Life in the Andes
9 - 14 September, Ian
Since my last entry we've all largely recovered
(only Zoe, who was never violently ill, reports continuing low-grade feelings of
sickness) and settled down into a quiet routine. We're taking it easy and
enjoying the beauty of the central highlands and the formidable hospitality of
Michelle and Andres. I've used up my last few sachets of bush tea and have been
relaxing instead with tea made from coca since we arrived; apparently it's a
tonic and preventative for all sorts of conditions ranging from stomach upsets
to altitude sickness. The girls' schoolwork is going pretty well here, too. My
one complaint is that a few days ago I looked at myself in the mirror while
brushing my teeth and, for the first time in my life, saw that I have become too
thin.
I wrote last time that there is a terrific walk of around an hour along the ridge that circles above the Black Sheep Inn. While Paula was ill I took the girls along it. At the end it seems that the path eludes you as your choices are either to cut right back across the hill and walk across a grassy field to the Inn or to descend down an implausibly steep slope to the road. Zoe, who has natural expertise at descents, chose the latter for us. We found out later that this is the preferred path as some of the locals have objected to hikers tramping across the land on the easier route. When I was sick the girls took Paula along the same ridge trail. I left my bed to watch from across the hill as they made the descent: the girls scampered down quickly, occasionally waiting for Paula who was proceeding cautiously, making good use of her trekking poles. This turned out to be sensible: later the same day an English lady making the descent fell and broke her leg twice, badly. She had her accident at about 5 p.m. and Andres and some of the workers ran out to her when news came back from her French fellow-walkers. They made a splint for her leg here and had her in a van on the way to hospital by 7 p.m. The drive is about 3 or 4 hours over heavily-cratered roads, and she ended up being transported up to Quito - several more hours again - to get the best attention. Here she had her legs set and pinned under local anaesthetic while she watched on a monitor. She was playing the archetypal plucky Brit when we saw her and apparently she remained in good spirits throughout.
Here at the Black Sheep Inn (BSI) we're learning in parallel about two related lifestyles: that of the Andean campesino and that of the Euro/North American traveller. Last week we drove out to one of the larger local markets at Zumbahua. We rode, with some of the other BSI guests, in the back of a high-sided flat-bed truck. The taller of us peered over the sides, while Zoe and others climbed onto planks that formed a little mezzanine so that they could look forward over the cabin of the truck as we bumped for an hour or so along the elementary road. Paula and Heidi scammed the seats next to the driver.
It is a very unspoilt rural landscape. Pigs, sheep and goats are farmed on severely steep hillside fields. Young children herd cattle along the road with sticks. Women carry bundles of sticks on their backs for firewood. Fields are cropped with potatoes and legumes related to lupins. Men and women in pairs frenziedly beat the lupin beans from their pods with sticks. People of all ages lie down in the sun candidly doing nothing. Most of the homes comprise one or two adobe or cinder block buildings, usually roughly-thatched but sometimes tin-roofed or tiled, on a few square metres of levelled ground. There is no provision of access for motor vehicles. One of the few grander houses we passed had its own bull-fighting ring. The owners used to celebrate all of the local fiestas with a fight, but they spend less time here now and the bull fights have become less frequent. As we drove into Zumbahua we passed a number of girls and women cleaning clothes in the river on the edge of the town.
We stopped and spilled out of the truck and Paula and the girls, together with our friend Alice from the BSI (who speaks a useful amount of Spanish) went and found a loo in a nearby "hotel". Apparently it was the most disgusting of our year so far, which is a competitive accolade to score. In town I felt like a conspicuous gringo: I stand about a foot taller than most of the locals and Paula and the girls are blonde. I have, however, cleared up the question of why the locals are referred to as Indians, apart from as a distinction from the mestizos who also have some Spanish blood. This is not explained in any of the guidebooks I've consulted and my on-line Encyclopaedia Brittanica glosses Indian in this context as "Indian-language-speaking", which simply begs the question as the "Indian" language is, of course, Quecha rather than a language from India. But Michelle, as well as being permanently jolly, knows everything and explained that "Indian" in this context derives from the word for "indigenous". The Indians in Zumbahua, as elsewhere, wear their ponchos, shawls and skirts in bright colours; the most common are various peacock shades of blue and green, often offset with contrasting reds and pinks.
The market is a photographer's paradise, but I'm a shy photographer, feeling uncomfortable poking my lens towards people who may not welcome it. In Fez I sometimes delegated picture-taking in the medina to the girls, who are generally less suspiciously received. Now, though, Zoe at least has started to feel the same reluctance that I do about it. If we return I'll try harder to use guile to get more shots. There are rows of stalls selling nothing but chickens' heads and feet. Other stalls cut the meat off crisped pigs' heads for an instant snack. The butchers stalls are no more refined than in Morocco, with meat freshly hacked into chunks hanging from a row of hooks set into a wooden plank. There are square yards of large and small bananas in red, green and yellow still attached to the stalks cracked from the tree laid out over areas of the market floor. Inevitably, there are numerous stalls selling various local variants of fruit and veg and Ecuador's climate has the variety to produce an unusually large range of fresh food. A row of men operating antique Singer sowing machines pedalled away at repairs. Llamas and the occasional donkey were tied up at the roadside next to the market square. And the ubiquitous stall selling CD's (ragaton is a South American favourite) was there on the corner.
Zoe and I went, with the help of Alice, to negotiate for a shawl to keep Zoe warm. I have no heart for negotiating with people who live in poverty but I think that the people here enjoyed Alice knocking them down to half of the asking price. I realised that I've now left the middle classes when I was happy for Zoe to buy a pretty but plain pink shawl in a machine-made synthetic fabric rather than one of the traditionally-patterned hand-crafted shawls that were equally easy to purchase.
On the truck ride back I joined Zoe standing on the planks looking in the direction of travel, wondering - since my centre of gravity was above the restraining bar - how far I'd be catapulted by a sudden stop. Life here seems casually valued. We stopped off at Quilotoa, which is a small village from which you can look down on a volcanic lake that is so tranquil that it seems as though it may slide open James-Bond-villain-style. Paula joined most of our party for the walk back, while Zoe, Heidi and I pressed into the cabin of the truck along with a German family to drive back. Hannes and Anja together with their children Oskar (3 that day) and Sophie (11 months) are on the most incredible journey, cycling down the Pacific Coast of South America in a year. They started off in Mexico City when Sophie was 6 months old. Since my late teens when I discovered the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez I've had a desire to visit Columbia that Paula has always opposed on the reasonable grounds of personal safety: I believe that there's an average of at least one kidnapping per day. The Germans have taken the same view as Paula with their single leg of air travel being a hop from Panama City to Peru to bypass the treacherous country. None of the many travellers we've met here has an itinerary through Columbia. For our Germans, I'm not sure that the FARC terrorists pose a greater threat than the pot-holed roads, altitudes of 5,000 metres or the shear amount of effort needed from two adults to push two children and 100 lbs of luggage up and down the Andes day after day for a year. I'm full of admiration for them and wish them well; so far they seem to be in fine shape. Since our two families were squeezed into the cabin, the driver picked up a party of locals on the way back, who rode to Chugchilan in the back of the truck.
Chugchilan is the village on whose outskirts the BSI is situated. As we crawled through, a man and a boy of about seven stood over a pig that had been butchered at the roadside while we'd been gone. The man was burning off the pig's hair with a blow-torch. The boy was brandishing a large-bladed knife that came above his waist when he rested the point in the ground, in between spiking the pig with it for no apparent purpose. The pig would probably be left at the roadside over night - and for sure would not be refrigerated - before being served up as snack food in the square the next day.
