The road was long;
I saw many things.
The tourists have returned
And the rains have gone.
Road journal entry: Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
Ecuador. Bus from Puerto Lopez to Jipijapa and Guayaquil. I am sunburned and cannot write on the curves.
Before I left for my quite long trip, I was kicked out of the house of my host family. Or rather, they were kicked out of my program. You see, there was another girl coming to Cusco through a different volunteer organization and she did not have a place to stay. And since I was going to be gone for a month, they asked me if it would be possible to let her stay in my room. I said it was perfect. She would be here for almost exactly that month that I was gone. Trato hecho. But Tinku would have none of that. And so, when she arrived and the secret was out I had to move all of my things from my family’s house and into a closet at Centro Tinku. And when I returned, I was homeless for a couple of days which was a great experience that I will talk about later. My next endeavor of that sort will be a couple nights in prison.
The day we left, we spent the morning packing all of our things and getting our backpacks ready. After a hasty skype with Simone and a quick coffee with Daniel (the friend that would later meet us and be robbed), we bought ourselves a Cusqueña and raised our glasses to life and the open road. We got on the bus to Lima, the city of kings and the city where all of the high rollers, movie stars, politicians, and cats like to hang out. Our mothers were not there to worry about us and they could not call us to make sure that we were okay, but we were fine because Daniel was glad to fill that gap. He called us every five minutes to ask us where we were and what we were doing. And since we were sitting on a bus, the response was invariably, “We’re on a bus. We’re sitting. Stop calling us.”
Cruz del Sur is the bus company to go with if you are in for a long haul and you want your shit to be protected from the robbers and the various cases of busses rolling off of cliffs and things. They are air-conditioned, have comfortable and spacious seating, serve meals with coffee and tea, have in-flight movies, a flight attendant, and wireless freaking Internet. Now that is all awesome—and a little ridiculous, that Internet thing—but when we were about an hour down the road, the bus pulled over and stopped on the windy country road for a while. The stewardess told us that this delay was due to the tire that was broken and that the on-board mechanic was doing all he possibly could to fix it. They distracted us with a game of bingo but then realized that the tire could not be fixed and we could not make the rest of the 22 hours of the journey with one faulty tire. We waited around some more and then backtracked toward Cusco to meet a new bus halfway. We drove about 45 minutes in the wrong direction and realized that this trip would end up taking some 25 hours. But when we stepped out of that bus and got onto the other, the stars burned so bright that we could almost see little spots of light on our skin like the night was projecting down on us. We could have stayed there forever. Screw Ecuador, screw the beaches, screw the road and the hotels and the food and spiders and mountains! We had here some endless stars over a field of yellow flowers.
But the stewardess, also a little annoyed with the delay, hurried us back on and into our seats and we took off again. The road is very apologetic in South America, and every time the bus breaks down or another unexpectedly decides to kick the passengers off, get onto a ferry, and ride it across a river, the road tells you it’s sorry with stars. We drove on looking out the window at the stars and making our way through the curves up a mountain. There were little houses across the valley spread out along the mountainside with single lights that looked like stars beneath us. We were epic adventurers in a space ship traveling through the stars to unknown end.
LIMA, PERÚ
I thought I’d be clever and save some space in my pack by wearing my long pants and sweatshirt and anything large that would be hard to make fit. But that bus took us to the costal desert of Lima where the sun heats up the chicken farms on the outskirts and makes the smell seep into everything. And though the bus was air conditioned, the sun still came in through the windows and heated you up. After 25 hours in the bus, we arrived in Lima with circles under our eyes and hair so greasy that one could have fried picarrones. You all remember Jose from the last adventure, right? Well, he came to pick us up in his shiny SUV and take us to his ridiculous house. When I say “ridiculous” I mean that it was super fancy and complete with hot running water (something very rare in Peru), house employees, and a pool.
We hung out on sunset cliffs and ate sushi and sorbet. Movies and meetings gave way to swirling interludes, and then we ate mama’s good cooking. Something like three days passed, I am not sure for certain because time seemed to all melt together, and then we got onto a bus that would take us to Ecuador. And would you believe it, as luck or the Devil or both would have it the air conditioning exploded a half-hour into the 27-hour ride to the north. I should remind you that Ecuador is so named because it is right under the equator, and therefore stupid-hot. The windows did not open. And so it goes, we melted to the seats and tried staying cool by dying because breathing and pumping blood burned up way too much energy. Though it was a fairly large bus, we were only an unfortunate few: a group of Columbian ladies, a woman who hopped back and forth between Peru and Ecuador, a 100% Ecuadorian man, and ourselves, the German and the American. People began disrobing and sprawling their nearly naked selves over two or three seats. Thankfully the bus driver also lacked the air conditioning and stopped the bus at regular intervals to get water and air. A mother got out at one such stop and dumped an entire bottle of chilled water over her baby.
GUAYAQUIL, ECUADOR
When we arrived late the next day, we looked as if we’d just come out of the monsoons of the deep jungle, but really we were wicked sweaty. We were completely surprised to find that Guayaquil was the largest in the country. We thought it may have been a quaint little tourist town with banana plantations all along the river, but we were crazy wrong. We were going to meet our friend Megan there but since we'd arrived at 7:00 and she was leaving the city for Cusco at 7:30, we never met up and had no idea where to go. Solution: jump into a taxi and say "Good evening sir. To the center!" We found ourselves an americanly priced hotel (which is really expensive) and wandered down to the river Guayacas that runs through the city and is so huge that it looks like a lake that has places to go. We snacked on tasty kebabs on the boardwalk and watched little floating islands of riverweed amble down the current.
The Guayaquileños, or at least the ones in this boardwalk for hipsters, have a very strange tight-pants-pop style about them. Every man down there could have been queer with their flashy skin-tight jeans and fabulous looks through nighttime sunglasses. The night was alive and everyone was out. It must have been a weekend but I am sure that we were not sure of this. There was a chapel glowing atop a mountain in the distance and we made up our minds to follow the night streets there. We learned later that the streets of Guayaquil are supposedly dangerous but we saw nothing of this. Steffi and I followed a stairway winding through old buildings-made-bars and microscopic parks to the little courtyard of the church. A balcony made just for us looked out over the river so we went and sat, and with our feet dangling we watched the tropical night unfold beneath us in twinkling music. A boy with a basket of roses came over to us and said:
Would you like to buy a rose
on this night so special,
so perfect,
so beautiful and cool?
and on and on in his lyrical tongue trying to sell us a flower for a dollar. I told him that yes, I would buy a flower, not because I wanted the flower but because he was a poet. We talked for a while, asked for his name and then immediately forgot it, and he told us the history of Guayaquil, and then the Incan Empire, and then all of the Americas in his too-fast-to-understand Ecuadorian Spanish.
PUERTO LOPEZ, ECUADOR
Our goal on this trip was not to see all of the big cities of South America because big cities are big cities no matter where on the globe you are. We wanted the real Ecuador. So in the morning, we caught a bus to Puerto Lopez, a random beach town that we'd found on the pay-per-minute internet in the already expensive hotel. I got quite burned on one particular part of my arm that was hanging out of the window and enjoying the breeze for most of the ride there. But that was perfectly okay. The air was glorious and a man on the bus was playing a soft sweet guitar and singing into the wind of the road.
Within five minutes of our arrival to Puerto Lopez, everyone knew we were there. The town was so small that news traveled faster than the gulls. A little girl very stern and businesslike sold us a cheap room with a complimentary lizard and a window that overlooked the plaza, if it was big enough to be called that. The ocean called to us sweetly so we ran down to the beach and jumped in with our clothes on. We asked a dog to watch over our shoes that we'd left in the sand and he did so loyally. It was our first time in the Pacific Ocean of South America and the water was warm and gentle. We drifted there letting the waves crash over us and screaming and giggling like we were kids and not only was it our first time in that ocean, but our first time in any ocean and we were afraid of nothing. I ruined my watch again but it was either swim in the waves or worry about the time and—so it goes—I chose the briny sea.
We watched the sunset and some boys playing soccer at the edge of the ocean, and then walked through the sand to drink two cucarachas and a piña colada. We met a nice couple of street-vendors from Argentina with a cat that was so small it could have made its home in a hollowed orange. Its name was Chiquitita. Their driftwood, stone, and jungle seed jewelry was displayed in the street though now it was night, and we asked of their travels and they told us of a man who could give us a cheap tour of the islands. After making some plans to meet this fellow, we looked up at the stars and talked about the universe. Then swift came a shooting star that was bigger and brighter than any I’ve ever seen. It didn’t blaze across the sky, but rather drifted down into the ocean. We had time to yell and point at it before it went out, which is an exceedingly long time when talking of shooting stars. “Did you see that? That was pure magic” And it was pure magic.
I forget the name of the man that got us the tour for cheap, but we met him the next morning as the ships were going out and the sun was working on getting up. He peddled his bike over to us and said, “Hi, I’m sorry. There are no more spots on the tour. But we can get you another tour of a different island where you snorkel and fish and get to see the boobies.” We said okay. You should note that Puerto Lopez is very close to the Galapagos Islands and there are many pelicans, blue-footed boobies, and other strange sea birds to see. The other tour left a little later and so to waste some time and apologize for not getting the tickets to the other more popular tour, the man made us breakfast in his house. We waited on hammocks in the damp shade while he cut up some fruit and fried some egg. He made us juice of the noni, which is a strange fruit that looks like either a mysterious deep-sea creature or an internal organ of some mysterious deep-sea creature and which has a pungent taste of cold vomit.
We trotted down the dusty street to the beach where funny little whiskered snails fluffed out of the sand as the waves came to catch krill or something microscopic.
Pelicans are a very angry-looking species. They perch on their thrones of rock and glare at you down their long imposing beaks with menacing black eyes. They are great respectable seabirds, yes. But they are also winged night-terrors that can see into the darkest parts of your soul and make you want to shout to the world, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Oh my God, I’m sorry!” They sat on boats and shit on the decks looking down at us as if it were not the decks they were really after but our dreams. Our little turquoise boat skiffed across the waves bobbing Steffi and me, a French family, some Peruvian newlyweds, a guide and a little boy at the helm, taking all of us along to the not-quite-Galapagos island. I felt like I was in a movie, particularly The Life Aquatic, only I was completely real.
The blue-footed boobies were there clinging to rock walls with their sky-colored feet. And at no particularly specific spot in the ocean, the guide spun the dinghy around and cast out the anchor. Some sea turtles swam by as casual as pedestrians on a stroll.
We had hooked lines tied to boards and we cast out hoping to snag some creatures for food. Steffi caught a little fish with bright red fins but the others caught with better luck some big silver fish, an eel, and a puffer. The guide scratched the puffer’s belly to make it angry, or whatever type of emotion is behind inflating one’s self, and then threw it back. According to Diane Ackerman, a writer of books and things:
In Japan, chefs offer the flesh of the puffer fish, or fugu, which is highly poisonous unless prepared with exquisite care. The most distinguished chefs leave just enough of the poison in the flesh to make the diners’ lips tingle, so that they know how close they are coming to their mortality. Sometimes, of course, a diner comes too close and each year a certain number of fugu-lovers die in midmeal.
The little French girl with her ancient stuffed rabbit straight out of a WWII movie began to cry with seasickness. And though he did not want to admit it in front of his new wife, the honeymooning husband was feeling it too; I could tell. And so, we hoisted the anchor and carved through the breaking waves to the island, putting on old snorkeling gear and plopping off the side like boobies from cliffs. I had only my underwear to swim in but did not care one bit; the ocean makes you take your clothes off. I picked up snorkeling like bike riding or the English language, and from my first plunge I dipped and swirled in the brine like I’d done before in magical places like Maui and Alpena with Danny and Earl before so much life happened. There were little striped yellow fish nibbling creatures around the rocks, another blowfish that I pursued for a while, some big mysterious purple ones, and tiny blue picaflores that skittered around. I even saw some sea urchins.
Islands uninhabited are the best islands—uninhabited by humans, that is. This island we explored was populated only by scuttling colored crabs and great sea birds that loomed in the branches. I climbed the rocks a bit in nothing but my underwear while Steffi talked with the German guy who I forgot to mention and who was from her city just by chance. I sat down in the sand where the ocean meets the land and pretended I was driftwood, let the waves crash over me.
