Border Thoughts

Last Saturday night I sat in my hotel bed trying to digest my new guide book. I felt suddenly ambivalent. The guide book was about Peru, and I felt all the confidence I had gained traveling solo through Ecuador slipping as I tried to swallow a new map. Weeks ago a wonderfully impulsive friend bought a ticket to arrive in Lima this Sunday, now pleasantly obligating me to go south. But suddenly I didn´t feel so sure I wanted to leave the comfort I had acheived in Ecuador.

That night I went out and followed the smoke of fireworks and the strange rising stars in the sky to a nearby plaza where the people of Cuenca were celebrating the city´s foundation with an annual weekend party. I ate grilled chicken feet--the talons are a little softer than bones, but crunchier than french fries--and watched an Ecuadorian scene that I felt properly exhibited its cultural festival attitudes. Children lit bottle rockets at the edges of the plaza, peering over the explosives, while families watched and laughed. Women roasted all sorts of different unintelligble meats, teenagers exhibited half-practiced indigenous dances in the center, crowds strode by a makeshift body of a saint in a glass case to say their prayers and cross their catholic hearts. Somewhere a family was lighting small hot air balloons, balls of flame that lifted up into the sky like rising stars (this is what I had seen earlier) and disappeared somewhere over the rooves of old colonial churches and apartments. A man stood under the costume of a paper-mache goat, kind of like the Chinese dragon in parades, dancing wildly, adorned with twirling firecrackers that sometimes went astray and fired into the shrieking crowd.

I woke up the next morning, still unsure about where I wanted to go. Should I linger in Cuenca, or another place in Ecuador? Or should I head straight for the border to cross? Usually I let impulse or augury guide me, but both were absent. When choosing between staying or going, I usually give weight to the latter, so I packed my bags, headed in the direction of the border, but first taking a detour to Zaruma. Before leaving for Ecuador, my friend and spanish tutor, who studied the mining culture in Ecuador ten years ago, gave me three letters to deliver to families he lived with. It has offered me an occassional purpose, a sort of mysterious mission, and I find that I very much enjoy trying to track down a family without any information except their name and that of the town they live. It is even more exciting to magically show up at someone´s house who doesn´t know you, bearing a mysterious letter and an old welcomed connection. Zaruma was the last of my letters, and I delivered it with some difficulty and great reward to a wonderfully pleasant and modest family. (click here for a borrowed picture of the city)

In most cities, there is a feeling of always being grounded. If not skyscrapers, the sky itself seems like a distant thing, but in Zaruma, I was inclined to reach up and touch it. It is not as high as Quito, but it feels like its sits on a throne above a kingdom of ranges, being isolated and improbably perched near the summit of a mountain in the midst of infinite alpines on every side. It likely would have never existed if the Spaniards had not been so intent on finding El Dorado, South America´s elusively fabled city of gold. When Felipe II was presented with a 3.5 pound ball of pure gold from the mines of Zaruma, the prosperous future of the town was guaranteed, and for almost 500 years it has seen prospectors and rugged, and sometimes abused, workers fill the streets and hillsides. Walking through the thin, stone-cobbled streets of Zaruma, the city in the sky (la ciudad en el cielo), between old wooden apartments, has been the most relaxing of all my activities. The air is like a bath and to breath and walk through it is be constantly cleansed in its tranquility. In the afternoon I sat on a rail, drinking a Budweiser, my first American beer in eight weeks, and looked at across the mountain range, which rised and fell like the folds of a long green dress, and I no longer felt worry. Not about Peru or returning to the States or anything. After Zaruma, I felt like I could cross Siberia if I had to. But I don´t. I only have to go to another new place, just across the border, with new beaches and mountains, stories and people, meandering south for three more weeks of joy-wandering.

I have lots more to say and tell you, but I am going to exercise restraint. I´ll see you in Peru next, paz y abrazos.

Traveler´s Metaphorical Proverb
6. If you can, walk it.