Devil´s Nose train from down south in a place called Alausi. I ought to go and read my guidebook, which I´ve been quite resistant to doing so far, but otherwise nothing will get planned for tomorrow.
I´ll try to post some pictures up and do another update about Banos soon. I did start this blog on my iPhone but it seemed to have a technical hitch so I have done most of it on a computer. There was a scary moment when I thought I´d lost all of it but then half of it came back. Phew.
Adios for now. And congratulations to Sarah and Rod who had their baby (Poppy) this week!!!!
Pickles xx
We rewarded ourselves with some cake from the local I´m-not-Starbucks-but-I-appear-to-be-very-similar-to-Starbucks café. The strawberry cheesecake was amazing. Kim´s boyfriend Tyrone then picked us up and we set off back Kim´s house, which is in the north of Guayaquil (I´m actually kind of guessing this fact, but I think it´s right). Here´s something you should know about Guayaquil - there´s a lot of traffic here. We stopped to buy some wire at the wire shop, and then decided the best thing was to let the horrendous traffic pass for a while, so wandered around a mall and ate some mcdonalds for about an hour (we didn´t eat mcdonalds for a whole hour, that´d be a bit like that fast food documentary programme where you eat mcdonalds 3 meals a day for like weeks and see what happens to you - I think the conclusion was you get ill and fat and throw up quite a bit). Apparently, waiting for the traffic to pass meant that instead of it taking 1 hour or more to get home, by waiting around an hour, it now would only take about 20 minutes. Though obviously we´d also spent an hour in the mall. All of this made my head explode a bit, like one of those questions on a maths exam about trains leaving from Norwich. Had we actually saved time by spending an hour waiting for the journey to get quicker, or would the end result be the same if we´d just have stayed in the traffic anyway. Does it depend how you spend the hour waiting for the traffic to pass as to whether you made the right decision? How do you measure something like this, it´s all a bit intangible.
Tuesday we went to the gallery again to finish putting everything together. The worker men were less resistant today, but there was a funny kind of Laurel and Hardy moment when 2 of them were up a ladder and having an argument about something and practically beating each other up and going ´estas loco o que´ (are you mad or what), and get away from me you´re too close, Í´m not gay you know. All whilst trying to change a lightbulb or something that probably demanded a bit of attention in order to not get injured. It was pretty hilarious. Today we had an almuerzo de dos dólar (2 dollar lunch) - I can´t remember if I´ve mentioned these before, but basically they´re amazing bargain lunches where you get a soup and a main course for 2 dollars. In fact I have mentioned these before, so I won´t mention them again now, apart from now it´s too late as I have mentioned them. I love eating at places like this, it´s where the locals eat and you get to do some great people watching. On Monday we had gone for encebollado for breakfast at a local café near the gallery, me and Kim and her co-workers Ronald and Juan Carlos, and Joseph. Encebollado is a very fishy fish soup with potatoes and yucca in it, you add chifles (the platain crisp things) and spicy sauce to it, and have lemonade with it too. It´s really fishy and really really yummy and apparently an amazing hangover cure as it´s full of spices and protein. This morning in Banos we (me and Danny) had jugo de mora y coca (BlackBerry and coconut juice - wow look at that, the word BlackBerry automatically converts to capital letters so it´s the proper trademark BlackBerry phone thingy), and balones con café (a big ball of kind of doughy corn stuff with coffee) in the local market. I actually have a slightly dodgy stomach now, so perhaps I was too keen with eating the local food like a local.
Tuesday was when Kim´s friend Kory showed up from Bolivia, so that evening we just hung out at Kim´s all of us, and Tyrone too. We had plans to go to yoga, or go cycling (Tyrone had lent me his single speed and as you know I have brought my bike helmet and pedals and cycling clothes thinking we would do loads of cycling..... hopefully we still will as we plan on being in Guayaquil again this weekend coming) but instead we did a chocolate taste test, comparing the 3 English chocolates I´d brought (maltesers, caramel, and galaxy), with an Ecuadorean chocolate and from the US (Hershey´s). The end result was the Ecuadorean bar won..... we were not expecting that. We had really good fun doing the test, but I´m not convinced Tyrone and Kory were that into it. Kory refused to give the maltesers a mark out of 5 as they´re not just chocolate he said - this is technically true, but it skewed the data somewhat. Tyrone is a dentist, so I think it´s pretty funny we made him eat loads of chocolate just for our own amusement.
Wednesday was Kim´s big day at the gallery - the opening of the exhibition, to which some press were coming, and the directors of JUCONI (the foundation she´s working for), and a third of the children (there´s 3 groups so one was coming each day for 3 days, as there isn´t space for all 90 of them in one day). Kim had to make a speech (in Spanish obviously) about who she was and what the projects have been about and what the aim of the work has been, which she did amazingly well, so well that I actually cried a little bit as I was so proud of her, and especially when another lady did a speech that mentioned how amazing Kim has been working with the children here. The kids gave her a card to say thank you and after the speeches they all went to look round the gallery. Me and Kory were official photographers for the occasion which was pretty cool too. That night we went for a drink in an area of Guayaquil called las Penas (the n should have a squiggle on it, and be pronounced pen-yas). This was a road with lots of step up it and a lighthouse at the top though I didn´t actually see the lighthouse. We went with most of Kim´s housemates and drank a large beer sitting on some benches. Becky had once muddled up the word for lighthouse ´el faro´, with the word for dickhead ´el foro´, when at the lighthouse and asking a question about the lighthouse. Her question was actually about a dickhead. Sorry for the rude words infiltrating an otherwise very polite blog.
And then I got the nightbus which was a little tiny bit stressful this time mainly because I had no idea what time the buses left and how long the taxi to the bus station would be. Taking a taxi in Guayaquil can be dangerous so we had called one specifically from a safe taxi company and they text you the driver´s number plate so you know to get in just that one. Guayaquil bus station is massive and like a huge mall, really clean, and nothing like what you´d expect a South American bus station to be - normally they´re a little bit dodgy and smelly and in a funny part of town.
So that was the end of my time in Guayaquil. And now I´ve been in Banos since Thursday morning and will most likely leave tomorrow, but I´m not entirely sure where to.... Possibly head back up north to a place called Latacunga where you can see some more mountains, and then possibly have a few more days in Quito because I didn´t see the equator or Otavalo market yet, which I may regret and won´t have chance to see the following week as me and Kim are planning on travelling up the coast, after taking the Devil´s Nose train from down south in a place called Alausi. I ought to go and read my guidebook, which I´ve been quite resistant to doing so far, but otherwise nothing will get planned for tomorrow.
I´ll try to post some pictures up and do another update about Banos soon. I did start this blog on my iPhone but it seemed to have a technical hitch so I have done most of it on a computer. There was a scary moment when I thought I´d lost all of it but then half of it came back. Phew.
Adios for now. And congratulations to Sarah and Rod who had their baby (Poppy) this week!!!!
Pickles xx
Tuesday 19 August 2014
Cuenca to Guayaquil
Hi everyone,
I'm in Guayaquil with Kim! We've been busy working, putting together the exhibition that opens tomorrow - see previous post for some pictures I uploaded from my iPhone. Kim is out here for the year (January to January), running art workshops with children in deprived areas in Guayaquil. Guayaquil is a hot city in the South of Ecuador on the coast (kind of coast - more like the top of a very long estuary). It's technically the coastal region therefore. Quito is in the Sierra (mountains), and the jungle is la Selva, so I've now been in all 3 types of Ecuadorean regions. We're going to go to the actual coast when we go travelling together in a few weeks. Anyway, Kim's been working on 2 different projects with the kids - one about community, and one about superheroes, and we've been installing all the kids' work at a gallery in downtown Guayaquil (it's a pretty nice area in fact, contrary to what I'd been told / led to believe about Guayaquil). I'm already getting tired of typing Guayaquil - it's not an easy word to type - try it. You pronounce it why-a-kill. It's easier to pronounce than to type.
So we got here on Sunday night, me and Kim, and 2 of her flatmates Becky and Laura. We had all met up in Cuenca on Saturday morning - I got the night bus from Quito on Friday night to Cuenca. This took 7 hours, and I drank one small sip of water during those 7 hours, as I get panicked about needing a wee. They don't have toilets on the night buses (or if they do, they lock them and you can't use them). We stopped at around 4am for a toilet stop, so I ran off and then ran back - when I'm on the night bus on my own, I worry that at the toilet stops the bus won't know if you're back or not, and it'll just set off without you. If you're with someone else at least they can tell the bus driver to wait. Anyway, that was my only thought on the night bus, as I slept the whole entire journey, to the point that the driver had to wake me up in Cuenca as he knew I was getting off there. The reason I slept was because I'd gone out dancing with some hostel friends in Quito on the Thursday night and was still a bit hungover. This is a good tactic for the night bus.
Cuenca - on Saturday morning - was cold, and rainy. I got a taxi to the hostel, and rang the doorbell for a while, until someone answered. I then just sat down for quite a while, drinking orange flavoured tea and eating chifles (these are the really thinly sliced and fried plantains - banana flavoured crisps), and wondering how come it was so cold in Cuenca. Kim arrived around 12, with her flatmates from Guayaquil - Becky is English and working on the same project as Kim, but as a psychologist, as is Laura, who's from Uruguay (which is almost as hard to type as Guayaquil, but not quite). I have mainly seen Kim in countries beginning with B - she came to visit me in Belize in 2008, then I've seen her in Britain, and last year I saw her in Bolivia. I'm now seeing her in Ecuador. This makes the word BE. I took this as a profound sign of something. Then we remembered that we met first in Mexico. This doesn't really spell anything, except MBE.
We wandered around Cuenca for a while, chatting and looking for somewhere to eat. I'd heard lots of good things about Cuenca - it's a colonial-ish town with some cobbledy streets. It was very nice in fact, but mostly it was nice to see Kim again. I last saw her in January, before she left England to come to Ecuador. When I met up with her last year in Bolivia, I was there for 3 months on the ICS volunteering project, and Kim was on her way from Chile to Brazil - she'd been doing an art residency in Chile and was headed to Brazil to do a 3 month art workshop volunteer project, similar to what she's doing now. Kim has a huge brain, and learnt Portuguese in about 6 weeks, her Spanish is fluent, and when she visited me in Belize she had been cycling through Central America for 8 months on her own. I first met her on a Macmillan Cancer charity bike ride through Mexico in 2008.
Anyway - we wandered around Cuenca until we found a place for an almuerzo dos dolares. This is lunch for 2 dollars and is 2 courses - the first one is soup, the 2nd is something like seco de pollo - this literally means dry chicken. The chicken is in a nice tomatoey sauce, served with rice and salad. It's not dry, but it's more dry than the soup, which is why Becky thought it's called seco de pollo. Another story is that because it's the second course, which is called segundo, this became seco, in a shortened form. We then went in an Incan museum, wandered some more, and had a piece of cake and coffee at a vaguely swanky place. I had tea instead of coffee - asking for black tea with milk in South America can cause all sorts of confusion. Sometimes you get hot milk with a teabag on the side. This time I got black tea on its own. I asked for milk a few more times, to be met with various different facial expressions that made me suspicious, and in the end was told I'd have to pay an extra 1 dollar for some milk. I declined and took some of the foam from Kim's cappuccino instead to use as milk. It's these kind of intricate details you all love reading my blog for isn't it. I know.
We had a siesta / beer / chat at the hostel. Our chatting was in English and Spanish - Laura doesn't speak English, so it would either be those 3 chatting in Spanish, and me trying to follow it all, or us 3 speaking in English and Laura not really understanding. Becky and Kim both speak really good Spanish - Becky lived in Argentina teaching English for a year and a half before coming to Ecuador earlier this year. Me and Kim opened some presents that Siobhan had sent over with me for us both - lovely notebooks from Sri Lanka - thanks Siob. I presented Kim with the gifts/things I'd brought for her - some cycling shoes (her boyfriend here - Tyrone - is a really serious cyclist and has built her a really cool road bike), some chocolate for Tyrone to sample (maltesers, a galaxy bar, and a cadburys caramel - can you believe I hadn't eaten any of them en route?), and a tub of tahini paste so she can make some houmous. The tahini paste had marginally exploded on the journey so far, so that I'd had to wash the chocolate bars - I was quite pleased to get rid o these objects and Kim was really happy to get them as they're all either impossible or very expensive to buy in Ecuador.
On Sunday we got up and went to el Parque Cajas, a National Park nearby and went for a lovely walk.
What actually happened is this. We got up, faffed around for a while, had some breakfast, went for some more breakfast, got behind schedule, got a cab to the bus station, paid 10 cents to go to the bus platform to be told there weren't any buses going to las Cajas, asked a lot of questions, got another taxi to another part of town, waited for another bus to take us to las Cajas (no idea which one we were waiting for so we asked every single one that stopped), got on one after about 30 minutes of waiting, got off it a while later when the driver told us we were there, wandered around looking for the park entrance for around 40 minutes. In this time we bought some gloves, put on 3 more layers of clothing, and drank a hot alcoholic drink - canelazo (the one that is like mulled wine), and wished each other happy christmas. It was pretty cold up there in the park - apparently we were now at 3800 metres. There were loads of religious statues of Jesus, and we appeared to be in the small, religious part of the park, where there were posters up demanding us to be quiet and have peaceful recollection. Of what I don't know. Possibly of how we'd become this lost in the first place. We asked a few old men where the park was, and eventually worked out that we needed to get back on the bus and go further up the road. So we did just that. By this point it was around 1pm, and we still had to go for a walk and get all the way back to Cuenca, get our bags, get to the bus station and go 3 hours to Guayaquil.
This part of the park was pretty beautiful, kind of reminiscent of the lake district, but not many camping shops or places for cream tea. It was absolutely freezing by now, but we were also vaguely drunk thanks to the canelazo. We bemoaned the string of odd / bad decisions / things that had happened so far that day (and mostly blamed it on the strange religious statues), only to then discover that there wasn't the expected 10 dollar entrance fee to the park. Our luck seemed to be changing. Kim then told me about some tourists who had gone missing for 6 days in the park. Because it's in the mountains, the weather can change very quickly - the clouds can suddenly descend and the path isn't that clear to begin with, so I can imagine how dangerous this can be, along with the added danger of the freezing cold. We had bought loads of picnic food, so were pretty sure we'd be ok if this happened - I had my penknife too so could fend off any of the bears and woodpeckers we'd read about in the guidebook.
We followed a (hard to follow) path around the lake, which should have taken 3.5 hours (to go only 2.6 miles - but you're at altitude so it's not that easy), but took about 1.5 hours to get to another sign that then said it was 5.5 hours, but it wasn't clear whether it was another 5.5 hours, or 5.5 hours altogether. Then we saw one that said 20 minutes back to the information centre. I persuaded everyone this was the best option incase the killer clouds descended, and given that we couldn't understand the map or the timings, and had a lot to still do. My feet were wet from muddy puddles and my fingers were frozen and I wanted a cup of tea. We ate a homemade tuna sandwich by the side of the lake, mainly so we had used the picnic items and penknife, and then had a cup of tea in the information centre and looked at the view, and me and Kim talked about Ecuador. She asked me how I was finding Ecuador so far, which I told her was quite a formal question for this point in the proceedings.
Leaving las Cajas was another story. We got to the bus stop nearby, by this point I was wearing 7 layers of clothing, including 1 thermal long sleeved top, a cycling jacket, a hoodie, and a rain coat. I was freezing - it was that cold that gets into your bones, like in Yorkshire, but much more dramatic and Incan. I saw a bus coming after a few minutes - we all yelped with excitement at the thought of being out of the cold and on our way back. The bus flew by at around 80kmh. We didn't know why. Another bus appeared a few minutes later - our luck was back. It flew by too. None of the buses that we saw coming were stopping - one little one looked like it was going to, but then changed his mind. It turns out it's actually illegal for people to stand on buses here and all the buses passing us were full, and for some strange reason, abiding by the law. Why at this moment in time, would Ecuadorean bus drivers decide to abide by the law? I don't know, but that is what happened. Kim had the genius idea of hitch-hiking. Immediately our luck was back and a lady and her daughter leaving the park picked us all up in her car - the 4 of us squashed into the back - not sure how legal that is, but it's standard fare here. She dropped us right at our hostel, 40 minutes later, and wouldn't accept any money at all for the favour. Amazing. The gigantic dog from the hostel greeted us - he is literally enormous - kind of like a sheep, and his name is Vincent Vega. I wanted to mention him earlier, but couldn't find the right way to do it and now we're about to leave Cuenca so I had to get him in the story somehow. I'm not sure he even did greet us at this point, but this is artistic license.
We found out that it is illegal to drink alcohol on Sundays in Ecuador, through chatting to the lady who gave us the lift. I think she may have thought we were all alcoholics as we had so many questions about drinking - she asked at one point if we needed to go get something to drink. I was confused as we'd drunk canelazo, but perhaps it's only cold alcohol that's illegal, or perhaps if you drink in a park full of religious statues then it's all fine.
We got our stuff, said goodbye to Vincent Vega (*this may not have actually happened), then went to get a collectivo to Guayaquil. This is a small minibus/people carrier. I think it's cheaper than the normal large bus, and Kim said it's quicker because of where it drops you off when you get to Guayaquil being closer to where their house is. We chatted for a while and then instantly passed out for a few hours - the altitude and walking and canelazo had caught up with us. Also driving through the windy (curvy not breezy) roads in the dark was hypnotic like being in a computer game, with just lights whizzing by on either side, and wondering if you get another life if you lose yours while your collectivo is trying to overtake a big lorry whilst going round a corner up a hill in busy traffic. I woke up suddenly in Guayaquil, as the collectivo ground to a sudden emergency stop to avoid hitting the car in front. I still had 7 layers of clothing on and a scarf at this point. You don't need 7 layers of clothing in Guayaquil, you need 1, and actually you don't need that 1 layer, but it's more socially acceptable to keep it on.
We got a taxi to Kim's house from the collectivo and that's where I'll stop this update. I'm currently at Kim's, her friend Corey is here too now, he arrived today. His name is actually spelt Kory - this means gold, in Quechua (the indigenous language of Peru/Ecuador/Bolivia). Kim knows him from her time in Cochabamba, Bolivia last year - he's passing through Ecuador having left Bolivia after a year there. He's originally from Cochabamba but grew up in the States from an early age, and this year was the first time he'd come to Bolivia (now Ecuador). Interesting, all these people with their different lives and different experiences.
Kim's gone to the supermarket with Tyrone to buy some other chocolate, to do the chocolate taste test. We're going to make him eat the chocolate I brought from England, along with some other chocolate, like Hershey's or something awful, and he has to rank them in order of preference. This has no purpose other than to prove that English chocolate is most likely nicer than Hershey's chocolate, which everyone knows anyway.
Tomorrow afternoon is the opening of the exhibition, we have a few more things to do there, and Kim has to prepare a short speech for the opening. I'm then getting a night bus to Banos, a nice sounding small spa town 7 hours away, kind of halfway back to Quito - I'm going to see Danny (friend from Quito) there for a few days, and then decide what to do next. It's really really lovely to spend these few days with Kim and be able to help her with her exhibition, and see all the amazing work she's been doing over the last year with the kids. We're going to meet up again next Friday to travel for a week together, most likely up the coast north and finishing in Quito for my flight home. The thought of which makes me feel a little bit sick as I don't really want to come home so soon, but not as sick as all the cake we ate this afternoon to celebrate 2 days of hard work at the gallery.
Over and out pepinillos for now xx
I'm in Guayaquil with Kim! We've been busy working, putting together the exhibition that opens tomorrow - see previous post for some pictures I uploaded from my iPhone. Kim is out here for the year (January to January), running art workshops with children in deprived areas in Guayaquil. Guayaquil is a hot city in the South of Ecuador on the coast (kind of coast - more like the top of a very long estuary). It's technically the coastal region therefore. Quito is in the Sierra (mountains), and the jungle is la Selva, so I've now been in all 3 types of Ecuadorean regions. We're going to go to the actual coast when we go travelling together in a few weeks. Anyway, Kim's been working on 2 different projects with the kids - one about community, and one about superheroes, and we've been installing all the kids' work at a gallery in downtown Guayaquil (it's a pretty nice area in fact, contrary to what I'd been told / led to believe about Guayaquil). I'm already getting tired of typing Guayaquil - it's not an easy word to type - try it. You pronounce it why-a-kill. It's easier to pronounce than to type.
So we got here on Sunday night, me and Kim, and 2 of her flatmates Becky and Laura. We had all met up in Cuenca on Saturday morning - I got the night bus from Quito on Friday night to Cuenca. This took 7 hours, and I drank one small sip of water during those 7 hours, as I get panicked about needing a wee. They don't have toilets on the night buses (or if they do, they lock them and you can't use them). We stopped at around 4am for a toilet stop, so I ran off and then ran back - when I'm on the night bus on my own, I worry that at the toilet stops the bus won't know if you're back or not, and it'll just set off without you. If you're with someone else at least they can tell the bus driver to wait. Anyway, that was my only thought on the night bus, as I slept the whole entire journey, to the point that the driver had to wake me up in Cuenca as he knew I was getting off there. The reason I slept was because I'd gone out dancing with some hostel friends in Quito on the Thursday night and was still a bit hungover. This is a good tactic for the night bus.
Cuenca - on Saturday morning - was cold, and rainy. I got a taxi to the hostel, and rang the doorbell for a while, until someone answered. I then just sat down for quite a while, drinking orange flavoured tea and eating chifles (these are the really thinly sliced and fried plantains - banana flavoured crisps), and wondering how come it was so cold in Cuenca. Kim arrived around 12, with her flatmates from Guayaquil - Becky is English and working on the same project as Kim, but as a psychologist, as is Laura, who's from Uruguay (which is almost as hard to type as Guayaquil, but not quite). I have mainly seen Kim in countries beginning with B - she came to visit me in Belize in 2008, then I've seen her in Britain, and last year I saw her in Bolivia. I'm now seeing her in Ecuador. This makes the word BE. I took this as a profound sign of something. Then we remembered that we met first in Mexico. This doesn't really spell anything, except MBE.
We wandered around Cuenca for a while, chatting and looking for somewhere to eat. I'd heard lots of good things about Cuenca - it's a colonial-ish town with some cobbledy streets. It was very nice in fact, but mostly it was nice to see Kim again. I last saw her in January, before she left England to come to Ecuador. When I met up with her last year in Bolivia, I was there for 3 months on the ICS volunteering project, and Kim was on her way from Chile to Brazil - she'd been doing an art residency in Chile and was headed to Brazil to do a 3 month art workshop volunteer project, similar to what she's doing now. Kim has a huge brain, and learnt Portuguese in about 6 weeks, her Spanish is fluent, and when she visited me in Belize she had been cycling through Central America for 8 months on her own. I first met her on a Macmillan Cancer charity bike ride through Mexico in 2008.
Anyway - we wandered around Cuenca until we found a place for an almuerzo dos dolares. This is lunch for 2 dollars and is 2 courses - the first one is soup, the 2nd is something like seco de pollo - this literally means dry chicken. The chicken is in a nice tomatoey sauce, served with rice and salad. It's not dry, but it's more dry than the soup, which is why Becky thought it's called seco de pollo. Another story is that because it's the second course, which is called segundo, this became seco, in a shortened form. We then went in an Incan museum, wandered some more, and had a piece of cake and coffee at a vaguely swanky place. I had tea instead of coffee - asking for black tea with milk in South America can cause all sorts of confusion. Sometimes you get hot milk with a teabag on the side. This time I got black tea on its own. I asked for milk a few more times, to be met with various different facial expressions that made me suspicious, and in the end was told I'd have to pay an extra 1 dollar for some milk. I declined and took some of the foam from Kim's cappuccino instead to use as milk. It's these kind of intricate details you all love reading my blog for isn't it. I know.
We had a siesta / beer / chat at the hostel. Our chatting was in English and Spanish - Laura doesn't speak English, so it would either be those 3 chatting in Spanish, and me trying to follow it all, or us 3 speaking in English and Laura not really understanding. Becky and Kim both speak really good Spanish - Becky lived in Argentina teaching English for a year and a half before coming to Ecuador earlier this year. Me and Kim opened some presents that Siobhan had sent over with me for us both - lovely notebooks from Sri Lanka - thanks Siob. I presented Kim with the gifts/things I'd brought for her - some cycling shoes (her boyfriend here - Tyrone - is a really serious cyclist and has built her a really cool road bike), some chocolate for Tyrone to sample (maltesers, a galaxy bar, and a cadburys caramel - can you believe I hadn't eaten any of them en route?), and a tub of tahini paste so she can make some houmous. The tahini paste had marginally exploded on the journey so far, so that I'd had to wash the chocolate bars - I was quite pleased to get rid o these objects and Kim was really happy to get them as they're all either impossible or very expensive to buy in Ecuador.
On Sunday we got up and went to el Parque Cajas, a National Park nearby and went for a lovely walk.
What actually happened is this. We got up, faffed around for a while, had some breakfast, went for some more breakfast, got behind schedule, got a cab to the bus station, paid 10 cents to go to the bus platform to be told there weren't any buses going to las Cajas, asked a lot of questions, got another taxi to another part of town, waited for another bus to take us to las Cajas (no idea which one we were waiting for so we asked every single one that stopped), got on one after about 30 minutes of waiting, got off it a while later when the driver told us we were there, wandered around looking for the park entrance for around 40 minutes. In this time we bought some gloves, put on 3 more layers of clothing, and drank a hot alcoholic drink - canelazo (the one that is like mulled wine), and wished each other happy christmas. It was pretty cold up there in the park - apparently we were now at 3800 metres. There were loads of religious statues of Jesus, and we appeared to be in the small, religious part of the park, where there were posters up demanding us to be quiet and have peaceful recollection. Of what I don't know. Possibly of how we'd become this lost in the first place. We asked a few old men where the park was, and eventually worked out that we needed to get back on the bus and go further up the road. So we did just that. By this point it was around 1pm, and we still had to go for a walk and get all the way back to Cuenca, get our bags, get to the bus station and go 3 hours to Guayaquil.
This part of the park was pretty beautiful, kind of reminiscent of the lake district, but not many camping shops or places for cream tea. It was absolutely freezing by now, but we were also vaguely drunk thanks to the canelazo. We bemoaned the string of odd / bad decisions / things that had happened so far that day (and mostly blamed it on the strange religious statues), only to then discover that there wasn't the expected 10 dollar entrance fee to the park. Our luck seemed to be changing. Kim then told me about some tourists who had gone missing for 6 days in the park. Because it's in the mountains, the weather can change very quickly - the clouds can suddenly descend and the path isn't that clear to begin with, so I can imagine how dangerous this can be, along with the added danger of the freezing cold. We had bought loads of picnic food, so were pretty sure we'd be ok if this happened - I had my penknife too so could fend off any of the bears and woodpeckers we'd read about in the guidebook.
We followed a (hard to follow) path around the lake, which should have taken 3.5 hours (to go only 2.6 miles - but you're at altitude so it's not that easy), but took about 1.5 hours to get to another sign that then said it was 5.5 hours, but it wasn't clear whether it was another 5.5 hours, or 5.5 hours altogether. Then we saw one that said 20 minutes back to the information centre. I persuaded everyone this was the best option incase the killer clouds descended, and given that we couldn't understand the map or the timings, and had a lot to still do. My feet were wet from muddy puddles and my fingers were frozen and I wanted a cup of tea. We ate a homemade tuna sandwich by the side of the lake, mainly so we had used the picnic items and penknife, and then had a cup of tea in the information centre and looked at the view, and me and Kim talked about Ecuador. She asked me how I was finding Ecuador so far, which I told her was quite a formal question for this point in the proceedings.
Leaving las Cajas was another story. We got to the bus stop nearby, by this point I was wearing 7 layers of clothing, including 1 thermal long sleeved top, a cycling jacket, a hoodie, and a rain coat. I was freezing - it was that cold that gets into your bones, like in Yorkshire, but much more dramatic and Incan. I saw a bus coming after a few minutes - we all yelped with excitement at the thought of being out of the cold and on our way back. The bus flew by at around 80kmh. We didn't know why. Another bus appeared a few minutes later - our luck was back. It flew by too. None of the buses that we saw coming were stopping - one little one looked like it was going to, but then changed his mind. It turns out it's actually illegal for people to stand on buses here and all the buses passing us were full, and for some strange reason, abiding by the law. Why at this moment in time, would Ecuadorean bus drivers decide to abide by the law? I don't know, but that is what happened. Kim had the genius idea of hitch-hiking. Immediately our luck was back and a lady and her daughter leaving the park picked us all up in her car - the 4 of us squashed into the back - not sure how legal that is, but it's standard fare here. She dropped us right at our hostel, 40 minutes later, and wouldn't accept any money at all for the favour. Amazing. The gigantic dog from the hostel greeted us - he is literally enormous - kind of like a sheep, and his name is Vincent Vega. I wanted to mention him earlier, but couldn't find the right way to do it and now we're about to leave Cuenca so I had to get him in the story somehow. I'm not sure he even did greet us at this point, but this is artistic license.
We found out that it is illegal to drink alcohol on Sundays in Ecuador, through chatting to the lady who gave us the lift. I think she may have thought we were all alcoholics as we had so many questions about drinking - she asked at one point if we needed to go get something to drink. I was confused as we'd drunk canelazo, but perhaps it's only cold alcohol that's illegal, or perhaps if you drink in a park full of religious statues then it's all fine.
We got our stuff, said goodbye to Vincent Vega (*this may not have actually happened), then went to get a collectivo to Guayaquil. This is a small minibus/people carrier. I think it's cheaper than the normal large bus, and Kim said it's quicker because of where it drops you off when you get to Guayaquil being closer to where their house is. We chatted for a while and then instantly passed out for a few hours - the altitude and walking and canelazo had caught up with us. Also driving through the windy (curvy not breezy) roads in the dark was hypnotic like being in a computer game, with just lights whizzing by on either side, and wondering if you get another life if you lose yours while your collectivo is trying to overtake a big lorry whilst going round a corner up a hill in busy traffic. I woke up suddenly in Guayaquil, as the collectivo ground to a sudden emergency stop to avoid hitting the car in front. I still had 7 layers of clothing on and a scarf at this point. You don't need 7 layers of clothing in Guayaquil, you need 1, and actually you don't need that 1 layer, but it's more socially acceptable to keep it on.
We got a taxi to Kim's house from the collectivo and that's where I'll stop this update. I'm currently at Kim's, her friend Corey is here too now, he arrived today. His name is actually spelt Kory - this means gold, in Quechua (the indigenous language of Peru/Ecuador/Bolivia). Kim knows him from her time in Cochabamba, Bolivia last year - he's passing through Ecuador having left Bolivia after a year there. He's originally from Cochabamba but grew up in the States from an early age, and this year was the first time he'd come to Bolivia (now Ecuador). Interesting, all these people with their different lives and different experiences.
Kim's gone to the supermarket with Tyrone to buy some other chocolate, to do the chocolate taste test. We're going to make him eat the chocolate I brought from England, along with some other chocolate, like Hershey's or something awful, and he has to rank them in order of preference. This has no purpose other than to prove that English chocolate is most likely nicer than Hershey's chocolate, which everyone knows anyway.
Tomorrow afternoon is the opening of the exhibition, we have a few more things to do there, and Kim has to prepare a short speech for the opening. I'm then getting a night bus to Banos, a nice sounding small spa town 7 hours away, kind of halfway back to Quito - I'm going to see Danny (friend from Quito) there for a few days, and then decide what to do next. It's really really lovely to spend these few days with Kim and be able to help her with her exhibition, and see all the amazing work she's been doing over the last year with the kids. We're going to meet up again next Friday to travel for a week together, most likely up the coast north and finishing in Quito for my flight home. The thought of which makes me feel a little bit sick as I don't really want to come home so soon, but not as sick as all the cake we ate this afternoon to celebrate 2 days of hard work at the gallery.
Over and out pepinillos for now xx
Friday 15 August 2014
Update
Hi everyone
So tonight I'm leaving Quito and am off to Cuenca on the night bus to meet Kim and some of her friends. This is a very short update as I went out last night and don't really have the brain power to do much today, but am planning on staying with Kim in Guayaquil from Sunday for a few days so I'll be able to do some more updates from there. It's hot today - apparently the weather here doesn't change, it's always just kind of hot and then sometimes chilly and sometimes rainy, but there aren't any seasons as such.
I put 2 photos up, you can see the Basilica in one of them, the big grey church.
Adios for now x
Thursday 14 August 2014
Welcome to the jungle part 1
Hola todos
So I'm now back from my trip to the jungle (la selva). It's much hotter in the jungle, and very humid. In keeping with my style of trying to avoid doing anything touristy, I went there with Danny to see his family, who live there, in a 'town' called Chonta Punta. Chonta Punta has about 100 people that live there, it's a few roads and some houses, and chickens and dogs, 1 little shop and a school. And a new school being paid for by petrol money the government has. Not sure if this is a good thing, but it's a fact anyway.
We took the bus from Quito on Sunday afternoon, to Tena. This is to the East, towards the amazon region. If you go West from Quito, you'd be at the coast. Tena is the capital of the region called Napu. The bus journey there was pretty spectacular. You leave Quito, pretty slowly due to it being hilly and the bus being full of people, and there being traffic. I was amazed at how big Quito is, it goes on and on and on. At one point we went through a pretty swanky area, called Marvalle (I think) - it had an Apple iStore and an Imax theatre. People got on the bus selling various things, so we had a coconut flavour lollipop at this point. We declined the offer of buying a new watch or memory stick.
After leaving Quito a while later the road starts to climb and climb, the windows steam up and the view outside becomes amazing - huge tall mountains, with jungle on them and waterfalls falling down them, and then massive vallies for as far as you can see. And if you're unlucky you have to get a bag from the driver to vomit into as the road becomes really really windy (that's windy as in curvy, not windy as in breezy - have never noticed this could be ambigious until now) with huge drop offs which you wouldn't want the bus to drop off into. I didn't have to vomit, I really enjoyed this bit. The clouds descend so you are pretty much in them - or rather we ascended to the clouds is more likely what actually happened. We climbed up then dropped down again and so on, on the windy roads, for a long time. I was listening to my panpipe music I got in Peru/Bolivia a while ago, and something weird happens to me when I listen to panpipe music. I know it's really odd, but it makes me euphorically happy, I am sure that in a past life I was an Andean musician. So there I was, on the windy bus, looking out at the jungle landscape, euphorically happy listening to panpipes and going on an adventure, and thinking how nice it felt to feel so happy. And then thinking how it's always tinged with an awareness that it won't last, the happiness. Not in a depressing way, but it will always pass, just as bad moods do too, so when it happens you have to try and stay right in it and not think about it passing. But obviously by that point you've thought about it. This is an insight into my mind which isn't as enlightened as the Buddha's mind quite yet, but almost.
After a while we were in Tena, where we went for food and found a place to stay. Danny called his mum to say we would be there in the morning in Chonta Punta, but neither of them knew when the buses left so we ended up getting up really early and being at the 'bus station' (small dusty area where the local buses leave/arrive) at 5.30am the next day. The next bus was 6.30am. We went to findsome breakfast on the street - flat, round bready things full of cheese - kind of like an enclosed small pizza without tomatoes or any other toppings/fillings. This was served with a small really sugary coffee which I dipped my bread into. The sun was rising and gradually more people appeared and I watched the old couple whose stall it was, making the little pizzas, and I guess that's what they do day in day out just by the bus station. A small boy slept behind them on a dusty rug.
The bus to Chonta Punta went through little jungle villages with little wooden houses and horses/chickens/dogs etc. It reminded me so much of Belize - where we used to live in Cayo near Guatemala was just like this. I hadn't realised that we were living in jungle area there really. When you say jungle I guess the mental picture is of really thick jungle with monkeys swinging from trees and panthers prowling around, chasing away poisonous snakes, and parrots chirping and giant tarantulas making webs to trap you in. But there are roads and villages and people living their lives there, and in the villages there are schools and health centres and shops. The pace of life is extremely slow, probably because it is so hot. We got to Chonta Punta around 9am and went to see Danny's mum. She has a restaurant, called La Patrona. They chatted away, I understood nothing, so sat there smiling and watching them, and wishing I'd had more Spanish lessons before I left. Mind you, even if I had, I think it's a different level of fluency being able to follow a conversation that fast between family members, in the jungle where they probably use all sorts of words that are specific to the area. Danny offered me a beer, which I accepted after a bit of hesitation. So by 11am on Monday morning I was really drunk (it was a really big beer).
I'll leave you with that cliffhanger as I have to go find my Spanish lessons for the morning. I found a school to have some lessons for today and tomorrow, but have no idea what time the lessons start so I better get there soon.
Oh there was a small earthquake yesterday in northern Quito but nothing serious as far as I know - it was around 5 on the richter scale.
Adios xx
So I'm now back from my trip to the jungle (la selva). It's much hotter in the jungle, and very humid. In keeping with my style of trying to avoid doing anything touristy, I went there with Danny to see his family, who live there, in a 'town' called Chonta Punta. Chonta Punta has about 100 people that live there, it's a few roads and some houses, and chickens and dogs, 1 little shop and a school. And a new school being paid for by petrol money the government has. Not sure if this is a good thing, but it's a fact anyway.
We took the bus from Quito on Sunday afternoon, to Tena. This is to the East, towards the amazon region. If you go West from Quito, you'd be at the coast. Tena is the capital of the region called Napu. The bus journey there was pretty spectacular. You leave Quito, pretty slowly due to it being hilly and the bus being full of people, and there being traffic. I was amazed at how big Quito is, it goes on and on and on. At one point we went through a pretty swanky area, called Marvalle (I think) - it had an Apple iStore and an Imax theatre. People got on the bus selling various things, so we had a coconut flavour lollipop at this point. We declined the offer of buying a new watch or memory stick.
After leaving Quito a while later the road starts to climb and climb, the windows steam up and the view outside becomes amazing - huge tall mountains, with jungle on them and waterfalls falling down them, and then massive vallies for as far as you can see. And if you're unlucky you have to get a bag from the driver to vomit into as the road becomes really really windy (that's windy as in curvy, not windy as in breezy - have never noticed this could be ambigious until now) with huge drop offs which you wouldn't want the bus to drop off into. I didn't have to vomit, I really enjoyed this bit. The clouds descend so you are pretty much in them - or rather we ascended to the clouds is more likely what actually happened. We climbed up then dropped down again and so on, on the windy roads, for a long time. I was listening to my panpipe music I got in Peru/Bolivia a while ago, and something weird happens to me when I listen to panpipe music. I know it's really odd, but it makes me euphorically happy, I am sure that in a past life I was an Andean musician. So there I was, on the windy bus, looking out at the jungle landscape, euphorically happy listening to panpipes and going on an adventure, and thinking how nice it felt to feel so happy. And then thinking how it's always tinged with an awareness that it won't last, the happiness. Not in a depressing way, but it will always pass, just as bad moods do too, so when it happens you have to try and stay right in it and not think about it passing. But obviously by that point you've thought about it. This is an insight into my mind which isn't as enlightened as the Buddha's mind quite yet, but almost.
After a while we were in Tena, where we went for food and found a place to stay. Danny called his mum to say we would be there in the morning in Chonta Punta, but neither of them knew when the buses left so we ended up getting up really early and being at the 'bus station' (small dusty area where the local buses leave/arrive) at 5.30am the next day. The next bus was 6.30am. We went to findsome breakfast on the street - flat, round bready things full of cheese - kind of like an enclosed small pizza without tomatoes or any other toppings/fillings. This was served with a small really sugary coffee which I dipped my bread into. The sun was rising and gradually more people appeared and I watched the old couple whose stall it was, making the little pizzas, and I guess that's what they do day in day out just by the bus station. A small boy slept behind them on a dusty rug.
The bus to Chonta Punta went through little jungle villages with little wooden houses and horses/chickens/dogs etc. It reminded me so much of Belize - where we used to live in Cayo near Guatemala was just like this. I hadn't realised that we were living in jungle area there really. When you say jungle I guess the mental picture is of really thick jungle with monkeys swinging from trees and panthers prowling around, chasing away poisonous snakes, and parrots chirping and giant tarantulas making webs to trap you in. But there are roads and villages and people living their lives there, and in the villages there are schools and health centres and shops. The pace of life is extremely slow, probably because it is so hot. We got to Chonta Punta around 9am and went to see Danny's mum. She has a restaurant, called La Patrona. They chatted away, I understood nothing, so sat there smiling and watching them, and wishing I'd had more Spanish lessons before I left. Mind you, even if I had, I think it's a different level of fluency being able to follow a conversation that fast between family members, in the jungle where they probably use all sorts of words that are specific to the area. Danny offered me a beer, which I accepted after a bit of hesitation. So by 11am on Monday morning I was really drunk (it was a really big beer).
I'll leave you with that cliffhanger as I have to go find my Spanish lessons for the morning. I found a school to have some lessons for today and tomorrow, but have no idea what time the lessons start so I better get there soon.
Oh there was a small earthquake yesterday in northern Quito but nothing serious as far as I know - it was around 5 on the richter scale.
Adios xx
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