Friobamba

About a month ago I spent a long weekend with two friends, Diego and Lisset, in Riobamba, also known as ‘Friobamba’ (‘frío’ = ‘cold’).


One of Riobamba's claims to fame, which is a bit more exciting than the typical 'My Aunty once shook hands with Tony Hart', are its stunning views of the volcano Chimborazo. Ol' Chimbo is the highest peak in Ecuador and the furthest point from the centre of the earth due to the equatorial bulge which gives it the right to laugh in the face of the non-bulging Himalayas!

The photo below is of Riobamba's local market where ice is still brought down from the volcano twice a week and used for making juices. Two brothers from an ancient ice-wielding family are the only remaining devotees of the idea that a blackberry and coconut juice is simply inconsiderable without volcanic ice cubes: now there's an oxymoron for you!

diego and liseth somehow didn't find this shop as amusing as I did!

We attended a CU conference over the weekend and undertook the epic 12 hour bus journey a few days earlier to ride the famous ‘Nariz del Diablo’, ‘The Devil’s Nose’ railway, which is the only remaining part of a once extensive and pioneering rail network in Ecuador. Any quick flick through an Ecuador guide book will highly recommend the 2-3 hour journey, which boasts a steam engine, stunning views and the chance to sit on top of the train as it whips along dangerous precipices. We arrived in Riobamba a day early to ensure we got tickets, and arose early on the frío Friday morning to discover that:

1. We were going on a tram, as the train was being repaired
2. We couldn’t travel on top because some tourists had recently been decapitated by newly-erected mobile phone cables along the route
3. The views weren’t as good as the ones on the nearby bus rides!!

Despite all that, we greatly enjoyed our non-mountable non-steam non-train train ride!

with a lovely, crazy Colombian friend we made at the train station

astronomical excellence in Alausí, one of the stop en route

We then spent 2 days at the conference which was really enjoyable, and toddled back to Loja on the Sunday night on a bus for which too many tickets had been sold (the shadow of a man standing up next to me haunted my 12 hours of dreams) after a rather amusing bus-wide fight about some missing apples which had mysteriously vanished from someone’s seat.

Quick Pics...

buskers in Cuenca

facial improvements in Cuenca

visiting Tatiana, a friend in Cuenca

coming to a garden party near you...

discovering hidden doors with lene

bedtime stories with zaydha's little sister

café days

funky express band

The Roses Descend: Part III

In the final stretch of our time together we bussed to Baños, a small town covered with the mystery, fear and awe that come from living in the tousled skirts of an active volcano. The effect of the evacuations last August is still felt as the incoming bus weaves through enormous piles of roadside ash.


Baños is a beautiful island town, raised above the rushing jungle-headed waters on high riverside flanks.
We got off the bus among the many sellers of sugar cane; lorries laden with the recently-hacked caña were continually arriving and the tough green stalks were stripped and chopped up, ready to be chewed by sugar-needy travellers.
Chewing sugar cane became rather a theme over the next few days, Jay being enamoured with the small bags of pale sticks which ressembled parsnip, but which emmited deliciously sweet juice when chewed along the grain and finally left you with a mouth full of straw-like plant residue.Baños is a spa town, and the boiling thermal water pouring down from the volcanic springs gave us a good Romanesque experience as we nightly joined half of the town’s residents in a series of freezing, bath-warm and boiling pools under the stars and adjacent to a gushing waterfall bursting out of the dark rocks. It made the Center Parcs spa look a bit lame!

We bumped into Martin, another SIM-er from Loja, who was also travelling with his parents, and happily spent the next few days eating and meeting them intentionally and accidentally. On our first full day we decided to do the famous Ruta de las Cascadas- a downhill bike ride past dozens of waterfalls, miniscule and terrifying, right to the edge of the jungle. We donned our cycle helmets (possibly borrowed from local miners) and began an adventure of large dams, ravine-crossing cable cars, roadside orchids, one long, dark mountain tunnel shared with oncoming traffic, inadvertent mud baths, a puncture (thanks, Dad!) and increasingly jungly fauna and breathtaking views over the valley.

jay took this photo whilst dad fixed my puncture!

Around lunchtime we stopped nearby an enormous waterfall called The Devil’s Cauldron, which we walked about half an hour to reach and were not disappointed. Gallons and gallons of water were forced down from the mountains into a cauldron of rock, swirling angrily and intensely in the enclosed pool before being released through the small outlet which formed a more orthodox waterfall further down. The owners of a nearby restaurant spent 6 months constructing a viewing platform with three descending levels; the last of which cannot be used during the rainy season, and the first of which still gets you wet in the dry. They were 6 months of daily donning abseiling gear for the owner and his workmen, as they set concrete and formed stone staircases above perilous watery depths below. It was stunning, and I would rather the relentless iced-water pumelling and whirling below us remain in your imagination than tamed and warmed by an inadequate photograph.

We cyled to Río Negro, almost the mouth of the jungle at Puyo, and Jay and I had the tired yet firm desire to press on into the beckoning green beyond, but after hours of amazing downhill bursts we decided to throw our bikes in a bus and head back to Baños for the thermal baths and a nice meal with Martin y familia. Whilst waiting for the bus, a lovely old lady with a most impressive beard leant us two stools as we sat in the dusty road with cheap ice cream, smiled at me lots and then gave me an enormous hug as we left.

Now, a summary of our time in Baños would not be complete without a reference to the various climbs out of town up to the top of the hill past the Evacuation Bridge, from where we looked and longed for Tungurahua. If ever you desire poetic inspiration, or to revel in the beauty of incomprehensible yet intoxicating words, look at a map of Ecuador and just read the town and volcano names. Tung-goo-rah-wah, Tung-goo-rah-wah. Never have I so longed for clouds to clear, and as we waited and waited for spectacular views of the bubbling companion tantalisingly close to us, we came to content ourselves with infrequent black cauliflower emissions of smoke and ash pushing their way above the persisent dull clouds. Not a bad thing to have to content oneself with, all things considered.

Tungurahua from a distance- Giovanni our taxi driver took this photo with Dad's camera which he left in the car!

The day after the epic jungle journey we set out in early morning rain along the same road, only this time in a small van loaded with raft and several sleeping Ecuadorians (thankfully not the driver, though that was just an unexpected bonus) and we drove slightly beyond Rio Negro to begin our jaunt down the Río Pastaza, not exactly white water but brown and rough enough for us! We arrived at the sports centre, a hut with a plastic sheet where we changed into our delicious wetsuits (in the rain) and were given instructions for rafting, not drowning etc. Then we mounted our inflatable vessel with other equally clueless foreigners and began an exhilerating super-speed-cruise about 30km into jungle proper. Jay and Dad were at the head of the mighty vessel and Mum soon realised that she wasn’t about to meet a watery end, and we all had a jolly nice time, what?

We descended in Puyo where we had traditional lunch (rice and chicken, rice and chicken… thus goes the rhythm of my digestive process) and saw a bright green parrot sitting outside the window. After Jay had convinced the guides that they would never win her hand nor her father’s blessing, we drove back to Baños via Shell and Mera, where Jim and Elizabeth Elliot lived before ‘moving in’ to the jungle, for those in the know.

And cake! There was lots of cake in Baños, which obviously marks it out as one of the best places to visit in Ecuador, (apart from my kitchen, but Lonely Planet have so far been terribly slow to catch on).

Prepare for unashamed tangent: talking of vessels reminded me of a conversation with a policeman I had in Loja last week. Normally the rule of the law here makes you feel more threatened than safe, as large groups of policeman hiss and made lewd comments on a frequent basis. However, last week whilst waiting for a shop to open in the central square I chanced to sit upon the grass (Cambridge pettiness appearing to be far removed from Loja) and continued my reading of Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’. Presently a policia presented himself to me, greeted me, giggled, and then walked away again. Bemused, I continued reading. A couple of pages later he returned, and, greeting me again, apologetically informed me that it was not the done thing to sit on the grass. Apologising (though not as much as him) I immediately made to move.
“No! Wait, you don’t have to move really, I suppose. I mean, you won’t be here for very long will you?” “No, really, it’s fine.. I can sit on the bench.” “No! Don’t be silly. Where are you from? [Insert normal formalities here…] Can you tell me about the vikings?”

So, for the next twenty minutes we remained on the forbidden grass and I shared my entire viking knowledge (mainly based on a primary school viking production which involved sitting on ‘long boat’ benches and singing ‘Row, Row, We are the vikings…’), discovering to my joy that this policeman has been wondering about the ins and out of los vikingos for a very long time without having anyone to ask! Despite my deficient knowledge he seemed delighted, another service to mankind dispensed….

