Aug 2007

From Mindo we travelled back to Quito and from there to Papallacta (2 hours) for a day at the best thermal springs in Ecuador. The weather was terrible and the road likewise. We got to Papallacta ok and checked in at Hostal Coturpa - we were the only guests and were attended to by two extremely young boys the whole time we were there. The whole thing felt a bit strange, really, including being served breakfast by two male teenagers!! It rained all the time and the whole place was covered in mist. Given that the purpose of the trip was the hot springs, the horrible weather was of no consequence, or maybe even of better consequence. We went to the balneario at around 5 pm and stayed in the hot waters under the rain for a good 2-3 hours. The next day we took a bus back to Quito and from there straight to Otavalo, Ecuador's mecca for artesania and indigenous culture.

Otavalo is a pleasant town and the people here seem extremely polite and happy. They are always smiling at you and are very friendly. This is the region where the local indigenous population have managed to become a majority also in the economic sense. They tend to be less poor than in other parts of the country and retain a very strong and proud sense of their traditions. Most men have waist-long plaited hair and the women generally wear a traditional costume in their daily lives.

Yesterday we took a tour with the Runa Tupari agency - it is a community-run agency which also places tourists with local families for both tourism and cultural exchange. We booked a day tour with them to see the local artisans as well as a quick visit to the laguna Cuicocha and also a night with a family for Saturday night after the market. Otavalo is the home of the biggest market in South America, and this is tomorrow!! By coincidence there is also a festival starting tonight called Yamor, so we are about to have a very busy 24 hours...
Anyways! The tour yesterday was good. Our guide, David, came to meet us at the hotel in splendid white shirt and long black plaited hair - only 20 years old! He took us around to visit a family producing totora reed mats, a musical instruments workshop and a wool-processing and poncho family business. Then we went to Cotacachi for a splendid lunch and finally to see the Cuicocha lake. Cotacachi is a small town famous for its leather goods and I couldn´t resist buying a nice posh leather handbag for the whole of $16!!

Today we went with the hostel´s tour offer up to the Laguna Mojanda, which is a volcanic lake set at 3,600 m. From there we walked up to the Fuya Fuya mountain to 4,200 meters. We got lucky with the weather and it was a great day hike. We are staying at the Hostal Rincon del Viajero and it is very good. They have a lovely terrace and a pool table and last night we stayed up till 1 in the morning playing - Gregory still wins.

So now we are ready for the mass party....

Tour with Runa Tupari and David

Cotocachi

Laguna Cuicocha

Fuya Fuya from the bottom

Going up...

And Laguna Mojanda from the top of Fuya Fuya

On Saturday we left for Mindo, only 2.5 hours north of Quito. We wanted to go to the thermal springs of Papallacta, but we realised in time that going on Saturday night was not going to be such a good idea... so we opted for Mindo instead. This was indeed a good move - Mindo is very small and comes alive at the weekend, so we were able to enjoy both the life and the quiter times in this very nice place.

Mindo is set at some 1,200 + m above see level, which means it is quite hot and full of bird and butterfly life. There are a few rivers around and it is a good place to do river tubing, which we did! One of the main activities here is to go down the rivers with regattas, which are huge inner tubes of tractors tied together in 5 or 7 in which one sits and floats in groups. We had a small one put together for the two of us and we went down the small river for about 30 minutes. Really good!!
Other things that we did in Mindo were to visit the mariposario, which turned out to be a really tiny corner with a bunch of butterflies. The real attraction there were the tiny frogs they kept incarcerated in a glass cage, they were absolutely beautiful!!
On one evening we went to a frog concert, which is basically a small night excursion organised at this place called Mariposas de colores just 500m up the road from Mindo. It is a hotel with cabañas set around a beautiful tiny lake where the owner has planted some insect-attracting water plants where lots of tiny frogs live. At about 6:30 PM the frogs come alive and start making a lot of noise, as a sort of collective singing event. So you go there and they give you a glass of wine and you sit down waiting for the frogs to start singing, then you walk down with torches to look at them sitting on the plants. Later you walk down a trail to look at fireflies, fluorescent bacteria on wood and huge cockroaches (10-12 cm, living on trees). Really a nice concenrt! They have a little boat with table on the lake, we liked it so much that we went back the next day to have coffee in it.

