Sublime beauty, a kind of virtue - and suffering
3 - 9 September, Ian
On Saturday we were driven from Quito up into the
central highlands of Ecuador where we've planned to spend virtually all of this
month. The drive out of Quito is along the Panamericana, which apparently runs
from Alaska all the way down to Argentina; I don't know if this is an actual
continuous highway or an umbrella concept uniting pre-existing roads within each
of the countries en route. Strung all along the roadside were ramshackle food
stalls, and buildings half-erected in cinder blocks made from the local volcanic
ash. This seems to be a constant of the poorer rural places we've visited: the
buildings are never finished, grey blocks remaining everywhere exposed. Turning
off the Panamerican, we joined a rough road heading to the hill villages; for
about half of the journey the road is attractively cobbled with large round
stones patterned to divide the road into two sides. Compared to African
villages, the livestock seems very healthy with numerous fat pigs, piglets, cows
and calves scampering across the roads and fields. Many of the otherwise grassy
hillsides are planted with
potatoes.
The people working the fields and kicking around in the villages are very distinctive. Our Ecuadorian driver, Otto, referred to them as Indians, although I can't imagine what kinship they could feel to the country of India. As in South Africa the racial tags used round here confuse me: something for me to learn about this month. These Indians are picture-book South Americans, tending to be short with yellow-red complexions and black hair, which the girls and women wear in plaits. Even in the equatorial heat, they cover themselves in colourful clothing and most of them wear Chico Marx-style felt hats.
Otto described the "social problems" that they have. In 1962 the President of Ecuador, who was then a dictator, gave the land to the people who had previously worked it as slaves - only "he forgot to give them education". The first problem arose because they continued to have typically 8 to 12 children in each family and so as they passed the land down the family lines, spurning the harsh aristocratic effectiveness of primogeniture, the parcels of land that each person had to sustain themself got smaller and smaller.
Poverty led many of them to look for opportunities overseas, primarily in Spain or the USA. Instead of earning maybe $200 per month here they could get 3 or 4 times that abroad. Many of them, particularly the working-age men, sold off their land to buy a ticket with the intention of sending money back to feed their families and re-purchase their land later. Children were left with grandparents. Of course, living costs overseas were correspondingly higher and their living conditions very unpleasant. Those men who did make a success in a new land often took wives there and made new families. Thus in most cases the money that was supposed to buy back the land that had been sold to fund the emigration never made it back home and so the kids left behind were deprived not only of their parents but also of their source of future subsistence.
So says Otto. None of this is described in our Ecuador book.
We're staying at a place called The Black Sheep Inn, which describes itself as an eco-lodge. Most of the people passing through here (the maximum capacity is 35, though it's currently holding 10 to 20) are travelling through Ecuador or South America and stay here only a couple of nights. Some people come here to acclimate to the height (3,200m) before attempting a climb up the nearby Cotopaxi volcano, which rises to 5,897m. The physical fact of the altitude even at this level is biologically apparent - walking up to our room, which is the highest in the Inn, even without our bags runs me out of breath.
The people staying here so far have been North American, English, Dutch, Danish, Belgian and Israeli. The Americans have all been on trips lasting days and the Europeans have all been on journeys lasting months.
The lodge was founded and is run by an American couple, Michelle and Andres, who are engaged in the hard work of living their eco dream. The setting here is as beautiful as anywhere I've been. From the wooden seats outside our room there are panoramic views across a canyon to mountains all around. Wedged into the canyon are mesa that provide rare opportunities for farming on the flat. Beyond the mesa the trees on the hillsides seem to spell out inscrutable messages in the lost language of their planters.
The eco credentials of the lodge are impeccable, with local supplies, water conservation and save-the-planet light bulbs in every conceivable spot. The place is even completely vegetarian, though this may be as much due to the potential health impact on guests of the local butchery practices as to high idealism. The loos are "dry" and run-off ("grey") water from the basins is used to irrigate the gardens.
In this type of place computers could be embraced as they are in many remote locations. However, my sense from seeing how they're set up and from speaking to Andres is that they don't really like computers. There is a PC in the dining room that I have used once to see whether our tapistry has arrived at home (it has!). It was not a good on-line experience. The workstation is at the narrowest and busiest part of the Inn, it runs a pre-XP version of Windows and the dial-up line is superslow. Working on three simultaneous Explorer windows was next to impossible with my viewing of blue "progress" bars interrupted by dubious pop-ups, and Windows' eventual loading of one page stamping over the top of my use of another. So I wont be doing much mail while we're here, and it seems that this will be the first place we've visited where I have to stack up any blogs for the whole month.
When we arrived this whole ethos (even the computerlessness) seemed very sweet and worthy. I did wonder how much moral exhortation the environmental consideration would carry with it, but those worries were quickly dispatched. The current managers, an English couple - Amanda and Chris - who are working here for a few months, could easily run the eco policy in a heavy-handed way and squeeze the pleasure out of our stay, but they don't: they've been unfailingly personable and practical.
Now, though, we've been ill. Paula was the first to fall victim to some tropical disease or other and was on (and off) her sickbed for a couple of days. While she was ill the girls and I did a great ridge walk that takes you above the Inn and in amongst the "Indians" working the fields and their children. The scenery is outstanding. When Paula recovered she did the same walk with the girls while I lay ill on the sick bed with a seemingly different unpleasant illness. I did, though, enjoy watching the llamas who graze the fields by our room and who were always hanging out just beyond the window. And whenever I had to go out in the night to get some relief from the stomach pains the heavens were beautifully clear. The band of the Milky Way bisects the moon-less sky and the stars shine densely with at least a couple of planets usually visible. The equinox is approaching and according to Amanda we're supposed to be able to see Orion, the Plough and the Southern Cross at the same time - so far I've only caught Orion, and this only once.
We have antibiotics and I think that I'll be fully recovered by the end of the day. Since the illnesses appeared I've been much more concerned about the girls than us as they seem so small and vulnerable to these resource-depleting bacteria and parasites. Zoe has been a little queezy but so far hasn't suffered anything serious. Last night Heidi was violently sick a few times but this morning doesn't seem too bad - hopefully she may have been protected by the course of antibiotics she took in lieu of proper dental treatment in the US. Pretty much everyone else here has been sick - around a dozen people to my knowledge. This has cast a different light in my mind on the eco thing. The dry toilets can be dense with flies (particularly towards the middle of the day) that can easily traverse the short vector from the untreated "humanure" to the kitchen. Also the bed-linen and towels appear to be laundered by hand at temperatures that are possibly over-friendly to potential ecosystems of resident microbes. What I find surprising is that these total guest wipe-outs haven't happened more often: apparently this is a first. There are 19 more guests arriving today and we'll see how they fare. Hopefully no one will be too ill - this would be a very bad place to need urgent medical attention: they rely on the book, Where There Are No Doctors.
In the middle of one of our bad nights we considered hauling out and moving somewhere else: maybe another village nearer Cotopaxi with a decent hotel, maybe Quito, possibly even Buenos Aires. For now though, we're staying and we've moved to a different room so that our first one - to which we wish to return - can be disinfected. This new room is lower down and has the sweet scent of sun-heated eucalyptus ribboning through the windows. Eucalyptus trees were apparently introduced (Otto again) 120 years ago by ordination of the then President. Andreas and Michelle have a program to eliminate them at the Black Sheep Inn and replace them with native species. Here, where unlike at home the heat makes their perfume intense, they remind me of Australia in that immediate olfactory way. The familiarity is reassuring.
Apart from the sickness, the friendliness of the locals that we're told about at every turn remains questionable. Yesterday an American couple went on a walk that finishes with a hard climb into and then out of the canyon. At the top of the canyon they were asked for money by local children (possibly noticing the American girl's huge diamonds), who punished them for their refusal by hurling rocks at them as they made their way down the narrow and vertiginous path to the canyon floor. Several of the rocks scored hits, bruising both of the Americans. While this was happening the Belgian couple were being attacked by three dogs and the Belgian girl suffered a bad fall as they fled. The dogs here are apparently brutalised by the locals who use them for rock-throwing target practice. But the people we've seen around here so far have all seemed reasonably friendly.
While I was resting I finished Marry Me by John Updike. I'd been saving this up for a while - I see from the list of "Also by"s on the inside that it's the 17th book of his I've read and I've enjoyed most of the others. But it was not the book that I wanted it to be. The combination of the detailed beauty of his writing and his total lack of sentimentality makes Updike seem so convincing. Marry Me has the same elegance of expression and the story is as interesting and well constructed as the rest; but now I find that the human virtues that get wrung out along with sentimentality are precisely the qualities that could make the situations he writes about redeemable. His characters are adults with the worst flaws of children. They are self-absorbed, never breaking through to empathise with each other, and thus destructive. Insofar as they have friendships they are motivated by rivalry and envy. Maybe when this book was written (1971 I think) it was a topical commentary on the new phenomenon of spiralling divorce rates and the associated Western "social problems". Now, though, I feel that there are more hopeful ways to look at the difficulties of finding fulfilment in the intensity of modern life and in place of Updike's Pennsylvania pessimism, which can only encourage you to be the emotional equivalent of one of those giant tortoises, we need perhaps a hopeful Californian voice, or a new European one.
The voice that I have to hand, though, is South American - I'm a few pages into Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Living to Tell the Tale and it's the perfect tonic.
The people working the fields and kicking around in the villages are very distinctive. Our Ecuadorian driver, Otto, referred to them as Indians, although I can't imagine what kinship they could feel to the country of India. As in South Africa the racial tags used round here confuse me: something for me to learn about this month. These Indians are picture-book South Americans, tending to be short with yellow-red complexions and black hair, which the girls and women wear in plaits. Even in the equatorial heat, they cover themselves in colourful clothing and most of them wear Chico Marx-style felt hats.
Otto described the "social problems" that they have. In 1962 the President of Ecuador, who was then a dictator, gave the land to the people who had previously worked it as slaves - only "he forgot to give them education". The first problem arose because they continued to have typically 8 to 12 children in each family and so as they passed the land down the family lines, spurning the harsh aristocratic effectiveness of primogeniture, the parcels of land that each person had to sustain themself got smaller and smaller.
Poverty led many of them to look for opportunities overseas, primarily in Spain or the USA. Instead of earning maybe $200 per month here they could get 3 or 4 times that abroad. Many of them, particularly the working-age men, sold off their land to buy a ticket with the intention of sending money back to feed their families and re-purchase their land later. Children were left with grandparents. Of course, living costs overseas were correspondingly higher and their living conditions very unpleasant. Those men who did make a success in a new land often took wives there and made new families. Thus in most cases the money that was supposed to buy back the land that had been sold to fund the emigration never made it back home and so the kids left behind were deprived not only of their parents but also of their source of future subsistence.
So says Otto. None of this is described in our Ecuador book.
We're staying at a place called The Black Sheep Inn, which describes itself as an eco-lodge. Most of the people passing through here (the maximum capacity is 35, though it's currently holding 10 to 20) are travelling through Ecuador or South America and stay here only a couple of nights. Some people come here to acclimate to the height (3,200m) before attempting a climb up the nearby Cotopaxi volcano, which rises to 5,897m. The physical fact of the altitude even at this level is biologically apparent - walking up to our room, which is the highest in the Inn, even without our bags runs me out of breath.
The people staying here so far have been North American, English, Dutch, Danish, Belgian and Israeli. The Americans have all been on trips lasting days and the Europeans have all been on journeys lasting months.
The lodge was founded and is run by an American couple, Michelle and Andres, who are engaged in the hard work of living their eco dream. The setting here is as beautiful as anywhere I've been. From the wooden seats outside our room there are panoramic views across a canyon to mountains all around. Wedged into the canyon are mesa that provide rare opportunities for farming on the flat. Beyond the mesa the trees on the hillsides seem to spell out inscrutable messages in the lost language of their planters.
The eco credentials of the lodge are impeccable, with local supplies, water conservation and save-the-planet light bulbs in every conceivable spot. The place is even completely vegetarian, though this may be as much due to the potential health impact on guests of the local butchery practices as to high idealism. The loos are "dry" and run-off ("grey") water from the basins is used to irrigate the gardens.
In this type of place computers could be embraced as they are in many remote locations. However, my sense from seeing how they're set up and from speaking to Andres is that they don't really like computers. There is a PC in the dining room that I have used once to see whether our tapistry has arrived at home (it has!). It was not a good on-line experience. The workstation is at the narrowest and busiest part of the Inn, it runs a pre-XP version of Windows and the dial-up line is superslow. Working on three simultaneous Explorer windows was next to impossible with my viewing of blue "progress" bars interrupted by dubious pop-ups, and Windows' eventual loading of one page stamping over the top of my use of another. So I wont be doing much mail while we're here, and it seems that this will be the first place we've visited where I have to stack up any blogs for the whole month.
When we arrived this whole ethos (even the computerlessness) seemed very sweet and worthy. I did wonder how much moral exhortation the environmental consideration would carry with it, but those worries were quickly dispatched. The current managers, an English couple - Amanda and Chris - who are working here for a few months, could easily run the eco policy in a heavy-handed way and squeeze the pleasure out of our stay, but they don't: they've been unfailingly personable and practical.
Now, though, we've been ill. Paula was the first to fall victim to some tropical disease or other and was on (and off) her sickbed for a couple of days. While she was ill the girls and I did a great ridge walk that takes you above the Inn and in amongst the "Indians" working the fields and their children. The scenery is outstanding. When Paula recovered she did the same walk with the girls while I lay ill on the sick bed with a seemingly different unpleasant illness. I did, though, enjoy watching the llamas who graze the fields by our room and who were always hanging out just beyond the window. And whenever I had to go out in the night to get some relief from the stomach pains the heavens were beautifully clear. The band of the Milky Way bisects the moon-less sky and the stars shine densely with at least a couple of planets usually visible. The equinox is approaching and according to Amanda we're supposed to be able to see Orion, the Plough and the Southern Cross at the same time - so far I've only caught Orion, and this only once.
We have antibiotics and I think that I'll be fully recovered by the end of the day. Since the illnesses appeared I've been much more concerned about the girls than us as they seem so small and vulnerable to these resource-depleting bacteria and parasites. Zoe has been a little queezy but so far hasn't suffered anything serious. Last night Heidi was violently sick a few times but this morning doesn't seem too bad - hopefully she may have been protected by the course of antibiotics she took in lieu of proper dental treatment in the US. Pretty much everyone else here has been sick - around a dozen people to my knowledge. This has cast a different light in my mind on the eco thing. The dry toilets can be dense with flies (particularly towards the middle of the day) that can easily traverse the short vector from the untreated "humanure" to the kitchen. Also the bed-linen and towels appear to be laundered by hand at temperatures that are possibly over-friendly to potential ecosystems of resident microbes. What I find surprising is that these total guest wipe-outs haven't happened more often: apparently this is a first. There are 19 more guests arriving today and we'll see how they fare. Hopefully no one will be too ill - this would be a very bad place to need urgent medical attention: they rely on the book, Where There Are No Doctors.
In the middle of one of our bad nights we considered hauling out and moving somewhere else: maybe another village nearer Cotopaxi with a decent hotel, maybe Quito, possibly even Buenos Aires. For now though, we're staying and we've moved to a different room so that our first one - to which we wish to return - can be disinfected. This new room is lower down and has the sweet scent of sun-heated eucalyptus ribboning through the windows. Eucalyptus trees were apparently introduced (Otto again) 120 years ago by ordination of the then President. Andreas and Michelle have a program to eliminate them at the Black Sheep Inn and replace them with native species. Here, where unlike at home the heat makes their perfume intense, they remind me of Australia in that immediate olfactory way. The familiarity is reassuring.
Apart from the sickness, the friendliness of the locals that we're told about at every turn remains questionable. Yesterday an American couple went on a walk that finishes with a hard climb into and then out of the canyon. At the top of the canyon they were asked for money by local children (possibly noticing the American girl's huge diamonds), who punished them for their refusal by hurling rocks at them as they made their way down the narrow and vertiginous path to the canyon floor. Several of the rocks scored hits, bruising both of the Americans. While this was happening the Belgian couple were being attacked by three dogs and the Belgian girl suffered a bad fall as they fled. The dogs here are apparently brutalised by the locals who use them for rock-throwing target practice. But the people we've seen around here so far have all seemed reasonably friendly.
While I was resting I finished Marry Me by John Updike. I'd been saving this up for a while - I see from the list of "Also by"s on the inside that it's the 17th book of his I've read and I've enjoyed most of the others. But it was not the book that I wanted it to be. The combination of the detailed beauty of his writing and his total lack of sentimentality makes Updike seem so convincing. Marry Me has the same elegance of expression and the story is as interesting and well constructed as the rest; but now I find that the human virtues that get wrung out along with sentimentality are precisely the qualities that could make the situations he writes about redeemable. His characters are adults with the worst flaws of children. They are self-absorbed, never breaking through to empathise with each other, and thus destructive. Insofar as they have friendships they are motivated by rivalry and envy. Maybe when this book was written (1971 I think) it was a topical commentary on the new phenomenon of spiralling divorce rates and the associated Western "social problems". Now, though, I feel that there are more hopeful ways to look at the difficulties of finding fulfilment in the intensity of modern life and in place of Updike's Pennsylvania pessimism, which can only encourage you to be the emotional equivalent of one of those giant tortoises, we need perhaps a hopeful Californian voice, or a new European one.
The voice that I have to hand, though, is South American - I'm a few pages into Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Living to Tell the Tale and it's the perfect tonic.
Posted: Thu - September 8, 2005 at 11:27 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM