SOS!!
The
Wow
factor
I last wrote only a couple of days ago when we
were at Hacienda Cusin in northern Ecuador. While I may have been a bit
ambivalent about the place, it was really very pretty, especially if you're
looking for a quiet romantic getaway and you're not too concerned about price or
value. As Zoe has now written, from Cusin Otto took us to Otavalo, where one of
Ecuador's most famous Indian markets is held each Saturday. Happily, it was as
colourful and exotic as you'd wish. The little chess set that we bought (we
caved in and paid $9) pitches imperial Spaniards against the indigenous peoples;
I think the idea is that the Spaniards play first. After we'd made our
purchases Otto led us to an ugly building at the side of the square; both
commercial and residential units opened off an uneven staircase that led us to a
roof terrace, where we had more of the delicious fruit juices that we've enjoyed
in Ecuador, sitting at a table with an excellent high view over the market.
Otto is of the opinion that the "Indians" who work the market stalls are much
richer than they appear, and they certainly hide their wealth quite well: while
the traditional dress that they wear is smarter than that of the campesinos, and
they look perhaps bigger and healthier (if not necessarily fitter), they eat
food that you might stay clear of yourself and don't seem to take a keen
interest in dentistry.
On the way back from Otavalo we swang by the town of Quincha, which is a less obvious draw for tourists. While it was Saturday and not Sunday, there was a lot of activity around the large wedding-cake church at the top of the square. The church was in session but plenty of people milled around and sauntered in and out of it. A number of wizened beggars sat on the steps with twisted bodies and cartoon-grade gnarled faces. Apparently people walk the 100 km or so here from Quito and Latacunga to propitiate the Virgin. At the other end of the square a woman was drumming up a crowd with the lure of a box of snakes whose skins were partially shed.
Her message wasn't crystal clear but it included the gnomic observation that, "God blessed the snake with a tongue but no ears". You'd be foolish to bet against her trying to sell something when the crowd reached its best size. Around the corner numerous stalls along the roadside offered 4" lengths of raw sugar cane and cubes of crude candy.
As Zoe has commented, we caught our plane by accident, turning up to the airport early only because the food and internet outlets we'd hoped to visit in Quito were either closed or too far from the hotel to draw us through the punishing thundery rain shower. We feel fond of Ecuador but it's the rural, poorer Ecuador that we like and not the $150/night scene, which doesn't offer the quality of the establishments in more advanced countries whose style and prices it emulates. For example, we visited several spots that glossily promoted themselves as wifi zones (including the Hotel Dann Carlton, the Hotel Quito, Quito airport and Guayacil airport and at not one of them - by their own admission, when challenged - did it actually work). At least my Powerbook tells me almost instantly if and why a HotSpot has gone cold. At Guayacil late last night there were quite a few business types wandering around with their Vaio's and their Dell's trying to stand nearer to the "Wi-Fi Access Here" sign while watching various earth, aerial and arrow bitmaps pulsing futilely across their screens promising connectivity that was never going to occur.
At the high tech end of things we had better expectations of Santiago, and today, finally and fittingly at Starbucks, we did find an operative wifi zone. While I was chatting to one of the Starbucks girls her brother, who happened to be sitting on the table next to Paula and the girls, spotted and stopped someone trying to steal Paula's bag. Paula had noticed several people looking at the mac and thinks that it was a criminal magnet. Tellingly, the chairs were the same as their blonde wood equivalents in Starbucks everywhere but with the addition of built in straps for you to tie up your bags while you try to relax with your latte.
It's way too early for us to form any impression of Santiago - let alone Chile - but we have quickly formed a view of the place we're staying: HELP!!
It's cool that it's allegedly the highest residence in the City and that we actually do need to deploy the low ratio setting on our 4x4 to make it up here. Getting our vehicle was less straightforward than you might think, given that we had booked a specific car way in advance and pre-paid for all available options. Even so, after landing at 4:30 am and waiting for the Alamo desk to open at 6:30 it took the full attention of three staff 50 minutes (that's 2.5 labour hours) to clear the paperwork. You'd that think that they might have made this slicker since it seems to be all that they do every day.
We don't help ourselves, of course, by not speaking Spanish. We started off with the best intentions, packing two different Spanish language courses in the restricted luggage with which we left England. But this was one project that's gone nowhere (yet) and on the way in to Chile I took the more realistic decision to buy the Lonely Planet Latin American Spanish phrasebook. This may be a more pragmatic way to learn a language anyway: what's the point of being able to conjugate irregular verbs correctly when you can't ask for the bill? I've discovered that I love the standardised vignettes of tourist behaviour implied by LP's sequence of phrases. I'd thought that I was buying a glossary of phrase atoms but as well as this there are unexpected molecules of interactivity (patterned by metonymy in Lacan's sense). I wont be distracted by citing examples but if you have one of these phrasebooks you'll see what I mean.
So we arrived at the place we've rented following a night of little sleep and after taking an unforeseen amount of time interpreting the joke instructions to get here (we finally capped the potentially unlimited journey time by paying a taxi driver to lead the way, and he needed extensive radio assistance). We wanted nothing other than warmth, comfort and a few small touches of luxury. What we got was unseasonably cold weather - rain and dense cloud - and a house with no fire or heater of any kind, no daytime electricity (it's "solar"), no fridge, no light in the bathroom, none of the promised water in the pool (though the weather currently makes a mockery of that), no bedding in place and only poor bedding available, unfinished paving outside, shoddy fixtures and fittings, and cockroaches in the food cupboard. (Post Script: Heidi was right when she wrote about how chilly it is here. Last night was freezing. Even in my technical down-filled Rab sleeping bag I was only just warm enough.)
Rationally we can't complain too much because the place is so cheap: it's actually costing us less than the month's hire of our (warmer and more comfortable) Nissan Pathfinder. And admittedly, in the evening the clouds have now cleared and we have a truly superb view across the twinkling night lights of the city. There is also a guy who looks after the place for the owner who smiles a lot and helps as best he can, and who brought us a bowl of tasty almonds in their husks. But that's all insufficient consolation. So now we're considering four alternatives:
(1) Tough it out and regard it as a sort of camping experience that will make us better people.
(2) As above, but invest in bedding and heating equipment to make it more palatable.
(3) Eat out a lot and treat ourselves to a couple of nights each week in a good hotel.
(4) Haul out.
Next weekend we decamp to a cattle ranch in Argentina for 5 days so that would be a natural time to decide, assuming we're hardy enough to hang on until then. Finally, here's where we want your help. If anyone has either enough "local" knowledge or access to the internet to propose a case (4) alternative we're interested in having some options to consider. Santiago is a natural base since it's a big city and we have to fly out of here at the end of the month but there's no reason why we couldn't spend time anywhere else round here - or between here and Cordoba in Argentina - instead. Since we've paid for this place already we don't want to spend too much on the escape plan.
A decent bottle of red and undying gratitude are the only rewards that we can promise for anyone who can come up with a mercy suggestion.
On the way back from Otavalo we swang by the town of Quincha, which is a less obvious draw for tourists. While it was Saturday and not Sunday, there was a lot of activity around the large wedding-cake church at the top of the square. The church was in session but plenty of people milled around and sauntered in and out of it. A number of wizened beggars sat on the steps with twisted bodies and cartoon-grade gnarled faces. Apparently people walk the 100 km or so here from Quito and Latacunga to propitiate the Virgin. At the other end of the square a woman was drumming up a crowd with the lure of a box of snakes whose skins were partially shed.
Her message wasn't crystal clear but it included the gnomic observation that, "God blessed the snake with a tongue but no ears". You'd be foolish to bet against her trying to sell something when the crowd reached its best size. Around the corner numerous stalls along the roadside offered 4" lengths of raw sugar cane and cubes of crude candy.
As Zoe has commented, we caught our plane by accident, turning up to the airport early only because the food and internet outlets we'd hoped to visit in Quito were either closed or too far from the hotel to draw us through the punishing thundery rain shower. We feel fond of Ecuador but it's the rural, poorer Ecuador that we like and not the $150/night scene, which doesn't offer the quality of the establishments in more advanced countries whose style and prices it emulates. For example, we visited several spots that glossily promoted themselves as wifi zones (including the Hotel Dann Carlton, the Hotel Quito, Quito airport and Guayacil airport and at not one of them - by their own admission, when challenged - did it actually work). At least my Powerbook tells me almost instantly if and why a HotSpot has gone cold. At Guayacil late last night there were quite a few business types wandering around with their Vaio's and their Dell's trying to stand nearer to the "Wi-Fi Access Here" sign while watching various earth, aerial and arrow bitmaps pulsing futilely across their screens promising connectivity that was never going to occur.
At the high tech end of things we had better expectations of Santiago, and today, finally and fittingly at Starbucks, we did find an operative wifi zone. While I was chatting to one of the Starbucks girls her brother, who happened to be sitting on the table next to Paula and the girls, spotted and stopped someone trying to steal Paula's bag. Paula had noticed several people looking at the mac and thinks that it was a criminal magnet. Tellingly, the chairs were the same as their blonde wood equivalents in Starbucks everywhere but with the addition of built in straps for you to tie up your bags while you try to relax with your latte.
It's way too early for us to form any impression of Santiago - let alone Chile - but we have quickly formed a view of the place we're staying: HELP!!
It's cool that it's allegedly the highest residence in the City and that we actually do need to deploy the low ratio setting on our 4x4 to make it up here. Getting our vehicle was less straightforward than you might think, given that we had booked a specific car way in advance and pre-paid for all available options. Even so, after landing at 4:30 am and waiting for the Alamo desk to open at 6:30 it took the full attention of three staff 50 minutes (that's 2.5 labour hours) to clear the paperwork. You'd that think that they might have made this slicker since it seems to be all that they do every day.
We don't help ourselves, of course, by not speaking Spanish. We started off with the best intentions, packing two different Spanish language courses in the restricted luggage with which we left England. But this was one project that's gone nowhere (yet) and on the way in to Chile I took the more realistic decision to buy the Lonely Planet Latin American Spanish phrasebook. This may be a more pragmatic way to learn a language anyway: what's the point of being able to conjugate irregular verbs correctly when you can't ask for the bill? I've discovered that I love the standardised vignettes of tourist behaviour implied by LP's sequence of phrases. I'd thought that I was buying a glossary of phrase atoms but as well as this there are unexpected molecules of interactivity (patterned by metonymy in Lacan's sense). I wont be distracted by citing examples but if you have one of these phrasebooks you'll see what I mean.
So we arrived at the place we've rented following a night of little sleep and after taking an unforeseen amount of time interpreting the joke instructions to get here (we finally capped the potentially unlimited journey time by paying a taxi driver to lead the way, and he needed extensive radio assistance). We wanted nothing other than warmth, comfort and a few small touches of luxury. What we got was unseasonably cold weather - rain and dense cloud - and a house with no fire or heater of any kind, no daytime electricity (it's "solar"), no fridge, no light in the bathroom, none of the promised water in the pool (though the weather currently makes a mockery of that), no bedding in place and only poor bedding available, unfinished paving outside, shoddy fixtures and fittings, and cockroaches in the food cupboard. (Post Script: Heidi was right when she wrote about how chilly it is here. Last night was freezing. Even in my technical down-filled Rab sleeping bag I was only just warm enough.)
Rationally we can't complain too much because the place is so cheap: it's actually costing us less than the month's hire of our (warmer and more comfortable) Nissan Pathfinder. And admittedly, in the evening the clouds have now cleared and we have a truly superb view across the twinkling night lights of the city. There is also a guy who looks after the place for the owner who smiles a lot and helps as best he can, and who brought us a bowl of tasty almonds in their husks. But that's all insufficient consolation. So now we're considering four alternatives:
(1) Tough it out and regard it as a sort of camping experience that will make us better people.
(2) As above, but invest in bedding and heating equipment to make it more palatable.
(3) Eat out a lot and treat ourselves to a couple of nights each week in a good hotel.
(4) Haul out.
Next weekend we decamp to a cattle ranch in Argentina for 5 days so that would be a natural time to decide, assuming we're hardy enough to hang on until then. Finally, here's where we want your help. If anyone has either enough "local" knowledge or access to the internet to propose a case (4) alternative we're interested in having some options to consider. Santiago is a natural base since it's a big city and we have to fly out of here at the end of the month but there's no reason why we couldn't spend time anywhere else round here - or between here and Cordoba in Argentina - instead. Since we've paid for this place already we don't want to spend too much on the escape plan.
A decent bottle of red and undying gratitude are the only rewards that we can promise for anyone who can come up with a mercy suggestion.
Posted: Tue - October 4, 2005 at 02:08 AM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM