Half way
"Life is not what one lived, but what one
remembers
and how one remembers it in order to recount it"
and how one remembers it in order to recount it"
A couple of days ago we left the Black Sheep Inn
and headed back up to Quito. We were all sad to leave the BSI, particularly the
girls, who had become very settled there. We had recorded the longest stay in
BSI's 11 year history and, perhaps even more impressive for such a remote spot,
we had received personal mail there (a letter from Paula's friend Jean and a
card to Zoe from Stephanie, both of which were most
welcome).
In our last few days there three of us found opportunities to do the walk back from Quilotoa again. My third excursion was with a Swiss couple and some German/Dutch girls we met on the way. This was on a Sunday, which is the only day on which the bus leaves at a civilised hour (9 am instead of 3 am) and I had the first journey that I can recall taking on the roof of a bus. The hour long ride to Quilotoa is pretty rough - it felt a little like horse riding - and if you're not careful you get whacked by branches; but it was great to have the views and the fresh air, and until the sack I was sitting on left the bus with its owner it was comfortable enough.
Paula did the walk a few days later with Zoe and another party from the BSI. People seemed to welcome having us with them since everyone who does the walk on their own does seem to get lost; I noted this earlier in our stay and it continued to be true, although a few hikers preferred to say that they had "discovered an alternative route". It's surprising that the route is so hard to follow, notwithstanding that some of the locals in Quilotoa, keen to protect their market for guide services, have removed, defaced and altered the signs that guide walkers to Chugchilan. Even without the signs, you can, from the rim of the crater where you start, see all the way back to the Black Sheep Inn so that the walk is arrayed in front of you like a 1:1 scale map.
While Paula and Zoe were out walking, which was the day before we left BSI, Heidi and I took lunch at one of the other hostals in Chugchilan. It was cheap ($2/head for soup, a main and fresh juice) but it confirmed the common wisdom that if you visit the region you really do want to stay at BSI.
On their walk Paula and Zoe got caught in a light rain shower, and when I did it we got drenched in heavy rain. I had taken a chance that a cagoul wouldn't be needed and the Swiss couple, who had heavy raincoats with them, simply preferred to get wet. This was indicative of the more English weather that we enjoyed in our final week, when every afternoon the skies clouded over after a sunny morning. In a natural phenomenon that remains mysterious to me, the rains also brought with them large numbers of beetles.
On our penultimate evening I thought that the signs were starting to show that it was time to leave. Over dinner people I liked talked for a long time about things that I don't (Sting, The Police, Men at Work, Star Trek. I thought about trying to divert the conversation onto the only Trek-related phenomenon of any interest that I could think of, namely the late 70's single Where's Captain Kirk? by Spizz Energy, but it didn't seem likely to be a winning talk tactic and although I recall liking it a lot at the time - in my mind it's bound up with the Rezillos and Rock Lobster by The B52's - I can't now even remember the tune). Amongst the other diners there seemed to two or three people, for the first and only time in the month we were there, who seemed borderline antisocial. Maybe they don't like Sting or Star Trek either. And despite having artichokes, which I love to be served when I eat out, I was less excited by the meal than usual. But on our final evening we had a very happy meal and a perfect bottle of wine.
The next day we left early with Otto, who took us up to Quito. Leaving along the Latacunga loop via Sigchos was like driving out of a dream. This sense, which primarily came from the spectacular and specific local landscape - we had outstanding views across to the pair of mountains known as the Ilinizas - was also heightened by music. As we hit the Panamericana the windows and then the hifi volume went up. Otto's CD kicked off, surreally, with Blue Velvet and also treated us to Roy Orbison singing In Dreams. I don't know if Otto has ever seen David Lynch's film - I'm guessing not and I should have asked - but if he hasn't his listening experience was very different from ours. Apart from these two tracks most of the songs that entertained us were standards that I enjoyed because of other versions that I know rather than for the croony covers on the CD. Pennies from Heaven is, for me, classically done in a live version I have on vinyl by Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden. I'm afraid that it's Brian Ferry's Smoke gets in Your Eyes that I like best. Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You can either be by Andy Williams or Lauryn Hill but not really anyone else. And I'm sure that there must be a better cover of Mr Bojangles than the drama queen pastiche by Robbie Williams but I don't know who does it, and I prefer Robbie's version to Otto's.
Over the music Otto was as informative as usual. As we looked out over the Cotopaxi volcano he told us that it erupts on a 100 year cycle and the last one was 120 years ago. Apparently they're recording 200 tremors per day at Cotopaxi now: if Otto had been North rather than South American the phrase "she's gonna blow" would have been inevitable. He also told us that an earthquake that we felt the other night at the BSI had been centred in Peru and had registered 7 on Richter; houses had apparently collapsed. And as we approached Quito he pulled over to show us the facial profile of the Ecuadorian liberator Mariscal Antonio Jose de Sucre embodied in a range of rocks, staring skywards. It was a perfect match for Sucre's profile as depicted on a Sucre coin that Otto also gave me. The Sucre was the national currency before the US Dollar was adopted; Otto gave more life to the troubles I've described previously, telling us that you used to be able to buy something with a Sucre whereas you now need 25,000 of them to make one Dollar!
We checked into the Hotel Quito, whose two main attributes, for us, were broadband internet access from my mac and a swimming pool. I had plenty of web chores (ordering our album of Galapagos photos, posting four blogs that had stacked up over the month, updating a pile of software, getting/posting email, downloading more podcasts, uploading the girls' Alaska newsletters finally etc). One of the biggest treats, though, was listening to the World Service and Radio 4 live. When we get to Santiago I'm planning to buy a little SW radio for the second half of our trip.
Yesterday Otto met us again to drive us further north to Hacienda Cusin, where we are now. Before leaving Quito we stopped into the post office to mail home some stuff. For the first time this year we discovered that there is no slow/cheap option to mail parcels to England by boat from here so we faced absurdly expensive air mail costs. The staff in the post office appreciated that we were reluctant to pay the price that they originally calculated and two of the women helped us consolidate the three parcels we took in into a single box, saving us about $50. Paula got it right when she observed that the pair of them fussing around, cooing over our dumb goods (including a soft toy blue-footed booby, a soft toy flamingo, pipe cleaner creations of the girls and several more-expensive-to-ship-than-to-buy books) and using yards of tape to mask the flimsiness of the damp cardboard box they proffered, were reminiscent of Almodovar's fantastic film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. It wouldn't have surprised me to see them simultaneously collapse from drinking spiked gazpacho.
While this little farce was playing out I should have been running over the street to get sandwiches for everyone; but I didn't so we had to stop for some lunch on the way out of Quito. Otto wanted to take us to McDonald's; when I said No his next idea was Burger King; and when I vetoed that it was Pizza Hut. As I've found before while we've been travelling, people in poor countries regard the food from these outlets not as some form of barely legal poison but as a good meal - like Marlborough cigarettes, McDonald's symbolises the values of the US to which people here so frequently aspire. Fortunately, we spotted a little independent bakery that saved us a drive-thru trip to cholesterol hell.
The geographical highlight of the route up to Cusin is that it crosses the equator. We reached this point in the early afternoon, and true to the pattern of the last several days the skies were totally grey and riven with thunder and lightning to our north. Concrete posts like trig points on either side of the highway indicated the equator and there was a parking area with a low-key concrete globe at the roadside. There were also a couple of appealingly shabby cafe shacks, which yesterday were deserted. We parked and skipped over the equatorial line more times than you might think would be interesting - especially with the drama of the fork lightning and the sense that the light rain would at any moment break into a downpour, it seemed really cool. Through the clouds we could see the base of the Cayambe volcano, which is the only mountain of any height on the equator anywhere along its length. Cayambe was apparently used for Stonehenge-like calendar-marking purposes by the indigenous people - on the way back we may make a point of seeing the ancient stone pyramids that they constructed to this end. The most developed equatorial crossing around here is at a place called La Mitad del Mundo, where French scientists constructed a monument. According to Lonely Planet this is "built right on the equator"; according to Otto, whom I'm much more inclined to believe, the French scientists were off by 200 yards (or metres, as they might say), while the "indians" have had it spot on for several hundred years. Otto also reports that there is a museum straddling the equator where there are two sinks only a metre apart in which water drains down one clockwise and the other anticlockwise. I've been trying to fathom out the legitimate physics of this and can't see how such a discontinuity can exist - if you understand it please enlighten me.
The equatorial crossing, which we re-trace tomorrow en route to the deep south of Chile, is a handy metaphor for the half-way point of our trip, which we reach on Tuesday. After six months our adventure so far is everything that we might have wished for. As at three months, I'm extremely glad that we don't have to think about heading home yet; it's great to have as much in front of us as we've enjoyed so far. Unlike at the three month point, though, I am starting to think a little about the practicalities of returning to work. You'd think that by now I'd be quite able to answer the "what do you do?" question but it still leaves me unsure what to say. There are three reasonable answers, and since I think I have a couple of my peers reading this blog I'd be interested in which you pick from:
(a) I'm a Managing Director of an investment bank
(b) I work in IT
(c) I tell people stories to make them feel better.
If I haven't managed to avoid the topic altogether I invariably pick (b), unless I'm standing at a US immigration booth when something along the lines of (a) usually gets me through most quickly.
At the time when I left (or a few months beforehand in any case) all three of these fairly described my job. Now it occurs to me that the eight choices defined by which, if any, of the three I should jettison define my career options. Inevitably, though, I'll be returning to a position similar to the one I left - one that I'm qualified for by experience. To make it easier we're giving serious thought to buying a pied a terre in London - there will be practical difficulties in developing any momentum while we're out of the country and I'd be very grateful to anyone who can offer help and advice over the coming months.
I recently finished reading the first (and so far only) volume of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale. If I'd read this book as a teenager (of course, it wasn't then written) it's very likely that I would have tried to become a journalist, as GGM is in this volume more than he's a novelist. (When the book ends he has only published one novel, Leaf Storm, which was initially rejected by a prominent publishing house in Buenos Aires). Maybe that's a job I would have been better at. On the other hand, without a degree in mathematics it's unlikely that I'd be enjoying the book I'm now reading quite so much - it's called Prime Obsession and it's about the density with which primes occur. It gives you all the maths that you need so that it can be read by the non-specialist - I'd be very interested in whether this is enough, so if you left off maths at school and you read the book please drop me a line. It's very good.
The quotation at the head of this blog is the epigraph at the start of Living to Tell the Tale; although it's patently false in some ways, it exactly describes how I'm thinking about this trip and our programme of blogs, newsletters and monthly photo albums. Heading into our second half I'm wondering whether to change anything. I think that the girls' newsletters are a success, and month by month they seem to be getting deeper. It's nice when they can use their own photographs and I like some of the comparative charts they've done, such as the Median Age chart in Heidi's Ecuador newsletter. I like the idea of the albums too, though I've only seen the first two (and most readers of this blog wont have seen any of them). Producing a decent album every month or two solves the problem of how to avoid our thousands of snaps languishing in the digital shoe-box of my mac. The albums also provide a form of closure on each episode, reinforcing that sense of each month being like a new trip into Mr Benn's wardrobe.
The form of record about which I have most reservations is this blog: it's serving two purposes, and I'm not sure that they're always compatible. First, it's my travel diary, the only record I will retain about not only what we saw but how we felt about it. Secondly, it's a newsletter for friends and family. For an introvert, I'm putting a lot of stuff out there and I publish a lot of material that would not see the light of day if I had a separate diary. Civilised behaviour is often a matter of knowing when to keep quiet and that's the issue. On the one hand, if anyone feels upset about what I might write, say, about the Bush administration - well, I can't be too worried about that. On the other hand, when I posted the stuff about our experience at the Black Sheep Inn this month, for example, recording how we felt the first week risks slandering some people we really like.
The solution to this occurred to me a while ago, namely to write a "facts and photos" entry about each place we visit that would give all of the information a reader might want if you were thinking of coming, and then to write supplementary entries, which I wouldn't publish, to include all of the accompanying diary jottings on what I read and listened to, our health, political reflections and so forth. I'm sure that this makes more sense but since I've raised the idea Paula has implacably opposed it. Let me know if you're really logging on to a blog written in Ecuador to find out which version of Pennies from Heaven I like best. (I must admit, though, I do think it might be kind of fun to issue my friends with the soundtrack to this trip when I get home, comprising not the local music but all of the tracks I've mentioned in the blog throughout the year. Yesterday, for example, I bought Hope There's Someone by Antony and the Johnsons on the recommendation of Adrienne, and I've been missing I Knew the Bride when she used to Rock and Roll by Nick Lowe - get it if you can.)
So now we're at Hacienda Cusin, where we checked in yesterday and leave tomorrow. We came here on the advice of a few guests at the BSI to see a different part of Ecuador before we fly out. The (gringo) owners describe it as a restored 17th century Andean estate, and it's your film-set perfect South American vision. The many courtyards around the rooms overflow with fragrant climbing plants, there are ten acres of rustic walled gardens, including a wonderful vegetable garden, and it's sleepy yet alive with hummingbirds and those special-effects frogs with the wood-click croak. The dining hall and library could be baronial English (reminiscent of Amberley Castle, where you should go if you can and haven't) with just a touch of Zorro. But when we arrived we were a little out of sorts and the girls were still missing BSI, which being the sincere life project of its owners is somehow more authentic than this idyll of verisimilitude. Today, though, everyone's spirits were improved not by the romance of the grounds but by shooting hoop on a small basketball court and then the discovery of the pool and table tennis tables in the games room. They're a lot of fun.
The only other guests at dinner last night were an English couple (this place has "honeymoon retreat" stamped all over it) and at lunch today we had an organised party of (mainly elderly) English stop by, presumably on a day trip from Quito to one of the local attractions. I don't know if I can put my finger on what it is about these tourists - there's certainly nothing wrong with them being English since we've enjoyed the company of all of our compatriots whom we've met this year. I've come to see that when a tourist dreads meeting anyone from their own land it reveals that their trip is less an episode of travel than of delusional fantasy: they are in the grip of a petit bourgeois neurosis. But the tourists we saw at lunch somehow exuded a sense of incipient terror, comforting each other with photographs of their floppy dogs in their gardens at home, and of travelling in a bubble.
Perhaps the most profound effect this year is having on me is to change how I conceive of travelling - later in our journey I may try to articulate this. For now I'm going to have a drink - probably a cup of tea or maybe a glass of the excellent tree tomato juice they have here - and then another frame or two of pool with the girls.
In our last few days there three of us found opportunities to do the walk back from Quilotoa again. My third excursion was with a Swiss couple and some German/Dutch girls we met on the way. This was on a Sunday, which is the only day on which the bus leaves at a civilised hour (9 am instead of 3 am) and I had the first journey that I can recall taking on the roof of a bus. The hour long ride to Quilotoa is pretty rough - it felt a little like horse riding - and if you're not careful you get whacked by branches; but it was great to have the views and the fresh air, and until the sack I was sitting on left the bus with its owner it was comfortable enough.
Paula did the walk a few days later with Zoe and another party from the BSI. People seemed to welcome having us with them since everyone who does the walk on their own does seem to get lost; I noted this earlier in our stay and it continued to be true, although a few hikers preferred to say that they had "discovered an alternative route". It's surprising that the route is so hard to follow, notwithstanding that some of the locals in Quilotoa, keen to protect their market for guide services, have removed, defaced and altered the signs that guide walkers to Chugchilan. Even without the signs, you can, from the rim of the crater where you start, see all the way back to the Black Sheep Inn so that the walk is arrayed in front of you like a 1:1 scale map.
While Paula and Zoe were out walking, which was the day before we left BSI, Heidi and I took lunch at one of the other hostals in Chugchilan. It was cheap ($2/head for soup, a main and fresh juice) but it confirmed the common wisdom that if you visit the region you really do want to stay at BSI.
On their walk Paula and Zoe got caught in a light rain shower, and when I did it we got drenched in heavy rain. I had taken a chance that a cagoul wouldn't be needed and the Swiss couple, who had heavy raincoats with them, simply preferred to get wet. This was indicative of the more English weather that we enjoyed in our final week, when every afternoon the skies clouded over after a sunny morning. In a natural phenomenon that remains mysterious to me, the rains also brought with them large numbers of beetles.
On our penultimate evening I thought that the signs were starting to show that it was time to leave. Over dinner people I liked talked for a long time about things that I don't (Sting, The Police, Men at Work, Star Trek. I thought about trying to divert the conversation onto the only Trek-related phenomenon of any interest that I could think of, namely the late 70's single Where's Captain Kirk? by Spizz Energy, but it didn't seem likely to be a winning talk tactic and although I recall liking it a lot at the time - in my mind it's bound up with the Rezillos and Rock Lobster by The B52's - I can't now even remember the tune). Amongst the other diners there seemed to two or three people, for the first and only time in the month we were there, who seemed borderline antisocial. Maybe they don't like Sting or Star Trek either. And despite having artichokes, which I love to be served when I eat out, I was less excited by the meal than usual. But on our final evening we had a very happy meal and a perfect bottle of wine.
The next day we left early with Otto, who took us up to Quito. Leaving along the Latacunga loop via Sigchos was like driving out of a dream. This sense, which primarily came from the spectacular and specific local landscape - we had outstanding views across to the pair of mountains known as the Ilinizas - was also heightened by music. As we hit the Panamericana the windows and then the hifi volume went up. Otto's CD kicked off, surreally, with Blue Velvet and also treated us to Roy Orbison singing In Dreams. I don't know if Otto has ever seen David Lynch's film - I'm guessing not and I should have asked - but if he hasn't his listening experience was very different from ours. Apart from these two tracks most of the songs that entertained us were standards that I enjoyed because of other versions that I know rather than for the croony covers on the CD. Pennies from Heaven is, for me, classically done in a live version I have on vinyl by Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden. I'm afraid that it's Brian Ferry's Smoke gets in Your Eyes that I like best. Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You can either be by Andy Williams or Lauryn Hill but not really anyone else. And I'm sure that there must be a better cover of Mr Bojangles than the drama queen pastiche by Robbie Williams but I don't know who does it, and I prefer Robbie's version to Otto's.
Over the music Otto was as informative as usual. As we looked out over the Cotopaxi volcano he told us that it erupts on a 100 year cycle and the last one was 120 years ago. Apparently they're recording 200 tremors per day at Cotopaxi now: if Otto had been North rather than South American the phrase "she's gonna blow" would have been inevitable. He also told us that an earthquake that we felt the other night at the BSI had been centred in Peru and had registered 7 on Richter; houses had apparently collapsed. And as we approached Quito he pulled over to show us the facial profile of the Ecuadorian liberator Mariscal Antonio Jose de Sucre embodied in a range of rocks, staring skywards. It was a perfect match for Sucre's profile as depicted on a Sucre coin that Otto also gave me. The Sucre was the national currency before the US Dollar was adopted; Otto gave more life to the troubles I've described previously, telling us that you used to be able to buy something with a Sucre whereas you now need 25,000 of them to make one Dollar!
We checked into the Hotel Quito, whose two main attributes, for us, were broadband internet access from my mac and a swimming pool. I had plenty of web chores (ordering our album of Galapagos photos, posting four blogs that had stacked up over the month, updating a pile of software, getting/posting email, downloading more podcasts, uploading the girls' Alaska newsletters finally etc). One of the biggest treats, though, was listening to the World Service and Radio 4 live. When we get to Santiago I'm planning to buy a little SW radio for the second half of our trip.
Yesterday Otto met us again to drive us further north to Hacienda Cusin, where we are now. Before leaving Quito we stopped into the post office to mail home some stuff. For the first time this year we discovered that there is no slow/cheap option to mail parcels to England by boat from here so we faced absurdly expensive air mail costs. The staff in the post office appreciated that we were reluctant to pay the price that they originally calculated and two of the women helped us consolidate the three parcels we took in into a single box, saving us about $50. Paula got it right when she observed that the pair of them fussing around, cooing over our dumb goods (including a soft toy blue-footed booby, a soft toy flamingo, pipe cleaner creations of the girls and several more-expensive-to-ship-than-to-buy books) and using yards of tape to mask the flimsiness of the damp cardboard box they proffered, were reminiscent of Almodovar's fantastic film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. It wouldn't have surprised me to see them simultaneously collapse from drinking spiked gazpacho.
While this little farce was playing out I should have been running over the street to get sandwiches for everyone; but I didn't so we had to stop for some lunch on the way out of Quito. Otto wanted to take us to McDonald's; when I said No his next idea was Burger King; and when I vetoed that it was Pizza Hut. As I've found before while we've been travelling, people in poor countries regard the food from these outlets not as some form of barely legal poison but as a good meal - like Marlborough cigarettes, McDonald's symbolises the values of the US to which people here so frequently aspire. Fortunately, we spotted a little independent bakery that saved us a drive-thru trip to cholesterol hell.
The geographical highlight of the route up to Cusin is that it crosses the equator. We reached this point in the early afternoon, and true to the pattern of the last several days the skies were totally grey and riven with thunder and lightning to our north. Concrete posts like trig points on either side of the highway indicated the equator and there was a parking area with a low-key concrete globe at the roadside. There were also a couple of appealingly shabby cafe shacks, which yesterday were deserted. We parked and skipped over the equatorial line more times than you might think would be interesting - especially with the drama of the fork lightning and the sense that the light rain would at any moment break into a downpour, it seemed really cool. Through the clouds we could see the base of the Cayambe volcano, which is the only mountain of any height on the equator anywhere along its length. Cayambe was apparently used for Stonehenge-like calendar-marking purposes by the indigenous people - on the way back we may make a point of seeing the ancient stone pyramids that they constructed to this end. The most developed equatorial crossing around here is at a place called La Mitad del Mundo, where French scientists constructed a monument. According to Lonely Planet this is "built right on the equator"; according to Otto, whom I'm much more inclined to believe, the French scientists were off by 200 yards (or metres, as they might say), while the "indians" have had it spot on for several hundred years. Otto also reports that there is a museum straddling the equator where there are two sinks only a metre apart in which water drains down one clockwise and the other anticlockwise. I've been trying to fathom out the legitimate physics of this and can't see how such a discontinuity can exist - if you understand it please enlighten me.
The equatorial crossing, which we re-trace tomorrow en route to the deep south of Chile, is a handy metaphor for the half-way point of our trip, which we reach on Tuesday. After six months our adventure so far is everything that we might have wished for. As at three months, I'm extremely glad that we don't have to think about heading home yet; it's great to have as much in front of us as we've enjoyed so far. Unlike at the three month point, though, I am starting to think a little about the practicalities of returning to work. You'd think that by now I'd be quite able to answer the "what do you do?" question but it still leaves me unsure what to say. There are three reasonable answers, and since I think I have a couple of my peers reading this blog I'd be interested in which you pick from:
(a) I'm a Managing Director of an investment bank
(b) I work in IT
(c) I tell people stories to make them feel better.
If I haven't managed to avoid the topic altogether I invariably pick (b), unless I'm standing at a US immigration booth when something along the lines of (a) usually gets me through most quickly.
At the time when I left (or a few months beforehand in any case) all three of these fairly described my job. Now it occurs to me that the eight choices defined by which, if any, of the three I should jettison define my career options. Inevitably, though, I'll be returning to a position similar to the one I left - one that I'm qualified for by experience. To make it easier we're giving serious thought to buying a pied a terre in London - there will be practical difficulties in developing any momentum while we're out of the country and I'd be very grateful to anyone who can offer help and advice over the coming months.
I recently finished reading the first (and so far only) volume of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale. If I'd read this book as a teenager (of course, it wasn't then written) it's very likely that I would have tried to become a journalist, as GGM is in this volume more than he's a novelist. (When the book ends he has only published one novel, Leaf Storm, which was initially rejected by a prominent publishing house in Buenos Aires). Maybe that's a job I would have been better at. On the other hand, without a degree in mathematics it's unlikely that I'd be enjoying the book I'm now reading quite so much - it's called Prime Obsession and it's about the density with which primes occur. It gives you all the maths that you need so that it can be read by the non-specialist - I'd be very interested in whether this is enough, so if you left off maths at school and you read the book please drop me a line. It's very good.
The quotation at the head of this blog is the epigraph at the start of Living to Tell the Tale; although it's patently false in some ways, it exactly describes how I'm thinking about this trip and our programme of blogs, newsletters and monthly photo albums. Heading into our second half I'm wondering whether to change anything. I think that the girls' newsletters are a success, and month by month they seem to be getting deeper. It's nice when they can use their own photographs and I like some of the comparative charts they've done, such as the Median Age chart in Heidi's Ecuador newsletter. I like the idea of the albums too, though I've only seen the first two (and most readers of this blog wont have seen any of them). Producing a decent album every month or two solves the problem of how to avoid our thousands of snaps languishing in the digital shoe-box of my mac. The albums also provide a form of closure on each episode, reinforcing that sense of each month being like a new trip into Mr Benn's wardrobe.
The form of record about which I have most reservations is this blog: it's serving two purposes, and I'm not sure that they're always compatible. First, it's my travel diary, the only record I will retain about not only what we saw but how we felt about it. Secondly, it's a newsletter for friends and family. For an introvert, I'm putting a lot of stuff out there and I publish a lot of material that would not see the light of day if I had a separate diary. Civilised behaviour is often a matter of knowing when to keep quiet and that's the issue. On the one hand, if anyone feels upset about what I might write, say, about the Bush administration - well, I can't be too worried about that. On the other hand, when I posted the stuff about our experience at the Black Sheep Inn this month, for example, recording how we felt the first week risks slandering some people we really like.
The solution to this occurred to me a while ago, namely to write a "facts and photos" entry about each place we visit that would give all of the information a reader might want if you were thinking of coming, and then to write supplementary entries, which I wouldn't publish, to include all of the accompanying diary jottings on what I read and listened to, our health, political reflections and so forth. I'm sure that this makes more sense but since I've raised the idea Paula has implacably opposed it. Let me know if you're really logging on to a blog written in Ecuador to find out which version of Pennies from Heaven I like best. (I must admit, though, I do think it might be kind of fun to issue my friends with the soundtrack to this trip when I get home, comprising not the local music but all of the tracks I've mentioned in the blog throughout the year. Yesterday, for example, I bought Hope There's Someone by Antony and the Johnsons on the recommendation of Adrienne, and I've been missing I Knew the Bride when she used to Rock and Roll by Nick Lowe - get it if you can.)
So now we're at Hacienda Cusin, where we checked in yesterday and leave tomorrow. We came here on the advice of a few guests at the BSI to see a different part of Ecuador before we fly out. The (gringo) owners describe it as a restored 17th century Andean estate, and it's your film-set perfect South American vision. The many courtyards around the rooms overflow with fragrant climbing plants, there are ten acres of rustic walled gardens, including a wonderful vegetable garden, and it's sleepy yet alive with hummingbirds and those special-effects frogs with the wood-click croak. The dining hall and library could be baronial English (reminiscent of Amberley Castle, where you should go if you can and haven't) with just a touch of Zorro. But when we arrived we were a little out of sorts and the girls were still missing BSI, which being the sincere life project of its owners is somehow more authentic than this idyll of verisimilitude. Today, though, everyone's spirits were improved not by the romance of the grounds but by shooting hoop on a small basketball court and then the discovery of the pool and table tennis tables in the games room. They're a lot of fun.
The only other guests at dinner last night were an English couple (this place has "honeymoon retreat" stamped all over it) and at lunch today we had an organised party of (mainly elderly) English stop by, presumably on a day trip from Quito to one of the local attractions. I don't know if I can put my finger on what it is about these tourists - there's certainly nothing wrong with them being English since we've enjoyed the company of all of our compatriots whom we've met this year. I've come to see that when a tourist dreads meeting anyone from their own land it reveals that their trip is less an episode of travel than of delusional fantasy: they are in the grip of a petit bourgeois neurosis. But the tourists we saw at lunch somehow exuded a sense of incipient terror, comforting each other with photographs of their floppy dogs in their gardens at home, and of travelling in a bubble.
Perhaps the most profound effect this year is having on me is to change how I conceive of travelling - later in our journey I may try to articulate this. For now I'm going to have a drink - probably a cup of tea or maybe a glass of the excellent tree tomato juice they have here - and then another frame or two of pool with the girls.
Posted: Sat - October 1, 2005 at 12:37 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