The following day Zoe and I went for a walk of around 5 hours. For the first half, until our lunch stop at a little hillside village, we walked with Alice and a German student called Juerg; after lunch Alice and Juerg pressed on further while we circled back to the Inn. In the village Alice prevailed upon a guy who was resting against a pile of breeze blocks to open up the "shop" for us. It was a small room with an earth floor and, lacking both lights and windows, the only meagre illumination came from the open door. There didn't seem to be much more for sale other than Chuppa Chip ball-on-a-stick lollies and small plastic bottles of sugary drinks; we bought a drink each and drank it with our fruit and rolls sitting on the front step of the village church. Locals milled around, usually staring at us and occasionally returning our Holas and our Buenos Dias's. Juerg, who has good language skills, tried to engage an elderly local lady in conversation but didn't get anywhere. It appeared that she didn't understand his textbook Spanish. After a while a bus turned up crammed full of more locals, and since they seemed to be ferried in for a church service, it being Sunday, we moved on.
On our way back Zoe was worried about dogs. In the morning we'd taken a short cut marked on our map and found ourselves on someone's land. The dogs of the owner viciously tried to chase us off, forcing us to defend ourselves with trekking poles and rocks for some 20 minutes until we were well away from their territory. It was a beautiful walk and it was a shame that Zoe's enjoyment of the beauty was eroded by fear. I kept telling her not to worry, of course, but shortly before we got home her fears were justified. We were taking a cut, again marked as legitimate, across to the ridge above the BSI and had to skirt a house cut into the hillside that was surrounded by dense bushes. Suddenly we were rushed by three dogs who sprang from the bushes, barking loudly and with lips curled back to reveal their drool-covered teeth. The dogs in the morning seemed to want to chase us away; these dogs seemed to want to bite us. Their barks and growls attracted more attack dogs from the house below us and in the scramble to fend them all off while keeping close to Zoe (who had prudently retreated to flat ground) I skidded and fell. Fortunately I kept enough control of the trekking pole I'd borrowed from Paula to fend off the dogs and Zoe used hers to bash the dogs away from her too. Before matters got worse the owner of the house appeared from nowhere with a stick - actually a eucalyptus branch - considerably taller than himself or me and whacked the most vicious dog with it. As the dog slid across the dirt the owner picked him up by the scruff of the neck and clubbed him brutally with the stick before throwing him down on the ground. He wasn't playing for an RSPCA award but Zoe and I were grateful. Of course, everyone says that it's rare for anyone actually to be bitten by one of these dogs; equally inevitably, a report of one of the travellers in the next lodge getting bitten reached us two days later.
The day after Zoe and I did this walk the four of us had a journey along a similar route only this time with horses and a guide - Miguel. From the village where Zoe and I had taken lunch we headed over to the cloud forest. The horses walked or trotted and occasionally broke into a canter. For me, the one non-rider, it was nice to be in a place where the rising trot is looked on with bemusement. The horses here aren't shod and mine was continually seeking out the soft ground to the side of the established path, which in this mountain landscape meant that I was permanently riding at the edge of a steep drop. I trusted my horse, although Zoe, perhaps with a growing distrust of the local animals, kept exhorting me to steer my horse back onto the track. The first time that I tried to do this, when we were zipping along at a fast trot, my horse was spooked by my jerk of the reins and sped into a canter in the opposite direction, racing, God knows how, along the near-vertical uneven grassy hillside. After that he became more obedient and the two of us, horse and rider, got on well.
The cloud forest is exactly what its name describes: a forested zone watered by the low clouds that hang over it. Miguel spoke no English and we speak no Spanish but it's surprising what you can understand. When he told us that a waterfall usually flows heavily but is reduced to a small trickle at this time of year, Paula and I independently knew exactly what he meant. It's also the wrong time of year to see the orchids flowering but it was interesting nevertheless. We saw a single hummingbird; they can occasionally be seen, in various exotic colours and forms, around the BSI.
On the way back we joined the path that Zoe and I had taken through the paramo, which is the specific grassy scrubland above the cloud forest here that absorbs moisture and slowly releases it back for agricultural use and drinking water.
In the afternoon Zoe, Heidi and I played bridge with Alice while Paula knitted and watched and learned. Learning bridge is something that we'd marked down as a possible activity this year but it's been largely displaced by Scrabble, which requires no special expertise. I hope that we do get to play bridge in the second half of the year. Heidi and I have played a little using software on my mac but really we need a proper player to teach us - and Alice has now gone.
So as we walk and ride around we discover something of the life of the campesinos and in the evenings we encounter that other anthropologically-distinct group: the travellers. They're a good bunch and we're enjoying mixing with them. Since I last wrote we've sampled more European nationalities, including one Swiss girl with a strong Dublin accent, which never stops disorienting me. I have to say that the Brits here are great, but then so are the others. My observation last time that the Europeans are on journeys lasting months while the Americans are here on trips lasting days has continued to be borne out in every instance. It's as if the Americans, like small mammals whose hearts beat faster to give them the same number of beats as larger mammals in a much shorter life span, just live faster. The walk back from Quilotoa, for example, takes most people about 5 hours but the American couple who did it (admittedly hurried along by stone-hurling local youths) completed it in 3.5. Yesterday I was chatting to a new guest whose accent I couldn't place - when he told me that he was travelling for three weeks my curiosity regarding his origins intensified as this was too short for a European and too long for an American. Turns out that he's from Quebec!
Since the BSI is not the absolute cheapest place to stay around here (at $20-$30 before discounts for meals and accommodation its maybe twice as pricey as the competition) it tends to attract the 30-something crowd rather than the 20-somethings, which makes for a more interesting family-style evening dinner. While there are variants in the itineraries of the travellers, there is a formula that they all more or less vary from (Peru and the Inca trail; Banos, Cotopaxi, the main Indian markets and a few other standards in Ecuador; the Galapagos if they have the money; not Columbia; probably Bolivia and then Argentina on the way South; maybe Tierra del Fuego.) Why not? I have a hankering to go to Buenos Aires that arises from little more than listening to Santa Maria by The Gotan Project.
The music that Michelle and Andres play here is good. Much of it (the jazz, Bob Dylan, David Byrne, Mozart) is music that I already know and like. The other day they played a few tracks by the instantly-recognisable Natalie Merchant. I hadn't heard her since I bought In My Tribe by 10,000 Maniacs so long ago that it was on vinyl; I also now have it, courtesy of Michelle and Andres, in digital format. I'm also enjoying Living To Tell the Tale immensely, and may try to find somewhere on our web site to use the epigraph with which Marquez kicks it off. In the last few bookshops we visited before we crossed the equator I tried, unsuccessfully, to find a novel I haven't read by Maria Varga Llosa; when I get home I think I'll re-read Death in the Andes.
I wrote last time that there is a terrific walk of around an hour along the ridge that circles above the Black Sheep Inn. While Paula was ill I took the girls along it. At the end it seems that the path eludes you as your choices are either to cut right back across the hill and walk across a grassy field to the Inn or to descend down an implausibly steep slope to the road. Zoe, who has natural expertise at descents, chose the latter for us. We found out later that this is the preferred path as some of the locals have objected to hikers tramping across the land on the easier route. When I was sick the girls took Paula along the same ridge trail. I left my bed to watch from across the hill as they made the descent: the girls scampered down quickly, occasionally waiting for Paula who was proceeding cautiously, making good use of her trekking poles. This turned out to be sensible: later the same day an English lady making the descent fell and broke her leg twice, badly. She had her accident at about 5 p.m. and Andres and some of the workers ran out to her when news came back from her French fellow-walkers. They made a splint for her leg here and had her in a van on the way to hospital by 7 p.m. The drive is about 3 or 4 hours over heavily-cratered roads, and she ended up being transported up to Quito - several more hours again - to get the best attention. Here she had her legs set and pinned under local anaesthetic while she watched on a monitor. She was playing the archetypal plucky Brit when we saw her and apparently she remained in good spirits throughout.
Here at the Black Sheep Inn (BSI) we're learning in parallel about two related lifestyles: that of the Andean campesino and that of the Euro/North American traveller. Last week we drove out to one of the larger local markets at Zumbahua. We rode, with some of the other BSI guests, in the back of a high-sided flat-bed truck. The taller of us peered over the sides, while Zoe and others climbed onto planks that formed a little mezzanine so that they could look forward over the cabin of the truck as we bumped for an hour or so along the elementary road. Paula and Heidi scammed the seats next to the driver.
It is a very unspoilt rural landscape. Pigs, sheep and goats are farmed on severely steep hillside fields. Young children herd cattle along the road with sticks. Women carry bundles of sticks on their backs for firewood. Fields are cropped with potatoes and legumes related to lupins. Men and women in pairs frenziedly beat the lupin beans from their pods with sticks. People of all ages lie down in the sun candidly doing nothing. Most of the homes comprise one or two adobe or cinder block buildings, usually roughly-thatched but sometimes tin-roofed or tiled, on a few square metres of levelled ground. There is no provision of access for motor vehicles. One of the few grander houses we passed had its own bull-fighting ring. The owners used to celebrate all of the local fiestas with a fight, but they spend less time here now and the bull fights have become less frequent. As we drove into Zumbahua we passed a number of girls and women cleaning clothes in the river on the edge of the town.
We stopped and spilled out of the truck and Paula and the girls, together with our friend Alice from the BSI (who speaks a useful amount of Spanish) went and found a loo in a nearby "hotel". Apparently it was the most disgusting of our year so far, which is a competitive accolade to score. In town I felt like a conspicuous gringo: I stand about a foot taller than most of the locals and Paula and the girls are blonde. I have, however, cleared up the question of why the locals are referred to as Indians, apart from as a distinction from the mestizos who also have some Spanish blood. This is not explained in any of the guidebooks I've consulted and my on-line Encyclopaedia Brittanica glosses Indian in this context as "Indian-language-speaking", which simply begs the question as the "Indian" language is, of course, Quecha rather than a language from India. But Michelle, as well as being permanently jolly, knows everything and explained that "Indian" in this context derives from the word for "indigenous". The Indians in Zumbahua, as elsewhere, wear their ponchos, shawls and skirts in bright colours; the most common are various peacock shades of blue and green, often offset with contrasting reds and pinks.
The market is a photographer's paradise, but I'm a shy photographer, feeling uncomfortable poking my lens towards people who may not welcome it. In Fez I sometimes delegated picture-taking in the medina to the girls, who are generally less suspiciously received. Now, though, Zoe at least has started to feel the same reluctance that I do about it. If we return I'll try harder to use guile to get more shots. There are rows of stalls selling nothing but chickens' heads and feet. Other stalls cut the meat off crisped pigs' heads for an instant snack. The butchers stalls are no more refined than in Morocco, with meat freshly hacked into chunks hanging from a row of hooks set into a wooden plank. There are square yards of large and small bananas in red, green and yellow still attached to the stalks cracked from the tree laid out over areas of the market floor. Inevitably, there are numerous stalls selling various local variants of fruit and veg and Ecuador's climate has the variety to produce an unusually large range of fresh food. A row of men operating antique Singer sowing machines pedalled away at repairs. Llamas and the occasional donkey were tied up at the roadside next to the market square. And the ubiquitous stall selling CD's (ragaton is a South American favourite) was there on the corner.
Zoe and I went, with the help of Alice, to negotiate for a shawl to keep Zoe warm. I have no heart for negotiating with people who live in poverty but I think that the people here enjoyed Alice knocking them down to half of the asking price. I realised that I've now left the middle classes when I was happy for Zoe to buy a pretty but plain pink shawl in a machine-made synthetic fabric rather than one of the traditionally-patterned hand-crafted shawls that were equally easy to purchase.
On the truck ride back I joined Zoe standing on the planks looking in the direction of travel, wondering - since my centre of gravity was above the restraining bar - how far I'd be catapulted by a sudden stop. Life here seems casually valued. We stopped off at Quilotoa, which is a small village from which you can look down on a volcanic lake that is so tranquil that it seems as though it may slide open James-Bond-villain-style. Paula joined most of our party for the walk back, while Zoe, Heidi and I pressed into the cabin of the truck along with a German family to drive back. Hannes and Anja together with their children Oskar (3 that day) and Sophie (11 months) are on the most incredible journey, cycling down the Pacific Coast of South America in a year. They started off in Mexico City when Sophie was 6 months old. Since my late teens when I discovered the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez I've had a desire to visit Columbia that Paula has always opposed on the reasonable grounds of personal safety: I believe that there's an average of at least one kidnapping per day. The Germans have taken the same view as Paula with their single leg of air travel being a hop from Panama City to Peru to bypass the treacherous country. None of the many travellers we've met here has an itinerary through Columbia. For our Germans, I'm not sure that the FARC terrorists pose a greater threat than the pot-holed roads, altitudes of 5,000 metres or the shear amount of effort needed from two adults to push two children and 100 lbs of luggage up and down the Andes day after day for a year. I'm full of admiration for them and wish them well; so far they seem to be in fine shape. Since our two families were squeezed into the cabin, the driver picked up a party of locals on the way back, who rode to Chugchilan in the back of the truck.
Chugchilan is the village on whose outskirts the BSI is situated. As we crawled through, a man and a boy of about seven stood over a pig that had been butchered at the roadside while we'd been gone. The man was burning off the pig's hair with a blow-torch. The boy was brandishing a large-bladed knife that came above his waist when he rested the point in the ground, in between spiking the pig with it for no apparent purpose. The pig would probably be left at the roadside over night - and for sure would not be refrigerated - before being served up as snack food in the square the next day.
The following day Zoe and I went for a walk of around 5 hours. For the first half, until our lunch stop at a little hillside village, we walked with Alice and a German student called Juerg; after lunch Alice and Juerg pressed on further while we circled back to the Inn. In the village Alice prevailed upon a guy who was resting against a pile of breeze blocks to open up the "shop" for us. It was a small room with an earth floor and, lacking both lights and windows, the only meagre illumination came from the open door. There didn't seem to be much more for sale other than Chuppa Chip ball-on-a-stick lollies and small plastic bottles of sugary drinks; we bought a drink each and drank it with our fruit and rolls sitting on the front step of the village church. Locals milled around, usually staring at us and occasionally returning our Holas and our Buenos Dias's. Juerg, who has good language skills, tried to engage an elderly local lady in conversation but didn't get anywhere. It appeared that she didn't understand his textbook Spanish. After a while a bus turned up crammed full of more locals, and since they seemed to be ferried in for a church service, it being Sunday, we moved on.
On our way back Zoe was worried about dogs. In the morning we'd taken a short cut marked on our map and found ourselves on someone's land. The dogs of the owner viciously tried to chase us off, forcing us to defend ourselves with trekking poles and rocks for some 20 minutes until we were well away from their territory. It was a beautiful walk and it was a shame that Zoe's enjoyment of the beauty was eroded by fear. I kept telling her not to worry, of course, but shortly before we got home her fears were justified. We were taking a cut, again marked as legitimate, across to the ridge above the BSI and had to skirt a house cut into the hillside that was surrounded by dense bushes. Suddenly we were rushed by three dogs who sprang from the bushes, barking loudly and with lips curled back to reveal their drool-covered teeth. The dogs in the morning seemed to want to chase us away; these dogs seemed to want to bite us. Their barks and growls attracted more attack dogs from the house below us and in the scramble to fend them all off while keeping close to Zoe (who had prudently retreated to flat ground) I skidded and fell. Fortunately I kept enough control of the trekking pole I'd borrowed from Paula to fend off the dogs and Zoe used hers to bash the dogs away from her too. Before matters got worse the owner of the house appeared from nowhere with a stick - actually a eucalyptus branch - considerably taller than himself or me and whacked the most vicious dog with it. As the dog slid across the dirt the owner picked him up by the scruff of the neck and clubbed him brutally with the stick before throwing him down on the ground. He wasn't playing for an RSPCA award but Zoe and I were grateful. Of course, everyone says that it's rare for anyone actually to be bitten by one of these dogs; equally inevitably, a report of one of the travellers in the next lodge getting bitten reached us two days later.
The day after Zoe and I did this walk the four of us had a journey along a similar route only this time with horses and a guide - Miguel. From the village where Zoe and I had taken lunch we headed over to the cloud forest. The horses walked or trotted and occasionally broke into a canter. For me, the one non-rider, it was nice to be in a place where the rising trot is looked on with bemusement. The horses here aren't shod and mine was continually seeking out the soft ground to the side of the established path, which in this mountain landscape meant that I was permanently riding at the edge of a steep drop. I trusted my horse, although Zoe, perhaps with a growing distrust of the local animals, kept exhorting me to steer my horse back onto the track. The first time that I tried to do this, when we were zipping along at a fast trot, my horse was spooked by my jerk of the reins and sped into a canter in the opposite direction, racing, God knows how, along the near-vertical uneven grassy hillside. After that he became more obedient and the two of us, horse and rider, got on well.
The cloud forest is exactly what its name describes: a forested zone watered by the low clouds that hang over it. Miguel spoke no English and we speak no Spanish but it's surprising what you can understand. When he told us that a waterfall usually flows heavily but is reduced to a small trickle at this time of year, Paula and I independently knew exactly what he meant. It's also the wrong time of year to see the orchids flowering but it was interesting nevertheless. We saw a single hummingbird; they can occasionally be seen, in various exotic colours and forms, around the BSI.
On the way back we joined the path that Zoe and I had taken through the paramo, which is the specific grassy scrubland above the cloud forest here that absorbs moisture and slowly releases it back for agricultural use and drinking water.
In the afternoon Zoe, Heidi and I played bridge with Alice while Paula knitted and watched and learned. Learning bridge is something that we'd marked down as a possible activity this year but it's been largely displaced by Scrabble, which requires no special expertise. I hope that we do get to play bridge in the second half of the year. Heidi and I have played a little using software on my mac but really we need a proper player to teach us - and Alice has now gone.
So as we walk and ride around we discover something of the life of the campesinos and in the evenings we encounter that other anthropologically-distinct group: the travellers. They're a good bunch and we're enjoying mixing with them. Since I last wrote we've sampled more European nationalities, including one Swiss girl with a strong Dublin accent, which never stops disorienting me. I have to say that the Brits here are great, but then so are the others. My observation last time that the Europeans are on journeys lasting months while the Americans are here on trips lasting days has continued to be borne out in every instance. It's as if the Americans, like small mammals whose hearts beat faster to give them the same number of beats as larger mammals in a much shorter life span, just live faster. The walk back from Quilotoa, for example, takes most people about 5 hours but the American couple who did it (admittedly hurried along by stone-hurling local youths) completed it in 3.5. Yesterday I was chatting to a new guest whose accent I couldn't place - when he told me that he was travelling for three weeks my curiosity regarding his origins intensified as this was too short for a European and too long for an American. Turns out that he's from Quebec!
Since the BSI is not the absolute cheapest place to stay around here (at $20-$30 before discounts for meals and accommodation its maybe twice as pricey as the competition) it tends to attract the 30-something crowd rather than the 20-somethings, which makes for a more interesting family-style evening dinner. While there are variants in the itineraries of the travellers, there is a formula that they all more or less vary from (Peru and the Inca trail; Banos, Cotopaxi, the main Indian markets and a few other standards in Ecuador; the Galapagos if they have the money; not Columbia; probably Bolivia and then Argentina on the way South; maybe Tierra del Fuego.) Why not? I have a hankering to go to Buenos Aires that arises from little more than listening to Santa Maria by The Gotan Project.
The music that Michelle and Andres play here is good. Much of it (the jazz, Bob Dylan, David Byrne, Mozart) is music that I already know and like. The other day they played a few tracks by the instantly-recognisable Natalie Merchant. I hadn't heard her since I bought In My Tribe by 10,000 Maniacs so long ago that it was on vinyl; I also now have it, courtesy of Michelle and Andres, in digital format. I'm also enjoying Living To Tell the Tale immensely, and may try to find somewhere on our web site to use the epigraph with which Marquez kicks it off. In the last few bookshops we visited before we crossed the equator I tried, unsuccessfully, to find a novel I haven't read by Maria Varga Llosa; when I get home I think I'll re-read Death in the Andes.
Posted: Wed - September 14, 2005 at 09:54 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