Ecuador- April 2010

Ecuador was a bit of a surprise to me. I didn’t know anything about it when we crossed over and as we moved on the longer we wanted to stay. So for a month we happily zigzagged like 3 times from mountains to the coast and back, and we didn’t even touch on Orient which is the Amazonian east of the country.
I liked the Laguna los Dios near Ibarra where we camped and hiked for the day. People come and dive in this volcanic lake and its water is crystal clear; and at the foot of a volcano.
It just happened so that we arrived to Ecuador in rainy season and particularly rainy too- it was raining almost every day or nite while we were there, sometimes a lot. San Miguel was a tiny little village 4 hours up the stream of Papayan River from the coast. We decided to spend Easter there, Thursday in, Sunday out. They had this awesome house there for the visitors- it’s huge, it’s on the hill overlooking river and it’s got hammocks. And we were the only guests then. Every morning a woman would come to cook us breakfast and lunch and if we wanted to also dinner. And as it was holiday there were celebrations in the village every day, and nite for a good measure. They had a missionary church there. They invited us in for Good Friday celebrations. It started with Kuko- their traditional dance, and then they did the quickest Camina de Cruzes I have ever seen, and I grew up in a catholic country. Then the whole Friday nite they were singing. On Saturday, we went to the church again, this time for dancing. We were all running in long snakes around the church hopping to the rhythm of bongos, sweating like hell, and I believe there was method to this madness, but it was fun, even if there wasn’t.
We wanted to leave that nite but there were no boats coming out as everybody was celebrating. So we stayed one more day.
On Sunday everybody was getting ready for the big dance party at nite. In the afternoon we started drinking a perfectly cooled beer (they have their priorities right) in a little social palapa (hut) and the way they drink it is that somebody buys a bottle ($1.25 for 750ml Pilsener), gets a couple of plastic cups and walks from one person to the other (or only the ones he/she wants) and pours them in a bit, until the bottle is empty. It seemed to be happening all the time and nobody seemed to care much about who to whom and how much- somehow it flew smoothly and everybody was happy. Every so often, somebody would serve Aguardiente- vodka made of sugar cane; acquired taste, so to say. Mick and I got ourselves a bottle of that concoction to somehow fill in the time during the day. It lasted us 2 days and that with me one nite throwing up from it. A well-trained local drinks a bottle and a half in one nite.
While we were drinking and dancing in the little palapa on the hill, it started to rain, then to pour. Soon, the party had to be relocated to bigger and drier area so it died out for a bit. Mick and I went to our room to sleep a little before we would catch a boat at 1am that nite. It never stopped raining so when we walked out at 12:30am all packed and ready to wave our boat, the river rose by 2 meters and flooded. There were no boats running that nite- too dangerous. What were we to do- we dropped our bags and joined the party.
The next morning the river dropped us quickly as it rose, so we kept our fingers crossed for the whole day that it wouldn’t rain anymore. We didn’t have any more money for accommodation and food but they let us stay in the house for the day and the lady who had cooked for us brought us some food. The music played the whole day in the canteen that day and I danced some more as some local saw a potential for salsa in me and fancied to teach me a bit. As the evening approached, it started to rain again. And then it poured. Hanging there in our hammocks we parted with thought of leaving that nite. It was quite a surprise when at 2am somebody all of a sudden emerged from complete darkness telling us to get ready as the boat was leaving soon... For Mick and me it was as if the sky opened and all the heavenly angels sang out together ‘Alleluia!’ That was our first week in Ecuador.
From Borbon, where we left our car while in San Miguel, we drove to Esmeraldas and Quito, back in the mountains. It rained a lot. We went to Laguna Quinaloa and from there back to the coast, for some sunshine. We spent a week in-between Canoa and Montanita, the later one being my favourite. We just hang out on the beach, watched the surf, drank rum and smoked at our leisure, chatted away with the befriended local family which let us park in front of their house/hostel, played hacky… you know, wasting time J Once ready, we drove to Guayaquil for some supplies and there again, a local family invited us warmly to their house, showed us around town and fed with local specialties. Then we drove to Chimborazo. Within 24 hours we rose from the sea level to 4800m above sea level. Enough to say, it was a mistake. The first day that we spent hiking a bit around the volcano and just hanging out in the van, ended up for Mick with a sickening headache and for me with a smaller one, so we had an emergency drive-out at nite to some lower altitudes. We came back the next morning, thinking that we would be fine now. We were not. We hiked to 5300 and along with the afternoon, the headache was back. We didn’t wait too long after that. As the weather was just getting worse too, we decided to piss off to some hot springs. Unfortunately, the road we picked to Banos was impassable due to (I love that bit) volcano activity. They had this massive eruption in 2006 and I don’t know if that gap in the road that made us turn around, was a leftover of that or something more recent. Anyway, we spent that nite on that road and took a different road to Banos the next day.
Banos is touristy big time, but has this unreal location at the foot of an active volcano, and really nice hot springs. I liked their caldo the gallina for $1.50 which is a chicken soup with big piece of chicken inside. Caldo the patas wasn’t as nice, but I like pig feet (I know) so I still enjoyed it.
From Banos we drove south through the mountain again, to Cuenca which Mick liked a lot. We spent a couple of days hiking around Cuenca in a national park Las Cajas- beautiful rigid mountains with bare grassy hills, rocky ridges, ubiquitous lakes and creeks and meadows. The weather wasn’t on our side but we still had fun being out there on our own (no guides needed for once!), looking for trails, cheering the sun and admiring the country.
From there, it was a drive in mist and rain through Loja to Vilcabamba, a laid-back gringo town close to the boarder with Peru. This is where we are now. Tomorrow, we probably will cross over the boarder. There is not much more I can say about this town, others that it is a good base to relax with a book and write a blog.
Ecuador was great for me. It took me by surprise, I enjoyed it a lot and I will recall it very fondly when I am old and wrinkled, telling stories to my grandchildren.