Home again, Home again

Well, this is not going to be a very exciting entry. I´ll make it short and sweet. Katy has been sick since the 18th of September with no break. She never really got over the amoebas and got a serious infection as well. We checked into the hospital in Quito a week ago, after returning from the beach on a night bus from the coast ( a hellish experience). We got out of the hospital this morning. Katy is fine, feeling weak, but very grateful to leave the hospital. All I will say about the hospital is, staying in hospitals where they don´t speak English is very confusing and at times extremely frustrating.

We´re flying home to Baltimore to stay with Katy´s family for a bit, this Thursday the 7th of Sep. After a week or two in Baltimore we´ll be going down to Asheville NC, to find a place to live and some jobs.

So, six months in South America or six weeks, who´s counting?

Baa baa black sheep, have you any medicine ?

Well, I have to say I spent this last week high in the Andes, far from civilization, in some of the most beautiful surroundings I've ever seen. We left Sacasili and behind last Thursday and hopped on a bus to the little town of Chugchilan. Chugchilan has about 300 residents and is way, way up in the mountains at about 10,300 ft. It also has the Black Sheep Inn, an amazing lodge, that Katy took me to as a belated birthday present. The picture above is me, its hard to explain how high up I was, or how little the bump I´m sitting on is. The picture below is the dropoff behind me.



The busride was nothing short of terrifying. Windy dirt roads, about one and a half lane, with dropoffs of 100's of feet to the side. You've never lived until you go around a blind curve and there is a another bus coming towards you. You just can't figure out how they´ll both fit, but they do. Anyway, we didn't fight over the window seat this ride.

The plateau below is where the above pics were taken, the little bump all the way to the left is where I was. Its also the view from our room.

The problem with the last week is that Katy has been really sick. Wrenching stomach cramps and nausea, day after night after day. We kept hoping it would pass and we'd get to enjoy the last of our time at the Black Sheep, but it didn't. So yesterday we got a van and driver and went to the capitol Quito.

On the drive to Quito as we wind along the mountains, our driver pulled over with a thump and a groan, of course its a flat tire. I asked him if he had a spare and he said yes, so I figured it would all be alright. As he tries to unscrew the lug nuts I started to get a sinking feeling. They were on really tight, probably a mechanic with a pneumatic drill. So I of course have to give it a shot, nothing, doesn´t budge. Then we stand on the wrench, then we jump, then we bend the wrench. damn it.

I decided to get Katy to push on the bent wrench with her foot to keep it on the nut and gave it one last shot. It was one of those moments where you just really want it to work. Really, if it doesn't work you might cry. After puffing and straining and making weird faces..... the nut came loose, best feeling ever. After that we used the foot technique and got all but two nuts off. Then a milk truck came by and after giggling at us, the driver got off the last two. I woke up today and the muscles behind my shoulderblades feel like somebody hammered on them.

We made it to Quito, went to the doctor, and it's ¨The Amoebas". 40$ and a prescription later everything seems ok again, except my back. Tommorow we're going to a small beach town called Canoa for 6 days. We're gonna do beach stuff and relax, eat some ceviche, and not get anymore stomach bugs, hopefully not mutually exclusive activities.

On the benefits of small towns.

We left Riobamba behind on Monday, but we´re still discussing the devil train. We caught a bus Monday morning (actually got seats) for the town of Latacunga. We really didn´t have any reason to be in Latacunga, its just a largish town with a bus station on the way to the Quilatoa region. We have reservations for the weekend at the Black Sheep Inn, an ecolodge high in the cloud forest, and Latacunga is on the way. We got to Latacunga and immediately decided to leave. Its big and noisy and dusty, something we´re trying to avoid. We took a chance on a small town called Sacasili. It´s on the map but not in the guide book. It was a 20 min bus ride but very different. It´s a little town, centered around a square with the best tended gardens I´ve seen down here. We´ve watched two guys constantly working in them since we arrived.

We´re staying in a hotel on the square, with a balcony and a great view, but no working sink. We´ve also noticed a deluge of water coming through the roof on the floor below ours. I´m wondering about the plumbing.



On that note here is a picture of our shower. Yes, that is a large electrical switch right in the shower with you. I think the equivalent would be bringing the hair dryer in. This is actually not even a little unusual. The switch is for the showerhead which heats the water with an electric coil, right before it drips on your head. These are fairly universal. They don´t always have the switch in the shower with you though.

Last night we sat on our balcony and ate pinepple and cheese empanadas for dinner. Katy once again took the lead in Rummy, (I was enjoying a brief two day lead) and drank warm beverages of Coke and something that passes for whisky.

We´ll be in Sacasili until Thursday morning when we head to Chugchilan and our weekend of luxury at the Black Sheep Inn. Tommorow wep´re taking a day trip to another small town nearby just for a change of scenery.

Devil Train!!!

So our reason for going to Riobamba was to take a train called ¨El Nariz del Diablo.¨ It travels along the old trans Andean railway and has sections that are steeper than anyother railroad in the world. It´s mostly used for sightseeing by tourists these days. In order to get a good view that pack onto the roofs of the train cars, some of which have small railings, some do not.

We waited in line for tickets for almost an hour and were suprised at how many people were there, one of the hazards of doing something mentioned as amazing in a popular guidebook. The train left at 7AM the next morning. We returned to our hostel and cooked an interesting dinner of scrambled eggs and veggies from the market. I say interesting because we put soy sauce in, and it gave the whole thing a grayish color. We also used the local fresh cheese which reacts in interesting ways when cooked. After dinner we played our habitual game of Rummy (We have an ongoing game of Rummy for the duration of our trip, Katy is currently 20 points ahead out of 2000, its a very tight match.) and went to bed early. We got up at 5Am and made it to the train station by 6. The train roof was packed with bundled up gringos. We clambered up the last car with room and staked out our spot. After sitting up there for about 5 min. I realized that my feet were going to freeze off, due to wearing sandals. I had also forgotten the sunscreen and my sunglasses, It was a disheartening start to a difficult day. As the train pulled out of the station an overwhelming urge to pee came over me, not good.

I will add here that as the train moved through the countryside, I was blown away by the landscape and fascinated by my view of Ecuadorian farm fields and their irrigation techniques which are extensive. I also could no longer feel my feet and I thought my bladder was going to explode, with no bathroom in sight. I contemplated throwing myself off the train into some of the more comortable looking felds, anything to relieve myself.

Slowly, as the sun came out my feet warmed up, and my bladder filled to an overwhelming capacity. I was forced to recline (as much as possible in the sardine like conditions) and not move, every bump bringing up the possibility of wetting myself. I was teased cruelly when we stopped for a moment in a small town to let traffic pass and I thought I might be allowed off what I had begun to call it in my mind, The Devil Train. Finally at 10AM after hours of near pants peeing conditions, the train stopped in a small mountain town and I scrambled over families and children to reach the ladder first and hurl myself towards a bathroom. I threw some money at the the attendant and had a few moments of blisslike release. God, life was once again, bearable and full of hope, for now.



For the next few hours I sat on the train roof reveling in my relaxed and empty condition. The scenery grew drier and more brown as we went higher into the mountains. The irrigation canals grew smaller and their flows were mere trickles. The fields that had the luxury of water were bright green in comparision to their neighbors. As we passed into the afternoon the sun grew hotter and brighter, in direct contrast to the mornings huddled shivering.


So we eventually reached the last town on the trains itinerary. Here to our amazement, more people packed on the trains roof, for the dramatic descent down a mountainside that gave the train its name. By this time I was thouroughly sunburned and kind of over the whole thing. The next few hours passed agonizingly slowly as our train crawled down the mountainside in a series of switchbacks that required long pauses and track changes, all with much jolting of cars as we sat perched on the edge of some staggering precipices.

Finally we reached the bottom, which was at the level of the river above. There were the abandoned ruins of a church and another nameless building and the river. We got off the roof and made the decision to make the journey back up inside the baqggage cars to get out of the sun and to actually be able to move around. We crawled up into one of the cars, and reveled in the cool shade of the metal box. We met some nice people and were standing and talking to an English teacher from L.A. and watchin the scenery scroll by the car doors. All of a sudden with no warning screeches or bumps the train came to a dead halt with a really scary boom. We were thrown bodily across the car for 4 or 5 ft. and landed sprawling on our butts. An Ecuadorian family sitting on a bench screeched across half the car, their baby luckily unharmed started screeching immdiately as did the other 3 kids in the car. I was immediately sure hundreds of gringos had been thrown to their deaths, but when I peered out they were all still up there, I guess they were packed in so tight that nobody had anywhere to go. The older lady sitting on the bench expressed everybodies feelings very simply when she announced, ¨No Mas Tren¨.

We made it back to town where I promptly sat down at a cafe and had a beer. After relaxing for a few minutes we went to get on a bus back to Riobamba, ¨No mas Tren¨. Due to the flood of gringos doing the same thing, the buses were full. Luckily we know that South American buses are never full, and Katy in a flash of brilliance asked if we could stand in the aisle. The bus guy, answered very simply, ¨Porque No?¨ Why Not?. So as a crowd of angry people yelled at the ticket office we quietly boarded the last bus back to Riobamba, standing up. I got some more reading done, and that was the end of the Devil Train.

The Road to Riobamba

The road to Riobamba is not that long, that bumpy, or that twisty but it´s a lot better if you have a seat on the bus. We boarded our bus to Riobamba this morning to find that it was quite full. This was unfortunate because we were waiting for the bus with about 15 gringos who were now packing on and looking for seats. Katy and I got on quickly in the hope of finding seats but to no avail. The gringos piling in near the door couldn´t see the bus was full all the way to the back and I guess they thought we just liked standing in the aisle because many of them felt the need to squeeze past everbody and jostle their way to the back to verify that in fact there were no seats. After finding themselves claustrophobically packed into the back they must have decided that the front was better so they jostled back to their original positions. It was somewhere in here that I turned to Katy and said ¨The Road to Riobamaba,¨ which i thought was pretty funny, and I guess she did too cause she STOLE IT FOR HER BLOG TITLE. After that I just opened my book and read standing up for almost an hour. We snagged some seats halfway there, and then I read sitting down.

Now we´re in Riobamba, which is windy dust and crowded, not nice like Banos. We did get to shop in a crazy huge market today, that had Everything ever made or grown, mostly. It was my first crazy market experience. I kind of liked it. We went to a supermercado later to buy some parmesean cheese and I had a moment where I saw the difference between the two had some deep thoughts about how the world is changing. very deep thoughts.

On Ecuadorian Dogs

I like dogs. I tend to notice them and I will probably try to pet them. I´ve been doing this pretty consistently since we got here. No problems so far.

I just wanted to remark on the fact that there a lot of pet dogs in Ecuador and they´re pretty well fed and taken care of, certainly not like the dogs of Haiti. Haitian dogs are all ribs and tendons and hungry looks. The dogs here are rarely on leashes people walk through the streets with their pets trailing after them. There are lots of different breeds too.

Anyway, my point here is that a country can´t be doing too bad when its dogs are well taken care of.

Banos

I´m wary of overly praising every town we stop in, but I really like Banos. Its a medium sized town nestled in a valley. The mountains tower over every side of it, patchworks of trees and square farm fields cut onto the nearly vertical mountainsides. To the north of town an active volcano looms, occasionally rumbling and spurting out clouds of ash or fiery glowing rocks. To the south is a deep canyon with a rushing river.

We´ve been here since Saturday, taking Spanish lessons at a school around the corner from our hotel. Our Spanish teacher is a 26 yr old Ecuadorian named Marco. He´s very nice and a good teacher. He likes to say Wow a lot, in his accent it sounds like Hwow. He puncuates most everthing with Hwow. I like him.

We went for a hike up one of the mountains yesterday. It was a steep hour long climp to the lowest summit on one of the ridges surrounding Banos. There were two cafes at the top and amazing views of the town and the ash spewing volcano. The top of the Volcano was covered in clouds, but you could hear it rumbling and see the ash spewing over the top of the cloud cover. I had a beer at the cafe and alternated between watching doll sized Banos, and the volcano, nice afternoon.

This morning we actually got up at 6:00am and went running then went to the thermal baths, La piscinas de la Virgen. They´re hotter than our hot tub and busy at 6:00am.

We´re thinking about coming back to Banos in December and staying here for a month, taking more Spanish lessons and enjoying the town.

Waterfalls

This is us playing in a waterfall in Misahualli

The Corruption of a Parrot

I I like this bird.

Where do the Monkey´s Sleep?

We left Tena on Thursday to head to Misahualli, a small town on the edge of two joining rivers, which head on to join the Amazon river. Misahualli is small and feels kind of sleepy and nice. The town is centered around a main plaza where most of the hotels and restaraunts are situated. The plaza is also home to a very mischevious and fearless band of monkeys. There is a sign in the plaza that reads ¨Careful, the Monkeys are a part of Life,¨ and they are. The monkeys hang out at the beach along the river during the day, playing in the trees and getting into the action along the riverfront, begging and stealing all the food and sodas (they love soda, and can drink it like a person) that they can. In the evening when the action shifts to the square so do the monkeys. You can walk around with bottle of water in your hand and suddenly feel a tug on it, looking down you´ll find a monkey with a look on his face like ¨You don´t need that do you?¨ Anyway, we had a lot of fun watching the monkeys, play with each other, people, and the village dogs. We just couldn´t figure out where they slept, at night they all just seemed to dissapear out of the square.

Thursday, our first night in Misahualli we stayed in a very nice jungle lodge (a.k.a. resort) with private cabins, a pool, and trails to a waterfall you could swim in. It was across the river from town and you had to take a canoe to get there or back. We swam in their waterfall and slid down the rocks into the river, and I almost fed their Parrot some beer (He definitely wanted some, but I decided I didn´t want to drink after a parrot and he wasn´t getting the whole thing).

Friday morning we woke up and swam laps in the pool (Dad), and had our complimentary breakfast. After that we went into town and got a nice cheap room on the square. We had seen people tubing down the river so we decided to figure what the word for innertube was in spanish and to rent some to float down the river on. I actually negotiated this feat (I have to admit Katy does a lot of our communicating), I got directions to Carlos´house (Carlos is apparently the local renter of tubes ¨bollas in espanol¨. Found his house, met Carlos and got innertubes. After that we hired a canoe guy to take us up the river so we could float back down.

Tubing down a huge South American River (Rio Napo) that NOBODY else is on, except the two people panning for gold on the bank and stopping on little beaches to lay in the sun or the little streams running into the river, is a damn fine day. One of the best ever maybe. I did fall out of my tube in some particularly fast water, and Katy did think I had maybe drowned, luckily I only swallowd about a litre of river water, the effects of which remain to be seen.

That night we had our question answered, the monkeys sleep on the roof of the Hostal Shaw, right on top of our room, and they don´t sleep much past 3AM. Today we spent on the bus going back west and south and up to the town of Banos, which is gorgeous. Its next to a huge river that rushes along the bottom of a big canyon with steep mountains on either side. They have little farms going right up the slopes.

I´ll post some pictures tommorow. The computer here isn´t cooperating with our camera.