Ups and Downs the Coast

When I left the jungle last Thursday I had no intention of stopping in Baños (above). But there is an adventurous alure that draws foreigners and Europens alike to the mountain resort town. It is a current tourist highlight for anyone´s trip in Ecuador, but I have seen black and white pictures of its past, families dining over waterfalls, young men scaling ropes across canyons, and I think it has long been a place of cavalier spirit. I suppoose that living under an active volcano, in a valley of rushing cascades, invigorates something relaxed but renegade in its people. I felt the same. After four days of biking, bathing in volcanic hot springs, hiking, and on the last day, rafting (my new favorite sport), I felt replenished and ready for something new. For the sake of my mother I did not jump off the 100 meter bridge on my way out of town (from now on, I will either not jump off tall things or not tell anyone, to spare my family worry), but instead took the first bus out to a small provincial capital, Guaranda, where I was the only white guy in town, again people laughing at my elementary Spanish.

That night I took a bottle of coke and cheap Ecuatorian whiskey--predictably terrible--and sat in the plaza under the watchful eyes of Simon Bolivar, reading Les Miserables on a bench under lamp and moonlight. I relished the opportunity to sit alone in public, without Europeans or smog, able to read my book and eat local french fries (the best I´ve had yet, served with three kinds of sauce, onions, and fried chicken on top). Above me the moon provided fantastic light. When lonely sometimes, I have found consolation in the idea that the sun shines on everybody, in all parts of the world, but I think the same cannot be said of its always-changing counterpart. In Guaranda, the moon possessed a halo, a nocturnal rainbow filtered through the clouds, and I realized how seldomly I had bothered to look up at night in Ecuador. But I also realized that I have become boring at night. Eating fries and reading my book, falling asleep early, hanging out with mild Europeans and rarely going to bars or testing my salsa skills. But there is a remedy for this. Easter and the Coast. This week is Semana Santa, and for any Catholic country this is reason enough to party, and the best parties are supposed to by the sandy Pacific stretches.

This morning I left Guaranda early and took the first bus to Guayaquil, the largest city in the country and a southern start to its longer coast. I am starting to log a lot of hours on the bus, so much that I feel more comfortable, more enchanted on a bus through the mountains than I do settling into a hostal. For me, the bus window is like a movie screen, a view of the moving pictures of the nation´s remarkable geography and a glimpse into the domestic lives of rural roadside families. For the first half of my trip, I watched the window movie, and its theme has been mountainous. Going to Guayaquil, I closed my eyes (on the buses, because of its bumpiness, reading or writing is impossible, so there are only two things to do, sleep or look out the window), and when I awoke the road was flat and the mountains absent. Instead I saw men wading waist high through vast fields of tall grass, waving machetes, impoverished houses on stilts, unpainted and weathered, with rotten bridges leading to more men lying in hammocks on porches, a wet and beautiful sort of poverty.

Soon, the bus pulled into a three story station in Guayaquil, and when I stepped off I discovered a giant mall inside, complete with sweepstakes cars and a McDonald´s. Not far away, a friend had told me, I could find a TGI Friday´s. I admit, the temptation of American culinary comfort was tempting, and to make it more develish, I saw beautiful women my age that for once were not yet mothers (god-blessed cathlolic country). I went to a ticket counter, simply to inquire about a place I wanted to visit, and before I knew it, I was on a bus to a different place I had never heard of (Jipijapa, prononced Hippie-hoppa) .

By evening, I was taking my first ever swim in the Pacific Ocean in the small wild town of Puerto Lopez, equipped with dirt roads, lizards, rats, turtles, motorized rigshaws, and enough long-haired men and women selling crafts to shame the Haight-Ashbury. The beach was thin and beautiful, symmetrically bracketed on its north and south ends by gorgeously carved rock bluffs, offering a strange and exotic sense of isolation. The distant horizon seemend infinite, but the immediate horizon was filled with boats and birds fishing between the waves. The water, warm and wonderful.

I hate to interrupt the parade of good sentiments, but I have to post here three bad things, goddamnit, because every person needs a chance to vent, and since I travel alone, you will have to hear my complaints:
1. Mosquitos. They are bad here, my room is harvesting thirty or more of them, and after dousing my body in Deet, they are relegated to biting my face.
2. Littering. Ecuadorians litter. A lot. For someone who spent the last two years forcefully encouraging the children I worked with to pick up their trash (if you kick it, you pick it, I´d say), it is painful to watch kids and parents alike throw the remains of their lunch out bus windows when a trash bag is next to them. If it weren´t for the trash lining the beach, I might have mistaken Puerto Lopez for heaven. People throw garbage into the perfect Pacific as if venerating its waters by offering it sacrficial trash. I hate it.
3. I lost my camera. I took three buses for eight hours today and after taking pictures of the stilted marshland communities, I left it on my seat. Some lucky bastard is showing it to his/her family now. I have lost them before, in a taxicab in Israel, in a mountain creek in the Smokies, which is why I bought one used before traveling again and saved my pictures whenever possible. But from now on, unless I buy an unreasonably expensive (because of the import taxes) camera, you will have to bear with my descriptions as images. If I could take only more picture to show you, it would be of the beach here, which I hear is less beautiful than its neighbors ¡Que Pena!

And finally, after finishing my Ecuatorian whisky the other night, I dreamed of a fun, new segment for the blog. It´s a gimmick, sure, but I am going to perform it anyways. For someone who reads, travels, and writes, metaphors are irresistable. So with each blog from now on, I will offer a metaphoror or few, without any purport (it´s for you to find the meaning). They might not seem like metahpors, perhaps proverbs instead, or just literal advice, but I swear there are a few levels if you are inclined to read them. So, to finish here, finally, I present to you (because we are all travelers, even if only within our own streets, unless you haven´t left that goddamn couch or computer chair today)....

The Traveler´s Proverbial Metaphors
1. Kiss the Locals (even if only the cheeks, but more is better)
2. Eat Food You Don´t Understand
3. Don´t drink the water, but don´t be afraid to swim in it

on the good road....paz y abrazos

Halfway Home Highlights

I have been in Ecuador for almost six weeks now; I have five remaining. Here are some photographic highlights and notes from the first half of my trip. On another note, I have been posting long narratives once a week, but I am going to try and offer some quick hit ditties more often, so stay posted.



1. Streetfood- I spent the first several weeks in lustful fear of streetfood. I had heard many secondhand stories of people coming back from Ecuador with worms, parasites, or whatever things inhabit your innards, after experimenting with food on the street. So I didn´t eat it. Instead I would hang out in the parks, standing in the plumes of smoke from the grills where various meats on sticks called to me. After awhile, I wondered if it wasn´t worth the risk. My firt venture was a fried platano (and still my favorite to eat, like a fried banana, split and stuffed with cheese, pictured above), and then I started to eat the fried fish, the pork, the... well, whatever looked like it was delicious and freshly hot (I have a set of intuitive rules about what to eat so as to avoid trouble, the number one rule, don´t eat food that is sitting in a bowl on top of raw meat). Both my wallet and stomach are rejoicing at my new commitment.



2. Monkeys. When I arrived in Misahuali, a small jungle town east of Tena, there were monkeys running around the town, on the beach, in the plaza, on the rooftops. They aren´t natural, but someone brought them here some time ago, maybe thinking it would be a good idea to attract tourists. My first impulse was to say, "Hey, look at the monkeys. They are so goddamned cute." But since I was just by myself, sipping beer on a sidewalk like usual, I just said, Whoa. Monkeys always seem so cool. But they are not. By the second day, the monkeys were not cool or cute, but simply little obnoxious thieves (ladroncitas). I was sitting in the shade of the plaza reading my book when a monkey stole my water bottle. I admit, I didn´t stop him, I wanted to see what would happen and if it could even open the bottle. A moment later four of them stood in a circle pouring the water on their heads and then smashing the bottle, frustrated it wouldn´t naturally refill. Then they all turned to me, searching my pockets and bookbags and lifting up my shirt. I had to beat them away with my bookbag. It was no longer, "Hey, look at the cool monkeys!" Instead, it was "Get your grubby little primative fingers out of my underwear!"

Tena sunset

3. The Jungle. Maybe a third of Ecuador is jungle, but I have to be honest, you have to possess an endurably cheeful disposition to enjoy such a place. It is hot, humid, and filled with people trying to court your wallet and take you on canoes to strange places for prices that are extravagant for a country where lunch costs a dollar fifty. I spent most of my time in Tena sitting in my underwear in the my air-conditioned hostal. In Misahuali, I was at first charmed, being able to walk barefoot, swim in the rivers, and play with the monkeys, but as the beach flies began to bite, the monkeys began to steal, and the locals were only friendly when advertising, I decided I had enough. I felt somewhat cowardly, fleeing the jungle, and taking the first bus of out of Tena, not caring where I went. By a stroke of good chance, the bus passed through Baños, where I decided to get off and revisit. I spent my first night soaking in murky hot spring pools under the gleam of a waterfall above. Sometimes you follow your heart, sometimes you follow your wallet, and sometimes you just flee. I´m in Baños by some combination of all of the above.



4. Family. The best choice I have made was to live with a family in Quito. They are warm, humorous, and always looking out for me. Most importantly, I have a home to retreat to when needed.

Plaza de San Francisco, Quito

5. Spanish. My Spanish is still terrible, and I only understand a fraction of what anyone says, but it seems to be enough to get by and get going (As dominican-american writer, Junot Diaz, once said, "a portion of what anyone says is unintelligible, anyways). Jokes are easy ways to communicate, since Ecuatorians are ready to laugh at anything, and even a failed attempt at humor is usually enough for a belly laugh. But the best ways to practice Spanish are flirting and drinking. After several beers, it is easy to think that spanish is easy, and you talk without thinking, without regards for vanity or bad grammar. Flirting, well, it inspires creativity. I don´t flirt because I want to, I flirt to practice the language. It´s practical, really.



6. Back in Baños. For now, I have returned to the resort town of Baños, where gringos drive go-carts wildly in the one-way streets, the locals lounge in the hot springs, and the volcano Tungurahua looms over everyone´s fun, ready to ruin it in a hot flash. I don´t know where I´m going next. Impulsively taking buses to new places seems to be my favorite activity now (On the bus, el controlodar, the man who collects the money always asks, where are you going, and I love nothing more than saying, No sé todovía, I don´t know yet), so as always, I´ll keep you posted. Paz, abrazos, Sam.

Mindo, My Sweetheart

Cascada Nambillo

Me, jumping

On Sunday night I sat at a small picnic table in a rustic plaza eating fried tilapia and watching children play in the street. While the oldest girl hit the younger boys with a long stick, the smallest boy picked up a large rock and tried to pulverize his friends. Everyone scattered wildly and then put the rock back in the infant's hands and kept playing. As a child, my mother never let us throw rocks at each other, at least not while she was looking, and for a moment, I wanted to be a child in Ecuador, not just Ecuador, but Mindo, the small community tucked into the cleavage of Paccha Mama´s (Quechua for Mother Earth) Andean cloud rainforest, where I was staying.

On this trip, I was learning that there is a balance between persistence and submitting to the signs presented, that for any traveler a mixture of circumstance and choice dictates every destination, and it is up to that traveler to decide on the proportions of each, and to swallow the product with cheer.

I had left that morning expecting to volunteer at the Mindo Cloud Forest Foundation and was dropped off by a dirt road in Milpe, a town so small that even its neighbors hadn´t heard of it. There was only a young boy at the foundation to receive me, so as I waited for the expected family to return, I explored the woods, and never have I walked the trails of a forest so bustling with life. I heard the likes of high-frequency power drills, low bull-horns, strong mechanical hummings, all backed up by prettier alto-soloist notes twittering above, but these sounds did not belong to tools or machines, but birds. The cloud forests possess awesome color, rich gradients of greens and intermittent flourishes of brilliance in the forms of purple orchids adorned with pink leaves, tropical hummingbirds, and other flora and colors inexpressible in any medium except by the image itself. Glimpses of distant ranges were sluiced by clouds, offering an illusion of floating mountain tops. I found a waterfall, washed my face in it and returned to find the foundation´s lodges empty. The dormitories were hot, full of insects, and the only company was the birds, so I read the signs, and I left to sleep in neighboring Mindo for the night. But while eating my fried fish and watching the blue clouds roll over the jungle town, the children playing in the street, I decided I would not persist to retun to Milpe, but instead stay at exactly where I was.

The community of Mindo contains about 3,000 people, most of them living off dirt roads scattered in the jungle. There is only one central street, a few hundred feet long, and four policemen, one or two on duty at a time, although they are mostly unnecessary, since there is no crime. It is supposed to be a tourist town, and the community has economically thrived on offering ziplining, tubing, waterfall climbing, and other activities similar to other tourist mountain towns in Ecuador, but on a Monday afternoon, I counted more chickens on the streets than tourists.

On Monday I discovered that not only did I not have money, but the town´s only ATM did not accept my card. At the time, I disregareded the possible augury, and instead decided on persistence, and over the next seven hours I took several buses and trucks in search of a working ATM, before finally returning to Quito for fifteen minutes to get some cash. I returned that night confident I had chosen the right mixture, especially as I bumped into a wonderful group of people from Uruguay, Ecuador, Germany, and providentially, my hometown Richmond, Virginia and neighboring Charlottesville. That week we tubed through river rapids and ziplined over jungle canyons (a very strange way to examine a forest, especially when upside down), which was only scary because children strap you into the zipline and sometimes forget to lock the beaners on your harness, but in Ecuador everything is as relatively dangerous as it is relatively safe, so you just have to trust the people and watch other people go first. (I don´t mean to worry anybody, I only mean to say that safety is relative, especially with extreme outdoor activities).

On Wednesday several of us had various ailments so we skipped the adrenaline-hungry activity of the day and visited the public health clinic instead. I had thirty or forty itcing, bubbly bug bites I had accrued in the small mountain rural town of Lumbisi a few days earlier, from playing in a dirty river and hanging out in the gardens (no more shorts for me). The doctor looked at me legs worriedly, and said I had an infection, but that nothing was living inside. I took my prescriptions to the pharmacy and nursed my health for the day.

On Thursday a storm had knocked out the power in town, and so I sat at a sidewalk café drinking beer and watching the rain form small tributaries in the crooked stones of the main street. I had come to know several locals in town, and the night before I lightly kissed a local girl on a bridge over the river. I was comfortable there, and while watching the rain fall, I realized I could probably stay in Mindo forever. If I had to characterize the few places I have been so far in Ecuador, I would say that Quito is a petty thug, Baños a friendly badass, and Mindo, my sweetheart. And like any guy with commitment issues, I thought maybe I should leave her early, before I grew too fond. I went back to my room, and I considered the rain, the infections on my legs, smelled the strange funk of my wet clothes by my bed—I considered that maybe kissing the locals was a bad idea, and not very sustainable—I read the signs, retired my persisitence, and I packed my bags to leave the next day.

Before leaving, though, I wanted to see Mindo´s cascadas (waterfalls), and so early the next morning I took a truck and then a tarrabita (like a gondola) across the valley. On the tarrabita, a young teenager hung off the back, unafraid of the 100 meter (or more) drop below. Children are always hanging off the back of moving things in Ecuador, and it´s usually their parents driving.
I saw six waterfalls that day, but even waterfalls lose their novelty after awhile. While playing in the fifth one, I realized how much more fun it would be have someone else to play with. There are benefits and drawbacks to traveling alone. I threw a few rocks around, got bored, and left. But the sixth waterfall redeemed everything. In the river before the final waterfall, there was a shaky wooden ladder supported by two vertical pipes and I climbed up, but noone was there. But I did not give up. I waited and climbed up again later when I saw a group of people, and someone let me in at the iron door at the top. Cascada Nambillo is not tall but moderately violent and its rapids rush impressively through the shallow canyon below. On a ledge before the falls there is a white strip of carpet and a guide with a rope and harness, waiting for anyone willing to jump. As always I asked, “Es seguro?” (is it safe?) and as always, he answered, “Claro” (sure). I asked again. He threw some grass down into the rapids, 40 feet below and pointed—that was where I needed to jump. There are few things more fun in Ecuador than jumping off tall things, and this was no different. I jumped, swallowed my stomach, and was in turn swallowed by the rapids. The water was resplendently cold, and the rapids strong enough that I needed a few tugs from my friend above to get out. I climbed back up, jumped again, then I gathered my things and left the forest, saying goodbye to the friends I had made that week on the main street before getting back on the bus to Quito, dirty, wet, and content.

Comida (Food), Part 1

Cuy


Fried pig´s head in a Quito market

I was going to wait and post about food in one great flourish near the end but I had an eating experience this week that I didn´t want to wait to share.

Before coming to Ecuador, I was dabbling in vegeterianism (I was, I guess, what Michael Pollan calls a flexitarian), but I decided that it would be too difficult to execute here. Often if you tell an Ecuadorian (or a Kentuckian) that you are vegetarian, they will politely ask, well, how about chicken? Besides, I´m not very principled.

The fruits in Ecuador are the jewels of the eating experience. They have fruits we don´t have in the States (guanabana, taxo, tomaté de arbol, and other names I cannot spell correctly), and they are often prepared as juice (jugo) or with milk (batido). They taste like smoothies, but better, because the fruit is simply better here.

Generally, most meals come with soup, potatoes, chicken or beef, more potatoes, and well, rice and sometimes more potatoes. My favorite eating is consistently the empanada, which is kind of like a samosa, but can be prepared with a fried crust of corn or platano (a kind of banada, de verde), with whatever meat or cheese you want inside.

But beyond fruit and strange variations of prepared corn, most of the exciting eating opportunities are carnivorous. My trials include meat from a pig´s head (la cabeza de choncho) over boiled corn kernels, soup made of lamb´s stomach (yuagarlocro), soup flavored with chicken feet (sopa con las patas de pollo), and cooked lamb´s blood in salad (ensalada con sangre de oveja).

On Wednesday, though, a generous and hospitable local family (Ecuadorians are iconically hospitable) took me to Otavalo, a town famous for its indigenous market crafts, and then north to Atuntaqui, a small farming town famous for its cuy, or better known to us as the annoying American pet, guinea pig. Cuy is considered a delicacy in other countries, like Japan and Germany, who are importing the meat from Ecuador, although I don´t know why, they are easy enough to grow and kill and cook without South American help. But in Ecuador, cuy has been a common meat for some time, and often in the past, it was the easiest meat for a poor rural family to cultivate and feed their family with. It is not common in most restaurants today, but it is always available if you search for it. In Atuntaqui, it is the cornerstone item of each restaurant´s menu. I ordered the animal expecting a part of it, but instead they served the whole little beast, splayed along its belly to fan out the rest, so that it appeared like a fried flying squirrel, still smiling at me on the plate. All the parts were there, even the teeth, and it reminded me of high school biology class when we dissected frogs, except that you get to eat it, too. The best part was probably the liver, fried and placed to the side, which tasted similar to eggplant. The meat itself was white, soft, and lean. It had more meat than I expected, and when I couldn´t finish it, Tito, the father I was traveling with, declared, "Y el ganador es... el cuy!" (The winner is the cuy!) We raised its severed claws in triumph, but then I thought about this, and decided I was the winner, and I bit off its face. It is good to eat meat guiltlessly again.

More on more food later in the trip. Tomorrow I leave for Mindo, a cloud rainforest in the mountains. I don´t know how long I will be there, or when I´ll be able to post next, but until then, buen provecho!

Some edible spanish for you readers (the genders might or might not be right):
Aguacade - avacado
verduras - vegetables
frutas - fruits
Choncho - pork
Fritada - fried pork
marisco - seafood
canquil - popcorn
bistec - steak
cuy (coo-ey) - guinea pig
most importantly, cerveza - beer

Shoeshopping in Quito

Hey, I wrote my first non-blog essay about my first week here. It is too long to post here, but if you are interested in reading about the troubles of shoeshopping in Ecuador and other stuff, comment below and I will email it to you. More blogs coming soon, paz, sam

Abajo y Arriba en el Sol y Basilica

Yesterday I woke up to the unroyal rumbling of more buses and a pack of dogs fighting and howling, and I realized I needed to leave Quito soon. I have made arrangements to travel to the big city´s antithesis, Mindo, a small town situated in a very large cloudy rainforest in the mountains, where I will be volunteering for the eco-friendly, tropical bird-loving Mindo Cloud Forest Foundation. I left the house feeling better about my next move and met with two friends, who have been making their way steadily from Mexico towards Bolivia, and had stopped in Quito briefly before leaving again. I celebrated the well-spirited, sunny afternoon like I used to in college, by drinking early, and a half bottle of Zhumir later I was climbing the belfry of the Basilica, my second favorite church in the world (next only to Milan´s Duomo), that took one hundred years to build. In most churches in Europe, there are more passageways, stairwells, and windows locked or roped off than are accessible. But in the Basilica you can climb almost anywhere, and even change the time on the big clocks if you are both knowledgeable and inclined. Like most wonderful opportunities, it will stay this way until somebody breaks something important, or gets fatally hurt and ruins it. We climbed safely up and walked across the top of the church on a shaky wooden bridge, and soon I was meditating in the open air of one tower and then drinking coffee and cognac in another. It felt good to be with familiar friends again, acting loosely in the cathedral sunshine.

Later that night I found out I was rejected by Teach For America, a job I feel very sure that I was overqualified for. I´m used to women doling out my rejection, but this is the first time a job or school has turned me down, and I can´t help but feel a bit stung.

I woke up hours later very sober, again hearing the chorus of street dogs fighting to certain death or submission, and I had my first ¨What the hell are you doing in South America" moment. It struck me that I´m on another hemisphere without financial prospects, spending the little money I actually have. I thought I had a plan of return, but now I really don´t, and this is both liberating and slightly frightening. I have planned this trip with the idea that I don´t know where I´m going, and I guess I can now extend the metaphor beyond the trip itself. I have a feeling I am not alone in this regard. For now, I´ll uphold my Panglossian disposition and maintain that the best of all possibilities always happens, because its the only way it happens, and I´ll move forward spiritedly to the mountain rainforests of Mindo in another few days.

In another, non-sequiturial note: have you ever wondered where all the Sacagawea dollars went? Well, they all went to Ecuador. The economy here has been US dollarized for almost a decade now, and while they often print their own coins, they use our forgotten gold dollar very commonly.

Lastly, I have updated some of the older blogs with pictures. Check them out, and never be afraid to comment, even if it is something small. It is good fuel for me to keep writing. Paz.

Poema de Quito

I just want to say thank you to everyone reading and commenting. It means a lot to me that you all are interested enough to tag along, I hope you´re enjoying it, keep the comments and suggestions coming, much love.

I have now been in Ecuador for three weeks. I have eight weeks left. I have finally finished my spanish classes, and I am now equipped with the language level of a nine year old (I tried to read a book for 11 year olds, but it was very difficult), which is not great, but enough to get around and understand half the people I talk to half of the time. I have a lot of notes I want to share about Quito, but I don´t want to exhaust you or abuse too much blog space, so I have consolidated everything into a list/poem of images. Quito is in many ways, the same as other big cities, but it has its differences, and these are images that struck me as singular or different. Vamos;

Volcanoes and dogs, airplanes brushing bluffs, Christ enmeshed in walls of gold, tin rooves and crumbling stone sprinkling sides of mountains, dogs fighting on rooftop ledges, humping in the park, couples tucked away under eucalyptus shade, stand up from Itchimbia and see the city, condors hidden in Pichincha, but always flying in my dreams, a river meadow, its slopes above filled with corn and tilted tinned houses, pigs rolling in the yards, cows grazing under the noise of the buses above, but dimmed by the small rush of the brown dirty river, houses pink, houses blue, houses yellow, houses colorless and weathered, rich and poor, new and old, always construction, shadows of colonial Spain, plumes of aromatic smoke, guinea pig and corn roasting over coal, hot cinnamon liquor in styrofoam cups, the city´s 150 foot winged virgin watching the north, her aluminum back to the south, an active volcano standing taller yet, 60,000 students in one place, el controlador whistling gordita, gordita, a young girl on a dirt path smiles at me hello, trailed by three stray dogs, and I know I finally found a place without gringos, full families tending stores, the kids tend the register while the mother steps out, affectionate fathers, babies wrapped in blankets, slung across the shoulders of indigenous women who forever look handsome in their colored dress despite age or shape, viejos playing volleyball in truck lots, cypresses standing tall in the parks, cut at odd sides, buses that rarely stop, just slow down, a small fire in the tire shop, boiled chicken feet, fried pig face, racks of fruits forever new to me, the sun cool but strong, buses and taxis always about to run you over, fumes that turn your boogers black, not much police, but alway security, the Monte Carlo fronted by guards unsure how to wear their shotguns, mountan forests that echo and creak, like doors opening and closing around you, the natives always ready to take down the president, men affectionate with other men but still machisimo, holding each other´s stomachs while they talk, teenage couples holding hands, kissing on the corners, young mothers, children, always children, on the buses, in the stores, on the backs of mothers and laps of fathers, and never pushed at a distance in carriages.

For me these images are very vivid, but do any of them strike you? Or make you think of something or somewhere else?

Bungee-jumping in the Valley of Volcanoes

This past weekend I had the treasured opportunity of leaving metropolitan Quito and visiting Baños, a small tourist town nestled like an egg in a valley of mountains, where the high ranges first start to transform into the jungles to the east.

It was there I finally felt I was living the liberated dream as a group of us rode bicycles through the volcano valleys past waterfalls, white rivers, and gorging canyons. In Baños, like all of Ecuador, there are many possibilities. On the way to a waterfall, I took the unique opportunity to jump off a bridge. I wore a bungee chord, of course, but despite this safety feature, I was instinctively scared. There is something very unnatural about jumping off high bridges, and as I stood on the rail looking down at the rocky river a few hundred feet below, I wondered if I wasn´t three-quarters crazy. But when the two assisting men yelled, "uno, dos, tres, salte! Salte!” I stopped thinking and jumped. All fear falls below you once you snap at the bottom and float freely above the rocks.

From there we rode bikes to the small town of Rio Verde, where most houses appeared without electricity, and the vegetation immediately changed to more tropical greens. We left our bikes and descended to Pailon del Diablo (picture above), a waterfall more than 80 meters high. Water generally inoculates tranquility in me, but standing under the head of the Devil of Pailon, I was respectfully astonished by the violence of its waters.

To return, we rode in the back of a truck, fulfilling a juvenile fantasy of mine that has always produced envy when I see the locals traveling so carefree-ly, hanging off the back and sides of pick-ups and other vehicles. It was a wonderful way to feel the valley blow by and witness our earlier journey in rapid regression.

Like Quito, Baños is a town guarded by volcanoes. In Quito, Pichincha overlooks the city with certain authority, but it does not exhibit much menace. But in Baños, if unobscured by clouds or the smaller mountains below it, Tungurahua looms over the town like a true bad-ass, impermissively erupting with grand flatulence, hawking fire or billowing ash on whatever poor town the wind delivers it to.

The indigenous translation (Quechua) of Tungurahua means “throat of fire.” On Sunday, I saw it erupt, (picture above) as I hiked through the rural farming village of Runtún in the mountains below, its ash floating wayward like a smashed feather pillow.. Nature here is a whole different kind of freak.