The guide called us in and we sadly headed back to mainland with our day’s catch in a cooler. We made ceviche in the doorway of some little shop and, as the day ended golden, we realized how badly we’d been burned. Ecuadorian ceviche is not like the Peruvian; it is more a cold soup with lemon, fish, and fried banana chips. And we wondered at this and why “Wiston Churchill” was misspelled on the curb of the sidewalk across the road. But we wondered at these things with as little movement as possible, carefully positioning our feet in the shade of leaves to avoid the dappled burning sun. I have never had a sunburn so severe and complete as that one beneath the Equator. It hurt to breathe and move and not move and not breathe, and it was everywhere because I was twirling and wave-washed most of the day just with the undies.
Steffi and I, avoiding the sunny side of the street, somehow broke into someone’s house because they had a sign for “coffee and books.” It was a kind of tree house with bookshelves, couches, and a small kitchen. We tried just making the coffee but then didn’t know where anything was or how to turn the stove on so we found the guy and had him make us espresso while we talked about climate change and things. I slept that night not with a blanket but with a wet towel and two bottles of lotion emptied across my skin.
CUENCA, ECUADOR
In the morning, we took a series of busses to Cuenca, a city whose name we’d found the day before while looking at maps of Ecuador in an Internet café. Through banana groves andmountains we went until we reached the city without a soul. Some English girls recommended us a hip hostel with café and modern decorations so we checked into the dormitory room and went down to have a coffee. Just then, an intimidatingly tall Australian woman entered in a flurry of very bad Spanish and very loud English. She somehow believed that if she took the vocabulary that she didn’t learn in her traveler’s dictionary and said it in very loud English, everyone would understand. However, volume is not a translator and I was able to glean from her strange mix of words that: 1) she’d been bitten by a dog while exploring some waterfalls earlier that day, 2) she had gone to a doctor down the street but 3) she needed someone to go with her and speak Spanish.
“Mean dog, he bite me on the leg. WATERFALL. I have to go to doctor. OWIE! I need person talk for TRANSLATE. RABIES! Help. Mean dog! BITE.”
“Stop talking like that and I will help you,” said I. She led me to the office she’d been to before, running through the halls and accosting poor janitors trying to ask them where is the doctor that was here before. She started into her “Mean dog, he bite me” speech but I stopped her and explained the situation to the clearly frightened man with a mop. He said that they had gone home for the day and then pointed to the sign where underneath the names “Dr. Cruz” or “Dr. Álvarez” was printed in large letters the word “abogado,” which means that they were lawyers. Suddenly, I felt great empathy for both the silly girl with the dog bite and for the bewildered lawyer into whose office a 6-foot-tall hysterical gringa had come screaming about mean dogs. I wondered how he would tell his wife about his day at work and how they would discuss the foreigners and their crazy misadventures. I told her the meaning of the word and her friend said, “Oops!” and they rushed off down the street waving madly at taxi cabs that would take them to the hospital.
I got Steffi out of the hostel and we ventured out for a nighttime walk through the old town. Cuenca is perched on rolling mountains at 8200 feet above the sea and was once the center of the Cañari people, a pre-Incan civilization, and was known as Guapondeleg, which translates to “land as big as heaven.” It was conquered by the Incas who were then conquered by the Spanish who thoroughly renamed it as the city of “Santa Ana de los cuatro ríos de Cuenca.” And now it is known for its beautiful European buildings and old-world cobbled streets.
The two of us wandered through the streetlights until we came upon a park with swing sets and merry-go-rounds looming silently in the dark. A runner passed and we sat on the swings. Another runner, and we swung. Another went by and we realized that the park was full of runners and aerobics instructors with their pupils exercising in the dead of night. It was very strange, their night work. It was as if in Cuenca there lived an all-powerful Huxleyish government under which all of the citizens woke up everyday, went to work, punched meaningless numbers into machines, went home, and then went to the dark park to do their one hour of government-mandated physical activity, but they didn’t know why they were doing any of it.
The next day, still uncomfortable in our own skins, we walked around the town like lobster robots trying our best not to agitate our burns. I felt as if I were not in Ecuador—or even South America for that matter—but Canada, or Europe or something of the sort. Though the architecture was very pretty, and the streets were lined with vendors of sweets and pastries, candles and flowers, there seemed to be something missing—some kind of spirit or soul. It was as if there were no joy in the city, or maybe these people went about their lives and raised children, who in turn grew up, got married, raised their own children and died, but they had no idea why. It gave you the unmistakable feeling that you were lost and incredibly alone. We could feel it buying cream puffs, and we could feel it talking to the copper jeweler who sold us tiny reliquaries to wear around our necks.
We made it our mission to liven the place up so we bought a pack of serpentinas (rolls of colored paper ribbon) and blew them all over the city, in the trees, down the streets and the river. We stretched a ribbon across a path that followed the stream to see what the people would do when they came to it. A woman walked up, her head bent solemn to the ground, and walked off the path to avoid the colored decoration. Another woman we encountered sitting riverside in a park peeling garlic. It seemed interesting that she be there; her house could not have been near as the street was lined with restaurants and shops. We asked her what she was doing and she said, “peeling garlic.” “For what?” we asked, still wondering why she’d come all the way down to the river to do it. “So I can plant it.”
But we carried on exploring and passed an impossibly old woman, just as much a part of the city as its marbled buildings, walking by at a snail’s pace. We followed graffiti through the art district to a satanic museum that featured bone chandeliers, crypts, fountains of blood, wall carvings of horrible ghouls and all manner of unspeakable things, and an authentic cockroach skuttling across the floor.
We walked into a coppersmith’s shop and talked to him for a while. The trade had been in his family for generations making tools and pots in the rule of the Spanish. And now in addition to such practical things, he works the metal into intricate hummingbird sculptures, helmets and shields of the dark lord of Sauron, miniature but still functioning beer brewing machines, and other auburn trinkets. He invited us to an opening of a local art gallery in which he was displaying some pieces and in the night we bought suspiros from a cantankerous pastry chef and attended. There was a band that played a lively tune and the old building it was in bustled with artists and their appreciators. But whenever there was a bar in the song that didn’t need the trumpet, or the saxophone, or whatever other instrument, the player would lower his tuba and stare blankly at the pages waiting patiently for the point in the song where he was needed again. There was no music or joy in their expression; porcelain figurines in a music box.
On our way into Santa Ana de los cuatro rios de Cuenca we passed a great wild foggy wilderness of staggering beauty and learned from some other tourists that it was the national park called Cajas. Literally in Spanish the name means “boxes” but I imagine it has some deeper meaning. Anyway, after the night in the art gallery, we took an early morning bus to the park and were left in the great mountain furrows to explore. Actually, I looked it up and it is a Quechua word that means “gateway to the snowy mountains.”
The air was novembercrisp and we wrapped our heads in elephant scarves and bundled in hoodies. We went out walking. There were all sorts of strange and sturdy plants with thick leaves and deep veins made to stand the windy heights like a hardy woman in fine fettle built for motherhood. And little streams of water seeped out of the cracks in the mountains, pooling and reflecting the cloudy sky in strange mystical geometries. We took a larger trail that lead around larger ponds and a waterfall to the top of a peak and back down again. We stopped every few steps to eat little German sugar cubes and take pictures of the landscape that captured nothing. Oh world, how frighteningly beautiful you are!
We reached the top of everything, looked out over the universe, and had a lunch of bread, tangerines, and little cookies, then meditated in the wind. There was a secret pond hidden way up in the ridges and folds, completely secluded from the rest of the world as if there had once been a volcano whose gaping mouth had drunk of the rain. We imagined we were birds and could fly over to that secret place of hidden wonders but in the end we were just as happy to be the people we were on the top of the mountain where many people had surely passed before. We slipped all the way down 1) because the other side was very steep, 2) there were many smooth grasses like slick fur, and 3) because the places that didn’t have grass were all muddy. And at the bottom of everything, we jumped across bogs and went up to a lodge to sip hot cocoa and eat bread.
There, over sandwiches and steaming chocolate, we met two Belgians who told us of a secret paradise hidden in the folds of southern Ecuador—Zaruma. And from there we hitched a ride with two Columbians who took us to the station, giving us strange orange fruits to eat, and just like that we were on our way to Zaruma.
