Impressions of Ecuador

Chronicles of Ecuador, 9/9/09 (an auspicious date for transformation) to 11/15/09.

Otavalo: 9/11 - 9/13

For a country named after the equator that passes through her, Ecuador can be cold - her altitude, apparently, to blame. It is coldest in the morning. Here in Otavalo, the morning chill seems to seep into my shirt and stay in it, below the fabric, inescapable.

Otavalo is just as I left it a year and a half ago. The same streetfood sellers are at the same street corners. Today, Saturday, Market-Day day, rows of umbrellas cast the same shadows on the streets. Perros callejeros swifty walk in designated directions and I imagine them as impatient shoppers. Glazed shopowner eyes still scan the gringos. Deep, musky aromas of oil and potatoes, colorful bars on gates announce, "We are not in the United States anymore."

I'm happy.

I'm leading a LEAPNow trip to Ecuador and Peru, with 7 students - 3 boys and 4 girls - ages 18 to 19. A great group, a challenging and inspiring itinerary, a hilarious co-leader (Cara). What's different is we are doing movement (yoga sequences with names such as 'Crow on the Moon' and 'Dragon Rolls Over') and meditation every morning; and we are reading "Seat of the Soul" and having weekly discussions about its chapters.

I have no camera. I apologize.

The Amazon: 9/14 - 9/18

We traveled to the Amazonia, by the river Puni, where we enjoyed living with no electricity, running water or bathrooms, sleeping in a communal cabin with Jeremy the tarantula menacingly perched overhead, hanging in hammocks or reading beneath mosquito nets. We bathed in the river (and avoided the boa), worked hard in the morning and had cultural activities in the afternoon such as making chocolate, a jungle trek, jewelry making, sifting for gold and a ritual shamanic healing.

The Amazon is a poet's dream. It's almost too easy! The river that runs muddy after rainfall... the humid, pollutant-free air....

A stick bug longer than a finger with bursts of red knots, elevated in the air by thin, long legs.
A hairy tarantula that, we’re told, jumps great distances and stings with its fangs - and has paid us a visit in our communal cabin. “She’s vicious” we hear.
Leaf-cutter ants that have microscopic ants on their backs.
Cobra ants with huge pinchers.
Giant morph butterflies that our guide firmly states cross oceans in their life spans.
“Why is there a cockroach convention over here,” interjects Cara, staring out from the inside of her mosquito netting at night; “there’s three of them hanging out over my head.”
By the time we are told, “Don’t swim too deep in the rio at night - for the boa,” we head out for our night swim in defiance, becoming one with, or perhaps merely becoming desensitized to, the new ritual of co-habitation with species other than that of the cat-dog-hamster-rabbit-goldfish variety.

Night swimming: We laugh, talk about 2012, try on Austrian accents, laugh some more. The trees on either side of the river amplify, rather than screen, the sounds of the Amazon. The frogs are content to incessantly repeat a one-note symphony. A loud, shrill soprano part played by crickets comes from above, below, seemingly everywhere at once. The night is loud and piercing, never-ending and immense.

Our experiences with the host community are less idyllic. Alcohol saturates the breath of most of the men we are introduced to. Work is hard, the expectations high, the 15-foot bamboo trunks heavy, the trip through the river with a costal of rocks and dirt slung over our backs slippery. We spend time in our cabin at every moment we have off, to recharge, unaware that our door is closed and the figurative message that sends. The shaman, who is also the president of the community, is drunk and passed out before our good-bye party can begin, so it does not. People eat our left-overs.

Laura, our contact, is the steam-engine, the cars and the caboose of the operation. She cooks us our meals - to the most extent, alone. She works with us in the mornings, despite thorns in her boot or the danger of falling trees, carries water from the pozo to boil for us to drink, sweeps the cabin and makes our beds. What fuels her is unknown. The woman is a force of nature, as much as is our natural environs. She is the incarnate spirit of the energy of the Amazon.

Baños: 9/19 - 9/21

Baños is known for its hot springs, its full name, Municipio de Baños de las aguas milagrosas, or Township of Baths of Miracle Waters. Ailments and life situations have been said to have been cured here. Water heated by the volcano is mixed with cool water to get to a 'palatable' 100-to-118 degrees.

After spending a week in the Amazon, the idea of Baños has become for our students the castle-in-the-clouds, the Camelot of Ecuadorian civilization. Minutes after rolling in and trying some sweet sickly-green cane juice, we walk past English letters upon blown-up images of gringos enjoying outdoor activities,
over well-lit pedestrian sidewalks,
through an open and tended parque central,
near hippie painted restaurants with English-language menu’s featuring such exotic dishes as pad thai, nachos supreme and chai tea, and - count them - zero Ecuadorians eating inside,
under swinging levanderia announcements, beckoning 2- or 3- hour laundry service;
by the time we have reach our hostel, our students have sighed inwardly. Baños is Spanish for “creature comforts.” Nevermind that it really means "baths" or "bathrooms" - they haven't had one for a while.

My bike ride:
Trucks and busses roared in agony close enough to make us feel small, vulnerable and endangered. Sprawling trees line both sides of the road, corpulent hills heave like breasts. Small blue signs appear suddenly after conspicuous long absences, to tell us we had arrived to a destination, or to tell us which way to go. This defined the 22 km guideless bike ride that Sarah and I made downhill from Baños. (The rest of the group chose massages or horseback riding.)

At one point a tunnel swallowed us whole. The air immediately dropped in temperature and the cold moist dampness felt like we had biked into an abyss. Suddenly I was scared - no cars coming from either side, but we would be invisible if they drove without lights, and they to us. The walls, ground and ceiling disappeared into the darkness. The cold air got colder and my fear and sense of survival pushed me out of the belly of the Tunnel of Death. We stopped immediately outside the tunnel.
“That was so scary!” we both cried. We looked back. A bus had just entered the tunnel and was pummeling its way through, speeding out with a roar.

We visited several waterfalls on our bike ride on our ruta de las cascadas. The last one, el Pailon del diablo, or the Face of the Devil, was a superb exemplar. A small grieta al cielo, crack to the sky, led to a stone pavilion under the waterfall's tumbling tongue, where we got wet in turns. Mist carried the devil's words to innocent ears. That the devil's duplicity is delivered through persuasive beauty could not be denied.

Next up: Cuenca: 9/21 - 10/2