On the bus from Quito we befriended this lady from Belgium who had lived in Mindo for 18 years or so, Rosa. She lives in Mindo with her brother, looking after rescued wild animals - birds, monkeys, the most gorgeous squirrel we have ever seen and other animals. The first day we went to see them on their farm and ended up spending a good few hours looking around and talking about stuff. They have no website and no email address and never used a computer! It will be hard to keep in touch or send them info but we promised we were going to look up what is out there in terms of animal associations to help them a little - they said they are spending some $1,000+ a month to keep the animals and nobody knows about it!! Well, the environmental police do, since they send them animals to keep, and apparently they send them lots of Australian parakeets which they confiscate when they shouldn't because they haven't got a clue about what they are doing!!

The people in Mindo are incredibly friendly, by the end of our 2 days there we knew enough people to have to greet someone every time we walked somewhere. Really friendly but, above all, genuine. We kept going back to a place that did fresh fruit juices. The owner there the first time asked us where we were from and then looked at both of us and said solemnly: 'welcome both of you!'. Well it might sound cheesy or whatever but this guy was really genuine and friendly and we really felt welcome, and not just because of our money. So then when he gave us the bill and undercharged us, we dutifully advised him of his error (we could not possibly pay even less than the already ridiculous prices he had). From that point on we were the most welcome ever and became great friends...lol!!!

In Mindo we stayed first at a very small place called Hostal Tranquilidad, a family house all in wood. For the next two nights we moved round the corner to the Jardin de los pajaros, another family run place, bigger and with swimmingpool and absolutely clean. Recommended if anyone goes that way, and real cheap at $24 per double with bath and breakfast.

Mindo toucan at the Belgian's animal refuge

At the mariposario

This frog was about 1.2 cm long

Mindo is also a humming bird paradise

Mariposas de colores hotel

Coffee on the pond

Our hostel's swimming-pool

River tubing

We met in Baños last Saturday and spent three nights there. Baños has a micro-climate which sees lots of rain throughout June, July and August, and we got no exception. So we didn't do much, we just hung around town, checked out every single souvenir shop (there are tons), ate and slept a lot. On Tuesday we went to Quilotoa, which is a remote indigenous village in the highlands with a beautiful laguna in a volcano crater. The place is at 3,900 m and is incredibly COLD. They tell you it is cold, but you don't expect it that bad. The village - 120 people - is tiny and very basic. We first ended up in Hostal Chosita, which is super basic. Earth floor, 'dormitory only', bathroom outside and no running water, pretty daunting! We put our bags down, thinking that the poor family needed the money. Then out of curiosity we walked into the hostel next door (Princesa Loa) and it was such a difference!! Concrete floor, own bedroom, bathroom INSIDE the building, and clean!! Well, the bedding hadn't been changed in a while, but miles more clean than the Chosita place. When I checked the bed at Chosita I found an ancient piece of mouldy bread under the pillow!!!! The problem is that there is no water in Quilotoa, so as a result they tend to wash things very little. Food hygiene is also a concern. They all charge $8 for bed and half board, regardless of the comfort. The Cabañas Quilotoa, which have running water and I think change their bedding with every guest, charge the same! Anyways, we felt good to stay at the Princesa Loa because this is a community-owned hostel and so the whole community benefits. A bit weird because in a village of 20 houses or so, about 6 or 7 offer accomodation, so we are not sure about the role of this community-owned place, but whatever! The lake and the views are really worth the trip and the cold, though staying in the village is a bit of an experience. There are also very few buses connecting the villages, so we decided to give up our plan for a clockwise circuit of the area and go back the same way we came. We manage to self-invite ourselves to join a group of bikers on a tour from Quito and went back to Latacunga in a jeep at a very slow pace following the bikers, which gave us the opportunity 1) to spare ourselves a squashed journey in the bus 2) take lots of pictures of the beautiful mountain scenery. We then spent the night in Latacunga and booked a tour to the famous Saquisili' Thursday market and Cotopaxi volcano.

Both the market and the Cotopaxi were excellent. The market is famous particularly for the animal trading that take place, which is not something that one sees every day. The local indigenas bring their cows, pigs, lamas, sheep, chickens, guinea pigs, cats and rabbits for sale. There are different areas, one for the animals, one for the pets, one for the fruit, one for the artesania, one for clothes, etc.
We went with a couple from Slovenia, two really young people who turned out to be very nice company, Katerina and Peter. They wanted to go to the south side of Cotopaxi, while we wanted to go to the north. The agency messed up and put us together for the tour but we wanted different things... In the end we went to the north part, the one we wanted, and I think that by the end of the day we were all very pleased we did, because the trip was really nice. Cotopaxi is really easy to trek: it's a peak of 5,800 m and you can get to 5,000 without even a walking stick! The jeep takes you up to 4,500 m, from there you walk for 45 minutes up to the refuge at 4,800 and then from there you can go higher. I think we went to about 5,000, then the slope was too sandy to continue, and I guess the air too thin!! People can go up to the crater with crampons in two days. It was sunny and we had a great day.

We are now in Quito, we have spent the day sorting out our bus to Caracas for the 9th of September - 58 hours on the bus! - as well as a trip to Cuyabeno, in the Amazon jungle, for September 3rd.
Quito seems quite pleasant and very easy to navigate. We could not resist the artesania and ended up buying a beautiful huge alpaca rug. In the shop we met 3 Indian girls who are studying dentistry at Kings College (my college!) and we ended up walking together to an artesania fair. There, not happy to have bought the biggest rug ever, we bought even more stuff, it is just impossible to resist! Ecuador has some fabulous handicrafts to offer at really ridiculous prices, it is crazy.

Tomorrow we are off to Papallacta for thermal springs and then Mindo and Otavalo for river tubing and more handicrafts shopping...

Quilotoa crater right hand side...

Quilotoa crater left hand side...!

The Quilotoa surroundings

Saquisili' market

Volcan Cotopaxi

The yellow box mid-way up the slope is the refuge, at 4,500 m

Did not quite manage to touch the glacier...

Yesterday I left the Cabañas Nanambiki and Campo Cocha. Was I sorry to leave? I am not sure. I had been counting down the days, but to say that I could not wait to leave would not be correct to say either. Mixed feelings... I guess the water, the bat and the insects were not helping to make me feel 100% comfortable there?

In the last few days more tourists came to stay in the cabañas, and this time they could speak English, so it got quite pleasant. Then on Thursday Elise got there - the girl we shared the flat with back in Cuenca. This round, however, most of the people fell sick. I mean, food sick. I cannot understand why none of the first lot did, and the second lot all without fail, at different intervals. Maybe a change in the water? I got sick also, right on the day when I came into Tena, but in my case it was the food back in the community at the cookery class. The French girls, Leila and Tania, got the ladies to prepare 3 different types of raw salad in a kitchen with no running water!!! Not such a brilliant idea, thinking about it. All three of us and none of the locals got sick for a day - the locals thought it was a 'bad breeze' because of Claudio's death. Better not to argue there... So I spent the day between the Internet and the toilet, only to come back home from Tena in a pitiful state on the bus for 1.5 hours and find that we had no water!! Not only no electricity, no water either. And 9 new people had just arrived!!! Of course nobody was worried or panicky, apart from me and my diarrhea state, and just like a miracle electricity came back that same night along with water - which needs a pump to come up from the river, so no wonder it ran out with no current for 2 days....

The tarantula's predicament suffered a bad turn. One day I was folding the washed sheets when I saw a small spider looking like a baby tarantula. I showed it to Ariosto, Cesar's brother-in-law, and he confirmed that indeed it was a baby tarantula!!! I must say that it looked really cute, just like a miniature tarantula but with beige hairy legs and a darker body. Really quite cute. From there we inferred that there must be a nest, so we set out looking for it near the laundry lines and surely there we saw it, hidden under the roof. This was a crucial moment for the tarantula, because it meant that it was not going to get away the next time it showed up - there were obviously far too many around and they needed to be killed. So they did... this is how you kill a tarantula: you throw petrol on it and set it alight! A really tragic death, I felt quite sorry for the tarantula, like with the snake dying in the alcohol, but nothing I could do about either of them.

On the last day I was there a group of 4 young French guys arrived. Somewhere between 22 and 25. They started looking around, examining the snake jars, then at dinner they announced they wanted to do a 2-day hike in the jungle, camping out. I thought to myself, bloody hell this lot are really couragous, these young people have no fear! So after dinner Cesar, just to make it more interesting for them, pulled out a couple of animals from one of the jars: a small black venomous salamander and a huge insect, which he described as extremely dangerous and with no remedy if bitten. Everybody was there taking pictures when the tarantula appeared, which was then set alight. At this point the most torrential rain I have ever seen in my life started - all around us were falling buckets of water and flowing water. Insects started crawling in from everywhere, different spiders, beetles, and a conga. The conga is a 4 cm black ant that bites and is quite horrible. When you see one, you make sure you kill it before it stings you. Then we all went to bed. The next morning, the 4 guys announced that they were leaving immediately!!!! That really make me smile. So much for brave young men!!!

The other interesting event of this last week was the chocolate making. Cesar and Ariosto showed us how you make chocolate from raw cocoa! The first step is to let the cocoa beans dry in the sun for a few days. Then you roast them in a pan in the fire, like with chestnuts. Just like with chestnuts, you then peel the skin off. At this point you grind the beans together with a cup or two of sugar a couple of times, till the mass starts to melt. You then place the paste in a leaf or aluminium and leave it to harden, and there's your chocolate bar!

Other than that, not much more happening. I gave my last two lessons and they went well, I had 8 people each time and it seemed to me that they did learn the few things I taught them, which is nice.

Saturday was good-bye time and a nice bus ride to Baños to meet Gregory.

Kids activity group at the cabañas

Eleli, Celina, Maite and Narcisa

Cocoa fruit and dried cocoa beans

Ariosto roasting the beans

Grinding the beans

Elicia making real chocolate bars...

These are called mayones and are palm giant maggots that the locals eat...notably a lot worse than cuy!!! They fry them and it seems that they taste like fat, say mayonnaise...I did not manage to try them so cannot say.

Nicely fried mayon with rice dish

Gregory and I decided that it made sense for me to go and visit the community of indigenas where Anne and Luis had volunteered (friends we met in Bolivia, who also volunteered in Bolivia helping out the children of Cerro Rico) - find myself something to do, speak Spanish and leave Gregory in peace to do his much homework.

So I left on Sunday August 5th, stopping in Banos overnight to avoid arriving in Tena at night. When I got to Tena on Monday, I discovered that a road blockade had been called, right on the way to my community!! Argh!! So I checked into the German-run Hostal LimonCocha and waited. On Tuesday the strike was still on. On Wednesday again strike still on, but this time only the bus company was striking: the roads were passable. At the hostel a friend of the owners offered a lift to a couple who were also stuck there like me, so I took the opportunity and, jumping into the conversation with my pathetic German, I got a lift too. By the time we got to destination the sentences were coming out in German, which I found quite amazing. Maybe there is hope...
When I got there, Cesar, my contact and head of the community, was fortunately in the village – his house and cabañas are 30 mins away from the centre of the village. So we got introduced, met the vice-president of the community Alberto and two nice French girls who are also volunteering there, Maite and Carina. We all then went back to the cabañas for dinner to discuss the volunteering business. Cesar announced that I was going to give English lessons. Erm. I thought we said that I would be helping the kids with their holiday homework...but what the heck! I said it was fine. The other volunteering projects were going to be 1) to decide what services can be offered to tourists, decide the prices and then produce a leaflet and promote 2) the cookery classes project, which would be run by another couple of French girls currently staying in the community also. It was a nice evening, within a few hours we had put together the PR project, the English course and cookery class for the community. Not bad! At one point during the evening Carina says to Maite – completely cool – watch out! A tarantula coming towards you! So Maite very casually gets up and calls Cesar, who chases the spider away. The tarantula came out the second night also, and again it got chased off. All you need to do with tarantulas is to blow on them and they will run away in the direction of where you are blowing. Good to know...isn't it?!
The first night I dreamt of a lot of snakes and calling Cesar to chase them away, but I managed to sleep. The second night I worked out where all the crap around the room comes from: resident bats which shit everywhere at night. Cesar said he was going to sort it out and indeed in the evening he prepared his darts and, using the cerbotane, got the one bat that was there. He got him at first attempt but the bat flew away with two darts in his body. Cesar thinks he will live – they usually break the wooden darts off and carry on. The next night was bat-free but the one after they came back and got really smart - they only appear really late when everybody is already in bed and not a chance that they will get up to shoot the bats.
On day 2, after coming back from my first lesson, I find a moving snake in a jar. Cesar had just got him and put it in alcohol, apparently a fatal snake that cannot be left alive if found. It was on a palm leaf only 2 meters away from the cabaña!!!! That I really didn’t like, a bit of bad luck and bye bye life. The community is fairly isolated, there is no signal and nobody in the community has a car!!! If something really bad happens and you need immediate help, you are dead. So I keep myself to the road, look at where I put my feet and try to survive as best as I can....

This place is a real culture shock. They live in really basic conditions – if it wasn’t for Cesar, who provides a lot of contribution with his cabañas, these people would be fairly lost. Cesar is really trying to help and share, he attracts volunteers to help out and bring some cash into the community, he provides opportunities to earn for tour guides and catering, and he pays a percentage of dollars into the community fund for every tourist who stays at his place. I am not sure if others contribute to this fund? I am sure he does a lot of other things as well, I think he is really generous. The community does not really seem to progress much though, they clearly lack some solid education and professional solid direction. When Cesar started out building the cabañas, they were all in there until he run out of money, then nobody wanted to help anymore. Now that he has built it all on his own, they want to build cabañas! But of course they have no money, and in the meantime he has got it all. Very difficult. If anybody with community development experience is out there looking for a place where to practice, please come here!! They need a general development project manager, an English teacher as well as people with plumbing and electrical skills. I have no idea if family houses have toilets with running water. I am staying at the cabañas in Cesar’s house and that works fine, but the school toilet, for example, does not seem to have water that runs. And people do not have showers, they bathe in the river.
The river... this is the crazy part. The community depends entirely from the river. The river that provides the water to bathe, to wash clothes, and the drinking water!!! The people here drink the river water. We are not talking about a clean, spring water river, we are talking about a muddy, dirty river. And I am drinking the same water!!!! The difference is that the water I drink is disinfected with purifying tablets, but still, it is the same water that flows downstream from Tena, passing lots of other towns before us. So we are all drinking the water where people and dogs bathe; the water where thousands of families wash their clothes; the water where the motorised canoes drive all day; the water where people rinse their dead chickens, dirty shoes, and so on. And the miracle is that they all live and I have not even got sick yet!!! Simply quite amazing.

The English classes have worked out quite well so far - I have only managed to give 4. The students are all fairly young, ranging from 13 to 36, and most have no idea. They are meant to have studied English at school but it is virtually non-existent. The first day I had a group of 13, it was good. We decided to offer 2 sessions so that everybody could attend, so the second day 20 people turned up for the first one and 10 for the second. The first one was pretty chaotic, new people again, toddlers running around (I had to chase them out), a real mess. The second session, however, was really decent and so I regained hope. When they asked me if I could do a session for 20 young children, though, I said I was not qualified. And it is true! Can anybody honestly see me with 20 screaming children under my supervision??? No way. So I managed to get out of this one and say no. Session 3 was on Sunday and most people were more interested in the football, but I still managed to get 7 people together and we had a fine class. Even a chicken turned up, crossed the class and went outside. Obviously it was also more interested in the football...
Today and tomorrow the classes have been cancelled for mourning, as one of my students has died. He was only 22 years old, he was electrocuted. On Sunday the electricity went. It usually happens when people attach themselves directly to the cables so not to pay for the energy. When they do, sometimes the electricity breaks and one of the fuses jumps. Because nobody really wants to involve the electrical company, which otherwise discovers the illegal handling, without mentioning that it takes 1.5 hours to town with nobody with transport and the usual 2-5 days before anybody turns up to fix, the community usually sorts out the fuse by themselves. This round the boys were drunk and so they did the job with carelessness - he climbed up and lifted the fuse with his bare hands, instead of keeping the due distance and using a cane pole covered with plastic. So he was dead on the spot and everybody run away in terror. So it is a bit of a disaster at the moment. No electricity, nobody dares to go and touch it, a very young dead in the community who will be buried tomorrow nearby his house (no cemetery), and the situation in the cabañas is also not that pink: Cesar was expecting 16 people and so bought a lot of meat. While, after a week, the local bus strike has finally ended, a national strike has now been called, so the tourists could not make it to Tena. Because we have no electricity, all the meat has gone off and also we have no idea when they will arrive... A bit messy really.

So today I have taken the opportunity to come into town and catch up with Internet stuff. In three days, buses allowing, Gregory and I will meet in Baños.

The cabañas

Dead snakes collection to welcome the tourists

Cesar preparing the darts for the bat

Campo Cocha centre

Maite & kids drawing with achiote, a natural colorant

Last Saturday I joined one of the groups of tourists and did the canoe tour. It was a really long and interesting day: we went to see the museum of the traps (how the Kichwas catch wild animals); Amazoonico, a Swiss-run animal refuge here nearby; a ceramic workshop and a butterfly farm. Here are some pics:

Ceramic workshop: everything made with river mud and natural colours and resins

Capybara

Tigrillo

Chorongo monkeys

Butterfly farm: caterpillar of the big blue butterfly

Cabinet full of different types of pupas, all nicely tidy...

And the finished product!

Last night we had a dinner party with Esperanza and her family, since I am leaving this Sunday to go to the Ecuadorian jungle to volunteer for a couple of weeks. Life in Cuenca is obviously too comfortable for me... Gregory is staying and continuing with Spanish classes, he's already at the preterite tense!! We will meet up in Baños, 8 hours north of here, practically mid-way between where i am going and where Cuenca is. I'm going to this place:
www.amazanga.org

So we organised a farewell dinner with Esperanza. She bought a live chicken at the market and made a chicken soup. I never went to see the live chicken or the killing, what I got to see was a unusual chicken for my standards, a chicken full of growing eggs in the belly like I used to see when I was about 5 yrs old. I have never seen eggs in chickens again until yesterday. It makes you wonder about the chickens we eat in Europe, all perfectly clean and disinfected, like the rest of the food. Here you go to the market and they sell EVERY single part of the animals, and they are not all the same either, they are actually real animals with all their different bits and pieces, feathers, insides, teeth, hairy legs...in fact you do not feel like eating the animals at all!!!

Anyways. The chicken soup was nice. The meat was actually a lot harder than we expected, maybe it was an old hen?? Or maybe real roaming chickens are as hard as rocks because they actually have muscles in their bodies? I had the leg and it was dark meat and bloody hard.

We offered to buy the second dish from a restaurant, the Ecuadorian delicacy par excellence: cuy, that is, Guinea pig. City Ecuadorians do not cook this animals themselves, because the preparation is somewhat lengthy and also the guinea pigs must be killed in a very specific way. They should not be scared before death or adrenaline will go everywhere and then they taste bad - well, not that they taste good in the first place... So they need to be killed quickly and then one eye is taken out so that they bleed from it... yaKKKK! Then of course you need to remove the fur, and only then you can roast them. So we went for ready cuy and took it home. Well, it was pretty disgusting, Gregory had some but I just could not touch it. It smellt and tasted of the same: a wild, musty acred taste of wild something between a very wild rabbit and a pig. The worst was when Esperanza took the head and stripped it completely clean!!!! I wanted to vomit!! I was so disgusted that I could not even eat the potatatos it came with. Well, I guess it all comes down to habit, the kids loved it too and were eating it like you eat chicken. And I saw Wilson grabbing the head at one point, but then he put it down, maybe he wanted to leave the best bit for Esperanza?? Gregory had the cheek to say to me that I am just the same with prawns, I too like to strip the head and I say it is the best part... Like tiger prawns and cuys are the same thing!

So here are some pics for everybody's enjoyment:

The real chicken with its eggs

Chopped up cuy in sight

Roasted cuy looking at you

YAKK!