Quito's colonial centre

Anyway, returning to family exploits… we returned to Quito for our final few days and did the obligatory afternoon trip to ‘Mitad del Mundo’, the predictably cliché tiny town constructed around the equatorial line, which, ironically, they painted according to measurements which have now been shown to be about 240m out. Quite funny really, but I am in no position to mock! So, putting empirical awareness firmly out of mind we straddled the hemisphere, with no particular feeling of grandeur and, disappointingly, no toilets with which to see the Coriolis Force which doesn’t even work on such small quantities of water anyway. All in all, the sum value is in the following photos, to be passed down through Rose family generations:


So, after a wonderful few weeks together we bade farewell at Quito airport one Saturday afternoon, to be reunitied after many more adventures at home and abroad. It was both wonderfully normal and yet rather strange to thus blend such different worlds, but I think that returning home, 2 months today, will be easier knowing that those I will be around have shared Loja with me.

The Roses Descend: Part II

Early Saturday morning we were reunited with the now legendary Giovanni who drove us 2 hours north of Quito to Otavalo, a town famous worldwide for its enormous Saturday market.

The road to Otavalo

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a wife and daughters will find his fortune wanting when they start to shop.

We spent hours walking around endless stalls of every kind of woven item imaginable, ponchos, paintings, chickens, jewellery, hammocks, plastic fruits… it was a quite unique experience. Dad soon grew tired of mooching and he and Jay caught a taxi to a nearby leather village (i.e. famous for, not made of) and both returned to our hotel that night with new leather jackets. I took lots of pictures at Otavalo but unfortunately had my camera stolen a few days later, so use your imagination to conjure up tired, sun-battered faces learning against impossibly high piles of equally sun-battered woven fabrics, and beautifully-dressed indigenous ladies clothed with resourceful smiles trying to outdo their beadwork rivals.

roast hog and scarves, a classic combination

We stayed in a lovely hotel in Otavalo which gave slight relief from the constant stream of traveling which left a persistent echo of bus engines, bus sellers and bus scent in mind and mouth. We sat outside in a beautiful garden dotted with flitty hummingbirds and enjoyed ‘Horniman’s Tea’, which, despite not tasting as good as Twinings, definitely wins on comedy value. Any comedy value to be found the following day was definitely only in hindsight, as we traveled from Otavalo, past Quito, down to Latacunga, a town somewhat akin to Loja in its fame and tourist appeal (lacking the former and hiding the latter). During the journey as the rain turned the Panamerican into a mud bath (minus the therapeutic qualities) we drove past two buses which had collided to form a perfect T shape and leave many dead, as we saw on the news the following day. Then my camera was stolen by some geezeros dodgerios sitting behind us before we pulled into Latacunga and settled into our hilariously miserable hotel, finding everything in the town shut for Easter Sunday as the rain and thick cloud continued to dismally bathe the town. Thinking about it, it’s pretty hilarious, but I was pretty fed up in the photo below:

We ate lunch and dinner in the only open restaurant in town and then went to bed early after all wrapping up in our new Otavalo woolies and watching ‘Home Alone’ in mine and Jay’s windowless hotel room.

‘I thought it was supposed to be hot at the equator?’

‘Not at 2800m, it would appear.’

We rose early the following morning to fulfill our purpose in coming to Latacunga- the famous ‘Quilotoa Loop’, a remote and adventurous voyage of hiking and catching milk floats and rare buses to travel round extremely isolated communities amongst striking scenery and past Laguna Quilotoa, a volcanic crater filled with alkaline water. As time was limited and we had had our fill of buses, we caught a taxi from Latacunga as far as the lagoon, past three villages and numerous unmapped indigenous settlements.

The drive was truly spectacular; the most striking feature being the cultivated land set right at the top of the patchwork peaks, the harvesting of which would definitely require Mr Motivator and probably lashings of fluorescent lyrcra. The early mist rose as we began our drive and then descended as we rose higher and higher into the moutains. A feeling of utter abandon cloaked the journey, only temporarily punctuated by the sight of fire in tiny hillside huts. Our first stop was at the service station; a large pile of mud behind which we relieved ourselves and, upon having to use our legs, we keenly felt the lack of oxygen at such great heights. The second stop was at the village of Tigua, from where the peaks of Cotopaxi and other volcanoes would have been visible without the thick layer of cloud. Vividly colourful paintings of Andean life which are internationally recognised (whatever that means) were originally painted in Tigua on sheepskin canvases. We stopped off at the local gallery, which was closed, but as we stood by the door the woman who runs it ran down from her house with the keys to let us in. We were faced with ghoulish masks and delicate depictions of village existence covering the walls and we bought a few pictures, giving us the perfect excuse to refuse the oncoming onslaught of ‘Genuine Tigua Pictures’ or ‘Better Than Tigua Pictures’ or ‘Pictures Made With Better-Fed Sheep’ over the next few days. The little girl in the picture below painted all of the pictures we bought.

A few hours later we arrived at the lake, paying $1 entrance to the village which has sprung up purely due to tourism. We climbed the steps to the lookout post and the view waiting below us was incredible. A heady mix of altitude, enormous volcanic flanks dropping down to deadly still, eerily bright water, a near total lack of vegetation and continued silence made for an impressive yet rather terrifying first meeting with Quilotoa. The photographs do it no justice at all.

We decided to hike down to the base of the water, much to Mum’s delight, joy and overall rapture. We began our descent which involved sliding down huge stretches of volcanic sand, trapsing across greenish flats and navegating down bouldered pathways. We had ordered two donkeys at the top of the volcano to bring us back up again, or at least some of us, as we were now at 3854m, and walking up the steps had puffed us enough. We arrived at the base of the water and the awe simply changed angle. There is no inlet for the water and the huge, immovable mass of liquid increased in eeriness as its blueness seeped out to reveal a deep emerald.

There was some slight confusion about whose donkey was whose as a few came trotting down the crater with their guides and several people seemed to have ordered them. Eventually Dad and Jay set off walking and Mum and I began our very bumpy ride to the top of the volcano, with the horseriding in Vilcabamba our only experience to help us cling on to the saddle-less mules.

Dad and I swapped for a brief moment, but I think I failed to get into a rythym and the old story of parents suffering for their children was padded out as Dad was forced to keep walking after I nearly collapses from (perceived) heart failure!

The drive back to Latacunga gave us our first terrestrial glimpse of the volcano Tungurahua, puffing out smoke in the distance as the sun began to set. We returned to a much livelier Latacunga, and I shall end this entry with these extracts from the safety notice in our hotel room, which are indeed ones that should we should all heed with great seriousness:

Hotel Rodelu gives you the normest welcome to Latacunga and reminds you:

The hostage is responsible of all normal use of all fornoture put on your use and to maintain an adequate suffer at ALL MOMENT IN HOTEL

(Spanish reads: The guest is responsible for all furnishings placed at your disposal and asked to behave appropriately at all times in the hotel)

It is forbidden to listen music on hing volume or doing strong noises that disturb the resting of other hostages

It is furbidden to bring animals (wonderful, unintended pun!)

RODELU HOTEL IT IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR AND VALVEE. Thing leaved on room there is sewrity box. The water from the faceuh is good for drink, without dinger of haman heaty

(Spanish reads: The tap water is safe to drink without endangering your health)

The restaurant menu was selling Sir Lion Stick and Gordon Blue food, as well as pineapple hard drink (piña colada)... the waitress was somewhat baffled by our unsurpressable giggles!

More to follow...

The Roses Descend: Part One

It has been far too long since my last entry and this bears no relation whatsoever to a lack of activity or excitement; not, of course, that both are necessary all the time! However, amid the funk gigs, salsa nights, trips to Vilcabamba and late-night flings with dead 16thC writers, the arrival of the Rose consortium at the end of March is by far most in need of exposition.

Now, after months of a worrying mother telling me to be careful when traveling, I was rather surprised (although traumatised is probably a more honest word) to discover, whilst waiting at Quito airport at 11.30pm, that my parents and sister Jay had decided to make an unplanned stop-over in Bogotá, Colombia. They missed their connecting flight to Quito after flying Madrid-Bogotá, and my misplaced optimism and faith in airline punctuality meant that we would miss our morning flights to Loja, although they had already managed to get the earliest flight out to Quito. Further plagued by my optimism and affected both by a latino sense that ‘things will work out somehow’ and the imminent presence of my father who can always, always fix anything, I went to sleep fairly peacefully. I arose at 4.30am and got yet another taxi to the airport (I did that route 6 times in 24 hours, but it was probably a blessing in disguise: taxi acclimatisation) to see if we could change our flights to Loja and travel that afternoon or even in the next few days. Nada. Na-da.

Dada! Three very tired looking family members finally appeared at Quito airport the following morning. It was strange and wonderful to see them again; you often spend so long thinking about people or things, reminiscing, imagining what it would feel like to see them, and then suddenly the mystery all falls apart and you are face to face again. We began planning, and it turned out that Dad and Jay had indeed come up with a plan to get us to the other end of the country in order to not entirely mess up our minutely-planned itinerary: get a taxi!

That may sound sensible enough, but suffice it to say that people are still asking: ‘Did you REALLY get a taxi from Quito to Loja?’ It feels glamorous to have passed into the mythological and now form part of Lojano legend, but it felt less exciting as we progressed further and further along our 15 hour zoom straight down the Andes. We had a lovely taxi driver, Giovanni, who was a bit of a trooper and doubled up as a tour guide as we drove the ‘Avenida de los Volcanes’. Unfortunately the clouds prevented much volcano spotting, but our epic voyage took us through unnavegable mist, past a fatal car crash, via a wonderful fruit juice stall selling ‘bounty in a cup’, 6 hours on a road resembling the surface of the moon (on a bad hair day) and past hundreds of indigenous people walking beside the road with llamas, mist, and reams of ruddy-red-cheeked children in tiny ponchos. We arrived at about 2am in Loja after momentary panic at the question ‘you can find your house, can’t you?’ and impressively only 100m down the wrong side of the dual carriage way.

"Service Station"

The next few days were spent catching up, emptying suitcases of things brought for me (Photos of Oliver! Soreen! M&S knickers! Shoes! English Tea!) and getting to know Loja. We spent 2 nights at the café and Mum, Dad and Jay were introduced to lots of friends- Dad’s Spanish skills in no way impeded communication, and Mum got to put her recent lessons to use! We did lots of normal things which through new eyes had restored wonder- the Sunday market, pottering in the streets among ‘proper shops’ selling only one kind of produce, shoe shining in the squares, going to my church, street sellers…

Hugo, one of the street kids at the café, was fascinated with my Dad’s height and keeps talking about it- ‘When are you parents coming back? You Dad was hu-u-u-u-ge!’ (¡grandote!)- I think that even I will be scared of my 6ft+ brother in law after a year of Ecuadorian heights! On Sunday afternoon we headed off to Vilcabamba for a few days to relax amongst the hills, and for Mum’s first ‘Thing I Don’t Really Want To Do But Will Later Be Glad I Did’- horseriding through rivers and up gentle slopes for a few hours with the friend of a friend.


We ate well at Izhcayluma and were all massaged (and some of us waxed) and Dad and Jay took very well to the hammocks. We returned for one more night at the café on Tuesday and on Wednesday morning caught the bus to Cuenca. 13 Panama hats, the world’s largest steaks,



a few museum visits and general admiration of colonial architecture later, we flew to Quito on Friday morning in time for the famous Good Friday parades through the historical centre.


We joined the thousands of quiteños and gringos throbbing through the cobbled streets awaiting the huge procession of ‘Jesus del Gran Poder’. The purple-hooded marchers, los cucuruchos, simultaneously resembled medieval princesses and plague doctors. Their penitent air as they followed the many men dressed as Christ dragging enormous wooden crosses through the streets was only somewhat dampened by the rather intimate drunk next to Jay and I who aromatised the air and was one of the few people evidently wanting a hug whom I refused to indulge.

In the afternoon we went up the enormous cable car which hulks your bulk up Volcan Pichincha to a dizzying 4100m. After a long time queuing we arrived at the top for views which were breathtaking in every sense, just before the clouds folded in, covering the valley below and beckoning driving rain and spectacular lightning. We sheltered in a conveniently-located wood cabin which served us mulled-wine in polysytrene cups and rather tasteless corn on the cob- a new Christmas combination, perhaps? Our attempt to get back down the volcano was a good lesson in latin queuing culture, or absence thereof. As the rain slammed down, the cable cars were stopping and starting spasmodically leaving a huge backlog of wet, chilly punters rather keen to get back to the more sensible altitude of 2850m. Endless new families were formed as everyone behind us claimed to belong to parents or children further on in the queue. As people slipped by us and the growing numbers threatened to remove the already miniscule amount of oxygen, it was clear that these people would soon be shot were they ever to visit Wimbledon. I cast my mind back to the previous summer where we were given ‘The Guide to Queuing at Wimbledon’- a whole book, dedicated to the etiquette of waiting! Here is my own version for the Quito cable car:

The Guide to Queuing at the TeleferiQo We are so glad that you have chosen to travel up to the top of this volcano in our cable cars, here are a few tips to make you trip more enjoyable:

1. You will notice that there are two separate queues- an express queue and freight queue, make your choice based on whether you have a few extra dollars to hand and no desire to wait at least 3 hours.

2. Whilst you wait your turn, why not make the most of our wonderful amenities? This volcano boasts a fun fair, fast food outlets and an arcade- whoever said natural beauty couldn’t blend with the modern world?

3. Should your bladder request your temporary exit from the queue, we recommend that you take a large handbag with which to bash the endless stream of rather impertinent ladies in the Ladies who, unless you are aggressive, will rob you of the bodily peace which you set out to restore.

4. Once on the top of Volcan Pichincha, you will be pleased that together with the stunning views of Quito you will be met by our very own busker- gaze in awe at the valley below whilst enjoying ‘Eternal Flame’ on the panpipes. Should you wish to purchase a CD, it is unlikely that queuing will be necessary.

5. Should a large storm begin whilst you are up top, forget that you are an unmarried, only child whose parents emigrated to Spain- all of the people just far along enough in the queue to be out of earshot are now your relatives! Think of it as a kind of benevolent mass adoption, and remember that if God hadn’t wanted you to shove your way to the front of the queue, he wouldn’t have created elbows!

[More to follow…]

Singing and Shooting

(written on Saturday night)

When was the last time that anyone learnt a genuinely interesting piece of information from a glossy magazine? Well, this week in ‘Vanidades’ I learnt that Chauvin was a general under Napoleon Bonaparte, and was renowned for his dogmatism and stubborn characteristics, hence the birth of the male chauvinist (with optional pig). Last night I had the privilege of meeting my biggest one ever! My new-found knowledge allowed me to view the experience of dancing with someone who insisted on calling me ‘woman’ in every sentence with slight amusement, although eventually I was forced to run out of the club out of sheer terror that I would soon be stripped of any non-generic name and chained to an oven… which, ironically wouldn’t even be necessary. I have been having frequent baking urges of late and have made mango upside-down cake (which remained right-side up, probably due to being on the other side of the equator), mango sorbet, butterfly cakes, flapjacks, coconut macaroons, white chocolate muffins… all low fat alternatives to oppressive males!


This week we had the privilege of all of the Miss Ecuador candidates coming to San Sebastian, and so for once being vaguely blonde and walking through the square did not attract much attention as all hisses were averted… perhaps beauty contests aren’t such a bad idea after all…

Another exciting event in the square today was a drunk man crashing into the back of our taxi, and then proceeding to deny that it was his fault in the most passive way possible. Not exactly the material for a good fight scene in a film:

Drunk man with half-closed eyes in brand new 4 x 4 (number plates pending) bumps into stationary taxi

Girls inside yelp momentarily

Taxi driver exits taxi

Drunk driver stares forward nonplussed as taxi driver approaches

Taxi driver sticks head through drunk’s window and points animatedly to back of his source of income

Drunk driver inclines head towards taxista with as much haste as a legless rabbit, rolls his eyes, lifts up his hands feigning innocence

Taxi man examines back of his taxi, returns to window and tries to ask for contact details, drunk raises hands again and slurs that it most definitely wasn’t his fault (taxi driver tells us later)

Taxi driver is affected by the gesture of the moment, raises his hands, rolls his eyes and in resignation returns to the taxi to take us home

Drunk leers at us as we depart paths

This afternoon we had a BBQ for people who come to the Saturday night Bible Study at the café and one of the activities (see below) was good practice for any repetition of the two encounters above, I’m sure that shooting arrows at least at the drunk’s tyres would have been a valid response!
The past few weeks have really zoomed past since my uneventful séjour in Peru. By uneventful I mean not being woken up when our bus arrived at the border and almost not getting my passport stamped which was the whole purpose of the trip, and then arriving in Peru too early for any banks or money-changers to be open so going with my taxi driver to his friend’s house. The friend came out in PJs and then brought out a huge plastic bag full of Peruvian sucres, which I trustingly changed for dollars not having any other options… one of those times where you think you could get kidnapped but probably won’t, and besides, you know it will make a good story afterwards. I stayed a few days in Mancora, a small fishing village on the northern coast of Peru, famous for its good surf and replete with gringo-friendly restaurants. I was glad to finally get back to Loja and settle back into seeing friends, working and having some form of routine after being in the Galapagos and then having to leave the country!


The past week has been full of rehearsals for two gigs on Thursday and Friday night. On Thursday Maria and I played at my favourite club in Loja ‘Casa Tinku’ and managed to attract a large crowd despite general perplexity as to what a ‘Noche de Feeling’ (‘Night of, erm, feeling’) entailed, as the posters that were stuck all over town thus described our mix of jazz, blues, pop and ballads injected with good musicianship!



Last night I sang in a Beatle’s Tribute Concert headed up by Maria’s Uncle Rafael, who is a wonderful guitarist, and accompanied by Kenny, a British ex-pat. It’s been great to be singing again, and this week I have two more gigs on Thursday and Friday so rehearsals continue to be the theme of most free time!


On Thursday I’m singing in a charity concert to raise money for a local bar owner who has cancer, and on Friday the ‘invitada especial’ of ‘Funky Express Band’ who are one of my favourite local bands, and have just come back from Cuba where they recorded a video for their latest single… one soon finds that every musician in Loja is in at least 3 bands, so singing with one band means links to about 15 others!

My parents and sister Jay arrive in less than 2 weeks and it will be wonderful to show them round. During the BBQ this afternoon I stood looking over the valley and felt a great freshness and joy at being in the mountains and having the amazing chance to be intertwined with the life of such a lovely little town.

Galápagos: Underwater

These photos were taking during our snorkelling by Rolf, a Canadian guy on the boat.

white-tipped shark

Galápagoodnessgraciousmeit’samazing!

The daunting task of putting the past 10 days into words feels a bit like I’ve been asked to paint a royal portrait and given a box of stubby wax crayons- nothing short of a poetic masterpiece could convey anything vaguely approximating to the experience of being in the Galápagos Islands.. and whilst wax crayons are definitely yet to be as appreciated as they deserve, I shall let the following small selection of the myriad photos taken during my time away speak for themselves, almost…

Iguanas...

Perhaps the most iconic of the Galapagos dwellers, my initial amazement at the iguanas scattered across the road less travelled on our first day on Santa Cruz island rapidly had to adjust from ‘Wow!’ to ‘Oh, another iguana’, or I think my lifetime supply of adrenaline would have been used up in eight days [dubious biological possibility].





We saw marine, land and hybrid igauanas in an array of colours on nearly all of the 10 islands we visited, some of which looked like recent army recruits in their shedding camoflage skin, others which were bordering on obese having over indulged on cactuses [‘Iguana Obesity – Volcanic Parents Accused of Nutritional Irresponsibility’], and others which were suffering from the non-favourable vegetation conditions on their island due its being made of solified lava.

Life on the Boat

The boat I lived on for the week was the lovely, miniscule ‘Yolita’, bearer of many wonderful young travelers and raised toilets from which one easily fell into the waiting shower with an unexpected jolt of the boat. I shared a tiny bunk room with a French girl Karine for the first part of the week and with a Brit, Sarah, from Thursday until Sunday. As Yolita nightly wove her way through Pacific wetness we wove our way into the bathroom and into bed with great contortionist fun as our two rucksacks took up more than all of the floor space, and I learnt the hard way that I could not sit up in bed!

The 8-day survivors

Everyone looks more beautiful in the Galápagos..

A cook, guide, captain and 4 sailors made up the crew of the boat who stay on board for 12 weeks at a time. As one of the few in the group who spoke Spanish I got to know them quite well as they knew that they couldn’t make fun of me in front of me as they could with other passengers! My idyllic idea of their life sailing around the ocean was shattered as I got to know a group of fairly lonely, tired guys whose only change of scenery is really the fresh batch of tourists who arrive every week, and whilst there is possibly no greater place to have monotonous scenery, change is change and for them there is very little of it. I had to put up with many anti-Loja jokes as all of them were from the coast and the Sierra/Costa rivalry is equivalent to the North/South divide in the UK… ‘they eat dogs in Loja’ - the highest insult for a lojano- formed the basis of a wonderfully imaginative array of jokes and insults!

mapping our route and planning pirate expeditions

Dinner time

Being thrust together with 15 other travelers in a small space for a week meant that we all got to know each well which was great, and led to some rather monumental decisions.. one couple who got engaged during the week and the formation of a wonderful business plan for me and Eric, a lovely Swedish guy: ‘GALAPAGOS- The Musical!’, coming soon to a volcanic island near you. My French and now-less-non-existent-than-before Swedish both got an airing which was good, although I realised how comfortable I have become in Spanish and little words I have known for years in French kept coming out hispanified as I chatted with Karine which was all a bit terrifying!




Our amazing cook- the kitchen is what you see!

We often sailed to different islands overnight, which meant noisy intrusion into dreams and a very fine line between the feeling of ‘Oooh, I’m being rocked to sleep’ and ‘I WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN!’ One morning I was very sea sick and removed all introduced food items to the bottom of the ocean until I became so hungry that I ate a huge bowl of rice lying down and didn’t get up for a few hours until I knew it was safely beyond reach of the persistent waves. On the nights that we sailed a few of us slept on the top deck and found that falling to sleep whilst watching the stars provided a very effective fixed point which distracted from any wayward tummy movements!

The Group from the first half of the week on Isla Floreana

Life in the Air

A host of friggate birds regularly caught a ride on the upthrust of our air as we sailed. Each day we would walk along different trails which are rigorously set out by the National Park, and the islands with high cliffs provided the largest nesting spots for masked and blue-footed boobies, hawks, gulls, doves, friggates, owls, pelicans…

Tortugas

With its world-famous endemic giant turtles, a trip to the Galapagos would certainly not be complete without several encounters.. one morning we visited the Charles Darwin Research Centre which does lots of tortoise and turtle conservation [that’s a super power that the world of heroes is lacking] and breeding. This was my first encounter with turtle breeding, which was unexpectedly hilarious! (see below)

On our last full day we took the smaller boat through some salt water lagunas and watched beneath the murky green as enormous shadows floated past us and occasionally poked up their heads to breathe. Both the tortoises and turtles can live for up to 200 years which makes their lack of haste very understandable, although the little fellow below was most speedy in eating passion fruit which makes me wonder if that was the real secret of the turtle beating the hare…

A fascinating fact… the creator of E.T. spent time in the Galapagos and was inspired to make the little wrinkly alien in the syle of the turtles he saw!

in a very old shell we found in a café- sumbitted for the front cover of 'Turtle Weekly'

Passion fruit breakfast

No such thing as privacy...

El Esnorkeling

Each day it seemed that we found a more amazing place to snorkel. Being within the 5% of the Galapagos visitors not yet retired, our guide seemed to greatly enjoy taking us on watery jaunts lasting up to two hours, which was exhausting, but one of the most indescribably amazing experiences of my life. Which I shall, of course, now describe! We snorkelled hugging the coastline of different islands and it felt a bit like swimming in lasagna- everything had its own layer and I’m sure that the invisible pasta protection was the basis for the lack of worry about being less than a metre away from sharks on a fairly regular basis! Many a moment was spent floating and gawking as sea lions, tortoises, white-tipped sharks, huge schools of fish, sting rays, eagle rays and all of their friends flipped and rolled along below. It all sounds rather dreamlike now, but I’m pretty sure that it happened! On the last day as I swam past a protruding rock, three Galapagos penguins dove in succession from the rock in straight past my face, and their identical elegance within a soup of bubbles was breathtaking. Galapagos penguins are the smallest in the world!





Many a moment was spent floating and gawking as sea lions, tortoises, white-tipped sharks, huge schools of fish, sting rays, eagle rays and all of their friends flipped and rolled along below. It all sounds rather dreamlike now, but I’m pretty sure that it happened! On the last day as I swam past a protruding rock, three Galapagos penguins dove in succession from the rock in straight past my face, and their identical elegance within a soup of bubbles was breathtaking. Galapagos penguins are the smallest in the world!

Luís and the Lobos

The number of sea lions was incredible, if I remember correctly there are about 30,000 of them in the islands. They are waiting on the benches when you leave the airport and hiding in rocky coves in the most isolated spots. Perhaps most people know what sound a sea lion makes, but as they began their chorus of the most amazing belches I was very surprised! The babies emit a finely-tuned blend of belch, splutter and desperation whilst the adults sound like drunk, beer-bellied burpers.






Our guide, Luis, specialised more in bad jokes, tales of death on the islands and animal imitations than breathtaking biological insights. However, he did do an impressive sea lion impression which always confused the babies into belching away merrily as they looked for their mother who was, in fact, a bored tour guide looking for a bit of a giggle. Watching the sea lions play in the waves was like watching animated sausages wriggling around a cobalt frying pan; letting their fat bodies roll over each other as they caught the incoming waves. At times I suspected they were being paid for being so camera friendly, but as Luis embarked on another tale of death I realised it’s not all sweet and salty for the lobos de mar: ‘These baby, you tourist, touch baby, maybe have a cream on you hand and baby mother know he by smell, you your smell on baby and mother no want! Abandon baby and die, die, die….’ Let that be a lesson to us all.

Playas y Vistas...

The famous pinnacle on Isla Bartolomé, formed by a wayward US bomb during their WWII training in Galápagos

white coral on Isla Rábida

As the week went on the animals began to vary less, but the landscape changes in the different islands made looking out of the bedroom porthole every morning a complete revelation. Some islands looked positively lunar, and indeed apparently NASA have flimed there (send all conspiracy theories on a postcard), whereas others had the most beautiful flat, white, brillliantly blue beaches I have ever seen.

Sombrero Chino- The Chinese Hat

The weather was glorious every day which made the endless tones of turquoise even deeper and more vivid. My favourite beach was ‘Tortuga Bay’ which Eric and I walked to with an Italian couple, Alex and Manuela, on the day we were moored in Santa Cruz to pick up new passengers. We trapsed in the relentless sun along a 2.5km paved path (which felt like The Wizard of Oz meets the Wild West) which finally dropped us sweaty and exhausted onto an endless stretch of the finest white sand littered with marine iguanas.

There are red, green, black and white beaches on the islands and our many wet landings ashore meant that there was intimate contact with all of them!

Tortuga Bay, Santa Cruz

La Playa Roja, Isla Floreana, with Karine

Isla Española with Eric

Finishing Off...

There are far too many more things to mention, and I’m sure I’ve written more than enough for the average lunchtime read, so when I return for those who wish I shall show the rest of my 600 photos and tell you more stories! I am so amazed that I was able to go, and back in the Loja rain which welcomed me when I arrived back on Tuesday I can hardly believe that I am really the person in all of these photos! However, the comments on my tan prove it, as well as providing interesting cultural insight:

Non-Ecuadorian: ‘Your tan is amazing, I’m so jealous!’
Ecuadorian: ‘Gosh, you’re really burnt, don’t worry, I’m sure it will go away soon.’

Good times! I also spent time in Guayaquil with Carolina on my way back to Loja which was lovely (had breakfast at ‘Planet Ice Cream’ so things couldn’t really get much more magical). I’m off to Peru (exact destination unknown) this weekend to get my VISA renewed and revel in the unecessary bureacracy sending me on another overnight bus journey replete with loud kung fu movies followed by 3am salsa sessions!

Enjoy the photos!

Sights...

A few pictures from the past week...

A mural depicting the defeat of the Spanish, taken from the Puerta de la Ciudad

Loja´s City Gate, La Puerta de La Ciudad. Hanna and I visited yesterday and climbed to the top of the tower, only to find upon descending that the doors had been locked for lunch and we were trapped! After fits of giggles and plans to jump, we shouted to a guard below who kindly told the clean to unlock us, which provided great amusement for all!

Banana, anyone?

The discovery of a new juice! The one on the left is 'Alfalfa', made from plant extract (with carrot and orange added, presumably to add some orange to the taste of green)

Singing with Maria de los Angeles on Wednesday night for Valentine´s day in a lovely little old bar. Preceding days involved much frantic learning of lyrics in Spanish!

A view of Loja from t'other side of the valley

Meal with the girlies.. the discovery of Thai Curry Paste in a kitchen drawer was cause for a giant prawn-filled feast on Monday night. From that we learned that Ecudorians should never, ever visit India without wanting to lose a lot of weight!

Chifles... (fried plátano), or 'The eighth wonder of the world'

Water, water everywhere...

The afternoon light is bouncing violently off the newly painted facades of the banana buildings opposite the café as I stand at the cash desk and await the arrival of the band who are to play tonight: ‘Las manos del poder’, ‘The Hands of Power’. When they came in last week to ask if they could play I asked them their name, and they looked embarrassed and asked if they could tell me the following week when they had thought of one. Last night when they delivered more vibes implying that they had never played anywhere before, their wonderful name made me pray that Hands would most certainly be present tonight, but in order to switch off the power and save us all!!

Carnaval is now in even fuller swing and this morning a huge water bomb mercifully skidded off the top of my head. Having spent the past 20 minutes trying to keep my hair dry from the rain whilst walking to the Post Office it would have been a bit ironic had I been drenched at the last turn to my flat! People often walk into the café totally drenched, egged or foamed, and I´m becoming increasingly glad that I’ll be in a little boat in the middle of the Pacific when it reaches its climax next week. Not to say that we haven’t been making full use of our roof and the opportunities of wetting of Very Important Businessmen it virtually thrusts upon us!

This week has been a monumental and a calm one; my sister Amy had her first baby, Oliver. I thought that I would find it really difficult to be away and it has been strange to be so far removed from home at such an important family time, but I’m feeling a lot more peaceful and content in Loja than I have for a while which helps. I´ve been here for 5 months now, and this week I booked my flights home- I´ll be back on the 23^rd of July, which seems like a long away, but what with going to the Galápagos, a family visit, two trips to Peru to renew my VISA and then a bit of traveling before I leave, I think the second half of my time will bring me to my nephew before I know it!

I leave for Guayaquil on the Friday night bus [note to self- learn to love 1am horror movies] and then leave from the airport on Sunday morning for a one and a half hour flight to the islands, where I’ll begin my one week floating jaunt in a little boat called ‘Yolita’. Today I started reading a collection of stories and memories by Galápagos residents which I hope (naïvely) will relieve something of the feeling of being just another tourist taking lots and lots of photos (although of course I will!), and being in the most unspoilt place in the world without really having a grasp of the lives and immense poverty which have co-existed with such wonderful wildlife. The first is the story of a woman from Loja who was forced to move to the islands by her husband during a long drought in the province. He could give no reason for his compulsion to move to the islands, but was so persuaded that he said to her:

´Well, the only thing I´ll say to you is that given how young we both are, if our marriage falls apart it will be your fault, not mine, because I’m not staying to live here, I want to give you and my children a better lot in life, so I’m going, if you follow me, great, but if you insist on staying with your parents then it’s not my fault.’

After taking the tri-annual 8-day boat ride from Guayaquil, they found themselves working on Isabela, the largest island of the archipelago, as guardians of Ecuador’s Australia- a penal colony. The subsequent accounts of her depression, extreme loneliness and desire to die in childbirth provide a stark contrast to the thousands of people who visit precisely because they have been able to eke out an existence on their islands, whereas the Galápagos were the very epitomy of hopelessness for Blanca Castillo de Vargas.

Other exciting news is that the hotel next to the Loja Fire Station burned down last night without the firemen noticing until it was completely destroyed. My diet has recently consisted almost entirely of leaf-encased raisin sweet bread, called quimbolito. On Sunday afternoon Veronica, Joanna, Susana and I began reading the Gospel of John together. Bob and Millie are going to Chile next week so I am in charge at the café, which will mostly mean trying to enforce a ‘no water bombs in the kitchen’ rule. Perhaps I shall just encourage those with wetting intentions to sign up for the Fire Brigade.

Market Sights...

Carnaval

It´s February. The dark, cold month when trousers never seem to fully dry out after inadvertent bathings in the rain and constant wetness hanging in the air.

Or, alternatively, the fresh, bright month when trousers never seem to fully dry out after deliberate soakings from water bomb-wielding little boys.

Carnaval has arrived in Ecuador! Preceding Lent, technically it falls in the last few weeks of the month, yet for the past few weeks Loja has witnessed an ever-growing number of city-wide water fight protagonists. I´m yet to work out the link between Lent and the daily attacks with water balloons from roofs, balconies, doorways, church steps, but if this is the Ecuadorian version of pancake day- ridding oneself of the constant urge to soak strangers in the street- then it´s definitely a bit more exciting than ridding oneself of eggs and butter. In any case, the eggs are just part of the fun here- here´s to scrambled hair! So, we have stocked up on water bombs ready to defend ourself from the especially purposeful kids on the roof opposite ours, whose aim seems to be improving. Last night I was chased down the street by two kids who thankfully had very bad throwing skills. I looked one of them in the eye and told him he threw like a girl, at which he proceded to prove my point!

Last weekend I went to the baptism of one of Irma`s grandaughters and then spent the night at a huge family party which was brilliant. We had a huge meal at midnight and the rest of the night muched on cough sweets and local brew, dancing the night away to music pumped from speakers large enough permanently damage the hearing of all present.

Viviana, looks like a princess, screams like a queen!

After a first photo, Erica said- ´Boring! Let´s stick our tongues out and then my Mum will get annoyed!

Paulina and Irma

At the weekend the GAP girls and I went to Vilcabamba for a night and have all been rather ill since. A huge debate on whether diarrhoea or constipation is more desirable last night pretty much illustrates the symptoms! Too much detail? When it´s commoner than the common cold, you become pretty hardened to using such words! In our team meeting yesterday we all practised using a special needle pen to inject if we are about die from an allergic reaction.. but only if totally convinced death is imminent, for which there was no training. Happy days!

Cairo meets Vilcabamba: the inexplicable pyramid in the hostería we stayed in!

Yesterday I hosted an English speech competition in the town hall and Bob was one of the judges. 12 students spoke for 4 minutes on Pablo Palacio, one of the most important Ecuadorian writers of the 20th century. Whilst some contestants passed without incident, my favourite was a definite candidate for South American Dictator, crumpling up his face and moving his hands in such an angry manner that his body language was hard to relate to his words: ´we should be proud of Pablo Palacio, a wonderful example of Loja´s cultural contribution to Ecuadorian and world literature.´ Bob was on the panel of judges and told me that the girl who won, who was by no stretch of the imagination worthy of her prize, was awarded the gold medal because she was the oldest of all candidates, and another of the judges said that it would therefore be unfair if she didn´t win. I proposed that next year it be called: English Speech Competition, or ´Give in your date of birth to win a prize´, but I´m not sure it will catch on.

El concurso: I´m at the lectern at the left, Bob´s at the table, and the English grammar skills were unsure whether or not to enter the room

Things have been really busy of late, but we´ve got a lot more hands at the cafe which makes doing the groups and Bible studies a lot easier in terms of workload. I´ve just booked my holiday for when the cafe closes for Carnaval proper in 2 weeks- off to the Galápagos islands for a week, which is more exciting than the recent discovery that potatoes and icing are a world class combination. More information to follow!

Sunset from our roof

Befriending a llama

Step 1: Know your target. He is fluffy, white and in desperate need of some dental floss.

Step 2: Gradually intrude into his personal space, always maintaining an air of disinterest, and never showing fear.

Step 3: Introduce the idea that you too are a simple llama, just needing companionship. This is most effectively achieved by baring your teeth and looking as white and fluffy as possible.

Step 4: Take the plunge. Try not to make jerky movements when llama´s bad dental hygiene makes you worry more about your safety than your olfactory pleasure.

Step 5: Enjoy your new friend!

Saturday Rain

The only thing missing on this photo is the fragile and beautiful second rainbow hanging just above the first

Giant Rats, Tiny People

It’s late on a Friday night and I am probably only still awake because I bought some amazingly mad stripy blue (bleen) trousers, and falling asleep would tragically rob me of such a vision of vertical wonder. So, spurred on by my new apparel, I shall fill in the blanks from the past few weeks. Having the power to both create and fill the blanks, I remind you that many blanks remain unblanked to be filled, which seems to be an inevitable and beautiful part of the daily attrition of those Small Things You Don’t Notice At The Time But Will Surely Come To Miss.

I would really love to eat a good green olive and some blue cheese. This am currently wondering how viable it is for my visitng family members to pop some Saint Agur in their hand luggage.

On to more likely things, such as the new President popping up just outside the café, 10 of the 13 members of a visiting team being bed-ridden and one hospitalised, being interviewed on radio, TV and appearing in local taxis as a token foreigner on a laminated tourist brochure and the public incineration of a large, stuffed rat.

So numerous have been the protests, parades and general public manifestations of noise and colour since I arrived that I barely even flinched today on seeing about 50 horses wandering past our balcony, and huge procession headed up by a floating image of a local saint.

Two girls on a GAP year programme arrived from the UK at the beginning of January and they experienced their first night of fireworks last night, which reminded me of my first week here when the combination of enough erratic explosives to provide a lifetime’s work for the world’s Health and Safety Departments and nearby, waiting eyes still shocked me. I am now surprised when people ask me if I’m getting used to life in Loja; I walked down a certain street today for the first time in a few weeks and it felt like the urbanised version of Friends Reunited.

with hanna, becky and sebastian

hugo, one of the homeless kids who comes to the cafe

Last week, Rafael Correa, our new President, (‘what lovely eyes!) came to the Plaza de Independencia. The whole event could have easily been confused with a teenager-heavy pop concert as screams and various outward gestures of devotion to the blue-eyed leader rose up to our balcony. Correa was mobbed (‘he’s so pretty’) and soon disappeared from sight, and his rousing speech (‘apparently he’s one of the best looking national leaders in the world!’) arrived in the form of passionate yet highly muffled pleas for revolution, so he may as well have been advocating his favourite brand of toilet paper given the political upheaval he failed to wreak in my fertile mind. Watching the middle-aged mothers go a bit dizzy at the sight of President Pin-up provided rather more audiovisual entertainment than El Hombre himself.

Last night a local TV show came to make a short programme about the café and the things we do, so El Sendero was temporarily turned into a studio with the added surreal experience (surreality?!) of a group of Peruvian Madrigals arriving to work wonders with tambourines and accordions. I had my first guitar lesson today (4 months later than planned!) and soon hope to run away and join the merry band of travelling musicians, as long as they give me a pair of their furry furry trousers.

an old photograph of lojana guitar players, possibly wielding their instrumensts as secret weapons

My guitar teacher is one of Veronica’s friends who studies music in Buenos Aires (and gets there on the bus, 4 days’ travelling with a daily toilet stop) and also a teatro aficionado, and is running an improvisation workshop in February which will be a rare injection of good theatrical discipline in Loja. Not sure whether we will reach the subtleties of my fellow year-abroader Will, who is being thespian in Paris, and who reportedly had to be a tea bag dissolving a biscuit. If only I could imagine myself into a good cup of British Tea perhaps I could learn to be content and not dream of pre-heated tea pots and digestives.

A week ago a short-term team from Australia came to Loja, primarily to help out with the English activities we run, but also to see the work being done here and bring man power, although ‘17-year old incoherent boy power’ might be a more accurate description! We went out to one of the villages in the province, Gonzanamá, and painted some classrooms in the poorest school in the village and spent the day with the kids there who were wonderful but exhausting, highly malnourished yet bright.
Later in the week we went out to an extremely poor area of the town and ran a children’s programme, gave out food, painted lots of faces and somehow agreed it was a good idea to let kids bash each other with pillows on gladiator-tyle podiums (perhaps I’m missing a latin plural there).
Having spent most of my time with students so far it was lovely to be with tiny people, although really challenging to see the hopelessness of so many kids trapped in poverty.


Not that hopelessness stops there; 4 of my good friends are currently looking for work and things are distinctly murky in the Loja job markets. The feeling that nothing will every really change seeps like transparent liquid into politics as well as into all levels of education in such a small town, where the greatest aspiration of a class of 7-year olds is often to move to the United States to clean houses.

Starting next week for a month I’m going to be teaching for an hour a day in one of the local English language schools, a favour for the friend of a friend (the Ecuadorian version of the ‘Old Boys’ Club’ is the ‘Cousin of my Sister’s Friend’s Grandmother’ club, and generally involves fewer blazers). However, having become either distinctly Ecuadorian in my commitment-keeping or too obsessed with good dessert, I forgot the meeting I was supposed to attend tonight as I was eating cheesecake with Veronica. Ooops!

On that sweet, no-bake note, I shall end and commit some of the many un-unblanked blanks to future recollections.

Merry Christmas and a Pyrotechnical New Year!

I am now back in Loja after a lovely Christmas and a really enjoyable week of traveling, although 6 grim hours home on a bus yesterday was the longest I actually spent in transit, during which my growing feeling that lengthy bus journeys have been made even harder after a life of free first class rail travel was confirmed. That’s without even taking into account the goats, chickens and drunks trying to sit on my lap, although that lot would certainly somewhat enliven Midland Mainline.

Tuesday, December 26th

We left Loja heavily bathed in cloud juice and began the 430 metre upward journey on a road whose twists and turns meant that half of our journey was actually spent heading back towards Loja! During the elections one of the most talked-of political promises was road improvement, and as our suspension was almost entirely suspended by the deceptively deep holes (which, full of water, could have functioned as wells for entire communities) I understood why. The landscape began to shift dramatically and Loja’s unfeasibly pointy peaks eased out into a wide shock of beautifully smooth green crumples which looked like carelessly dropped mounds of silk flopping off the mountainside. We had a belated white Christmas in the form of the huge boulders dislodged by the recent downpours which winked in the middle of the road, forming a petrified barrier bettered only by the indigenous groups huddled along the roadside with washing lines suspended over our paths; a protest against something which was probably unrelated to their traffic warden underwear which flipped and danced in the wind.

We arrived at the cabins we stayed in for two nights, and I hardly need to say how lovely it was to stay in the top room with its stone walls, straw-matted floor and sloping bamboo ceiling and wonderfully comforting smell of cauliflower cheese, which most likely explains the vivid dreams I had there! Bob and Millie returned there yesterday on their way back from Quito and met a French man who is walking across South America with his llama, which I found almost too wonderful to believe and just hope that our paths cross in Loja, although I’m not sure llamas are allowed on the main roads, unlike quad bikes.

Cuenca cathedral, with its famous blue domes

Being philosophical over ice cream with Lyndsay

Wednesday

Having read an advert for a local collection of over 400 orchids, we naively set out on Wednesday morning and finally arrived at the closed orquideario after an hour and a half of enquiries at Cuenca University, advice from local taxi drivers, men in a tool shop, a woman in a mobile phone shop, a complete lack of any helpful signs which was in no way improved by my navigational ability and the fact that I asked for all of the directions, endless wrong turnings and incredulity that an orchid garden could actually be inside a place which was advertised as a school. This frustration was slightly echoed throughout my time in Cuenca as countless museums and lugares de interés were firmly padlocked shut, to the surprise of those who assured me that it would be business as normal. Perhaps the ‘normal’ is what caught us out! Anyway, we went into the centre of Cuenca to a hat workshop, which was really interesting.

The famous Panama hat has, in fact, always been made in Ecuador, but before being directly exported, entrepreneurial Panamanians shipped them to the United States and to Europe, giving them their erroneous nomenclature (that would be a good name for a band, my copyright!) This also followed their being worn by workers on the Panama canal and being wrongly identified by travelers. The industry remains far from tourist-intended in Ecuador, in Cuenca they form an integral part of indigenous dress (and there is a much higher concentration of indigenous people in Cuenca than in Loja) and the ceilings of the many workshops we passed were covered in bespoke bonnets for the local bonce. The hats are made from a palm fiber grown in the humid regions of the central coast, where the shoots are beaten, boiled and dried for three days, before normally being transported to Cuenca for weaving, although the finest quality hats (superfinos) which can take up to a month to weave and cost around $200 have to be woven at the coast as the shoots are so fine that they snap in less humid conditions. The tightness of the weave determines the quality of a hat, and we were shown the moulding process which involves hydraulic bashing using metal and stone moulds.

Hats in various states of unweave

Thursday

Bob, Millie and Lynsday left for Quito on Thursday morning and I caught the bus to a spa-pueblo of Cuenca where I spent a day reading, sitting in a huge swimming pool as hot as any bearable bath and finally bathing in the moonlight when the many noisy children had left. I walked up to the bright blue church at the top of the village and saw the beginnings of a Christmas parade in which dogs were given an equally important rôle as the children. I followed the pipes from the hot pools up to a point where you could see the water surfacing at its natural temperature and I understood why they had to add lots of cold water to the pool as only a pot was missing to make the perfect cup of Earl Grey.

Decorated canines- essential for any parade

Friday and Saturday

On Friday morning I checked into a hostal in the centre of Cuenca full of young, international travelers and spent a lovely few days speaking with foreigners in an interesting, almost creole form of Spanish! Due to high industry levels the greater wealth in Cuenca is immediately palpable and the sight of Pizza Hut and other wonderful emissories of Western cultures made Loja feel nice and protected from the onslaught of the worldwide domination of a 12 inch Pepperoni and Coke. Having said that, it was nice to be in a place more visited by tourists for the purpose of buying a few presents and having many more closed museums to be disappointed by! I did manage to find one open, full of Inca carvings which confirmed that Sylvanian families are a mere continuation of a much longer tradition stemming from the apparently innate desire to replicate oneself in teeny tiny form. Many of the jugs, cooking pots, axes and statuettes were labelled either in French, Spanish or English, which led to one particularly special moment when next to the ‘zoomorphic whistles’ I saw rows of ominously sharp, flat stones labelled as ‘hachas cemoniales’ (‘ceremonial axes) in Spanish and ‘instruments de musique’ in French! This seemingly incongruous juxtaposition is tempered only by my many karaoke experiences here which definitely approximate to torture.

Evenings were spent in the candle-lit hostel bar playing cards and me being systematically thrashed at every single game. Dancing until 4.30am on Saturday night was possibly not the wisest move before New Year’s Eve, but I met some lovely people and got some good recommendations for jaunts further afield.

Sunday

So, with three and half hour’s sleep under my proverbial belt (possiby rucksack support strap) I returned to Loja yesterday afternoon, ready for my first party at 5pm. Most of Loja’s 20s and 30s assemble yearly in one street, hanging out in their cars, drinking and dancing and generally knowing everyone there! Another great New Year’s tradition here is for men to dress in drag, and I was greatly disturbed to see one of my friends riding on the top of a truck in a miniskirt. I bumped into lots of people I knew and discovered that they somehow knew, or were related to, all of the people I was with, which had a mushroom cloud effect on our streetside gathering and was generally very jolly! My friend Veronica is moving to Quito on Wednesday to try and get work there, which I’m really sad about as I’ll miss her a lot, but it was lovely to spend time with her and her friends. After that I went to the house of one of the couples on the team- Colin and Jill- for fireworks and my first experience of the lifeblood of an Ecuadorian New Year- burning dolls and fire jumping.

During the week Guy Fawkes-esque dolls and models popped up all over Cuenca, and if anything there were even more of them in Loja when I arrived, as well as a huge volcano, helicopter and a small village contructed out of papier-mâché which I saw in one neighbourhood. Models of politicians and basically anyone famous (thankfull not local TV presenters, as my Dad pointed out to me on the phone this morning!) are burnt with great relish at midnight every year, beaten with belts and then the ensuing erratic flames must be jumped over three times to ensure the forthcoming year be a successful and merry one. Stalls with masks and homemade fireworks have been everywhere, and the dolls lie in shop doorways or are carried by underwear-clad men dubbed as ‘widows’ who jump on any cars foolish enough to venture into the streets past 8pm on the 31st.

Colin and Jill have young children, so together with lots of other families we began the burning at about 9pm in the middle of the street, with our orange-faced doll soon melting to an impressive set of burning clumps, with the occasional firecracker and rocket spurting out from a surrendered limb. From there, Amanda, Colin and I went to a family party at our friend Miriam’s house, with dancing already in full swing when we arrived. We spent a lovely evening swirling with family members, small children and total strangers who beamed and made me glad that I had taken a few dancing classes! There were about 60 people there, all family, and at midnight we went out onto the road to burn their three dolls and begin the second jumping session of the night, which began a bit badly when Miriam’s Dad fell over into the fire whilst leaping, causing his trousers to catch fire temporarily but his smile and delight only to increase. A police car slowed down as it passed us and an officer leaned out to shout something- bad sign?- ‘Feliz Año Nuevo’ he cried and they zoomed past. I think that if high jump teaching were conducted under such circumstances then any pupil’s lack of enthusiasm to hulk their bulk over the little painless pole would soon melt away under the heat of a roaring flame beneath them. One of Miriam’s cousins set off some rockets from a plastic bottle which he held in the air which made me laugh inwardly at my very fleeting thought that the children with sparklers really should be wearing gloves. When the flames died down we went back inside to begin the midnight meal which was beautiful, and fuelled a few more hours’ dancing before we finally gave in and left, clearly hours before the party would end.

Definitely one of the best New Year’s Eve experiences I’ve ever had, and henceforth shall all celebrations I attend involve such wonderful antics, so get saving those plastic bottles…

Parental Advisory: Explicit Soup

Two little friends: The Jenga Architects of the Future

Trying to look happy and carefree

But I'm a real Ecuadorian!

The world's scariest Santa

Vero and Susana

Yo, Fabricio and Maria

Christmas cooking

I am sitting up on my roof listening to ‘Silent Night’ on the first Christmas Eve ever to afford me sunning possibilities. Given that I’ve not written for a while and that I’m leaving Loja for a week or so on Tuesday morning, I think it’s time to share some choice ‘morsels’ (see below) of the past few weeks.

Perhaps the title of this entry requires a prompt (and preferably swift) treatment of the subject so that insatiable curiosity does not force you to rush all the way through more mundane accounts of television shows and photo shoots. I should begin by informing you that incredibly I have not been ill since Tuesday, finally proving that there is no explicit link between food consumed and level of stomach discontent, however the explicitness resides in the fact that this week I went with 4 girls to eat Ox Penis soup for one of my friend’s birthdays. There, I’ve said it! For those of a more delicate constitution, look away now…

‘Caldo de Nervio’ is a famous hangover cure and ‘full of nutrients’, and from the distinct lack of other females in the Loja-renowned café we visited for Tuesday breakfast, more of a male ritual than a traditional way to celebrate another year of life with a group of giggling females. Memories of supressed laughter in primary school sex education classes returned with the guffaws and squeaks of grown women anticipating what was to befall us that fateful day, which has forever changed my gastronomical record and most probably established eternal enmity between me and my digestive system, The soup arrived with a worrying large unidentifiable piece of meat in its centre, and even if Lojanos were concerned about food presentation, there would be little one could do to disguise or make appealing the 15 or so slices floating in the turmeric-coloured broth. Thinking longingly of my usual morning feast of mango and cammomile and honey tea, I managed to eat one piece of the unmentionable and upon nearly returning it back into the bowl decided that that was sufficient to be able to tell this story and also retain some self-respect! My only worry now is that I will not be able to top this new height in culinary grossness and shall have to leave you all bored and unimpressed with anything else an Ecuadorian kithcen can rustle up for the next 6 months!

It’s nearly Christmas! Even though it is very strange to not be at home and yesterday Christmas was potentially going to be cancelled due to a widespread outbreak of disgruntled colons among those I am to spend it with, I am really looking forward to tomorrow and the past few weeks have been lovely. Last Sunday we had an Australian bush dance for English Night which involved the joy of seeing Ecudoarians not being able to dance for the first time ever! It’s very like a barn dance or a ceilidh, and with the added hilarity of a compartively small space, instructions in English, and
comparatively smaller English comprehension skills, the night was a beautiful medley of fleeing limbs, harmonised collisions and only a minor threat of an outbreak of civil war.

Yesterday I had a Christmas lunch with Veronica, Susana and Joanna (a new volunteer) which was great fun; we cooked and I made mulled wine and shared presents (I now have a 2D wooden doll with woolen hair that I can plait, amazing!).. I put on some carols and lovely choral music which was thoroughly voted down in favour of more latino-friendly beats. It was Veronica’s birthday last week and we spent the night dancing and karaokeing in her lounge, during which her little sister taught us some dance moves for ‘Regetón’, which is a blend of hip hop, R&B, bad rap and sheer nastiness which is really popular here, and I can only bear listening to about 2% of the time. I knew all of the songs from the TV show as lots of the dance groups use them, so I felt very hip and trendy, which isn’t a very frequent occurrence! Indeed, dancing has become an increasingly important part of life here; last night I went with a few friends to ‘Casa Tinku’ which is a lovely candle-lit live music venue. Whilst talking to a friend I missed the comments of the singer on stage and was reliably informed that he had said that if anyone dared to simply walk up to him on the stage then they would be given a free bottle of wine. Encouraged by those around me who decided that I would be a good candidate, I started walking towards the stage and then heard shouts ‘Que bailes! Que bailes!’, ‘Dance, Dance!’ and suddenly realised that the grins of my chums meant that one was, in fact, required to strut one’s stuff on stage to get said vino. This one has never returned to hear seat so quickly!

This Tuesday was the grand finale of the TV show, when all the finalists came to show their stuff. I arrived and was told I had a new co-host, a guy from California, and that we had to present the show entirely in Spanish and were given a huge script full of pretentious quotes and ecstatic praises of the organisers and participants. I wondered why they got foreigners to do it (‘gringos’, as we’re called, which can either refer to all non-latinos or just to people from the US, and comes from the Mexican/US border when US soldiers in their green uniforms were given a predictably warm welcome: ‘Green, go!’) but have learnt to shop asking most cultural questions that begin with ‘why’!

So, with the TV show over until March and something of an acquired nonchalance towards the audiovisual media, I decided to branch out last week and together with two English girls who were travelling through Loja, Bob and Millie’s daughter Lindsay (who’s here for Christmas) and a token Ecuadorian male, went for my first photo shoot! One of my friend’s husbands works for the Tourist Board and they’ve been making some new publicity and wanted some foreign faces to stick on some postcards in the hope that others would see our unharmed bodies here in Loja and feel safe enough to venture further south than Cuenca, rather like using blue tack to take off old adhesve from a wall.
Sort of. Anyway, we went to the oldest church in Loja and spent a few hours of disastrously cheesy posing, dancing, climbing on random obects and all in all having obligatory fun, which has always been my favourite kind. The photos are to be used for some postcards and some laminated publicity which will go in all of the taxis in Loja which tourists can leaf through or locals (and anyone who knows us) can laugh at.

Tonight my church is having a candle-lit carol service and then I am going to Amanda and Helene’s house (two girls from the team) to stay over, to be joined by 4 or 5 more people tomorrow for our celebrations. They went away for 2 nights this week so I house-sat for them, and spent a happy 2 hours on Friday morning locked between their front door and the fortress-esque yard door, the key for which I had cleverly left on the kitchen table. More of that obligatory fun ensued! Three people were baptised this morning and church has been really lovely recently, especially now that I feel settled and have a sarcasm/banter relationship with enough people to feel truly at home there. On Tuesday morning I am going with Bob, Millie and Lyndsay to Cuenca, a city about 6 hours north. We’re staying there for 2 days and hopefully visiting Cajas, the national park, and then they fly up to Quito and I’m planning on heading to a little town called Baños (which, brilliantly, could be translated as ‘Loos’) which has lots of natural thermal baths and springs, and then back to Cuenca for a few days of museums and exploring before coming back to Loja on the 31st ready for the great New Year Incineration Festival!

Hope that you all have a wonderful Christmas and remember, ‘A blog is for life, not just for Christmas.’ Ahem.

Vilcafotitos

Look closely to spot the Christmas tree; wonder at the fact that the mist covers at least 6 deeper layers of silhouetted mountains on the horizon.

Calm in the middle of the storm.

What a wonderful invention! Definitely not intended to make anyone jealous...

The second best shower in the world. This Flinstone-esque delight of abathroom is, in my opinion, beaten only by the open-roofed bathroom we had in India last summer which had a bountiful banana tree growing into it.

The path from my cabin to the restaurant- what else do you need, after all?!

Days Between Two Hills

An impending sense of doom hangs over me like an overfull rubbish bag as I contemplate the task of ‘filling in’ the past few weeks when pictures have possibly painted a thousand words, but my entries have been so long until now that a thousand has probably been too short! Amazed to get an email from Katy D saying she’d read the whole of my blog so far in her break from work… whoever said nurses worked too hard?!

A dizzying rush of dancing, wonderful live music, lunch with friends, teaching, Bible studies, talks and the general wear and tear which can either inspire or crush, depending one one’s mood, became all a bit much this weekend and I ran away to the Valley of Eternal Youth, keenly feeling the pressure of my 21 years. On Sunday afternoon after church I caught the bus to Vilcabamba (and met a very nice guy called Fabiano who grows avocados, which made me think of the ‘Avocado Baby’ book and whether a Vilcabamba avocado had ever fuelled the shopping trolley-lifting exploits of the young hero) and returned today feeling very rested. I stayed in a lovely place called ‘Izhcayluma’, which means ‘between two hills’ in Quicha, and had a little wooden hut with a balcony overlooking endless folds of green and the hugest hammock in the world! I spent a lot of time swimming (the water of Vilcabamba is said to be curative, hence themselling it at inflated prices to gullible tourists), slept in quiet for the first time in about 3 months (I don’t count the amazing insects that lulled me to sleep and the rather rude-sounding birds that greeted me in the morning!), met some travelers, ate good food and had an amazing back massage. I also read ‘The Water is Wide’ by Pat Conroy which charts his personal attempts to combat segregation in the South of North America in ’69 as he taught a forgotten island of black children who struggled against an education system that gave lip service to their right to knowledge but could not fathom the weight of its crime against so many individual lives. It was a strangely pertinent comparison to my continuing reading on Ecuadorian history, and tales of the Spanish conquest which actually led to a debate in Spain between two eminent scholars as to whether the conquerors should consider the indigenous people as animals or ‘real humans’. Incredible. I felt echoes of this inhumanity as I tried to teach Hugo, a homeless boy of nine, to spell his name tonight. Forgotten, ignored life was a feature of 16th South America, the Deep South in the ‘60s and is equally a feature of today’s world.

It was very strange to be thrust into the traveling community for a brief spell and realise that a lot of people here to ‘do’ the country know nothing more about Ecuador and its people than their Lonely Planet Guide tells them… I felt suspicious of one British guy’s claims to be trying to ‘find himself’ when he’d never even heard of Loughborough! Yesterday afternoon we had a huge tropical storm which was heralded in with black clouds as thick as tar and mid-way gave rise to a sweeping rainbow which brightened from its base upwards as bolt lightning gave the eye the dilemma of which fairly rare natural phenomenon to look at, both being framed within the same small shot of God’s amazing creation.

On the bus journey back today I smelt tarmac and then realised that we, as well as the many other vehicles around us, were driving through the freshly-laid black stuff intended to fill in the many holes which pepper the terrible roads and licking it over our tyres and basically anywhere there was not a hole to be filled. Clearly shutting off one side of the road would be too complicated, although perhaps that’s in the pipeline as we later drove past two men sitting in the middle of the road with a large tape measure extended between two apparently randomly-selected points. A few chickens on the bus, stopping off half way for the driver to pick up some things from his house and it all felt perfectly, wonderfully normal.

It was refreshing to be vaguely ‘on the road’ and have time to write, think and pray, and after a break I’m really looking forward to the next few weeks as the sunshine tries to retrieve its dominion of our little valley from the proliferation of terrible plastic Santa Clauses…

Fundación Fireworks

I can't work out whether I've seen more fireworks or stray dogs in Loja- tomorrow is a holiday to celebrate the founding of Loja and we've just had another amazing mad pyrotechnical fest!

Otavalan Dancers

I had the pleasure of interviewing these Otavalan dancers for the TV show yesterday, who were more worried about having to speak English than the fact that they were about to wield potentially fatal flags around the stage!

Snapshots I

The Disney bakery at the corner of my road ('Donald's bread') , tragically shut down for a week for tax fraud
Tungurahua volcano from the air, still leaving thousands of people homeless and the tourist industry paralysed

A lazy afternoon with Yesenia, Veronica and a distant, deformed relative of Ronald McDonald

The man in the white shirt asked me to take this picture, voila his chosen pose!
Stocking up on drinking water in the Plaza Mayor
My future retirement home- donkey a necessity to haul groceries up ridiculous gradients