Hello hello, it seems a lifetime ago that I last wrote in here but methinks that may be my mind playing tricks after a week away from civilisation. Anyhow, it was one fabulous week which I will treasure forever and I succeeded in doing many crazy outdoor things that I had never dreamed I would ever do or want to do.
On Monday morning we set off on a typical Ecuadorian bus armed with our backpacks and any collective change we could scrape together for the bus fare (nobody here ever has any change, it is insane). Hannah and Ada were running late so once we arrived in the humdrum town of Machachi about one hour south of Quito we waited for them to arrive and then piled into the back of a ´cabina´(in Macachi this was just a sort of truck with space for four inside and then plenty of outdoor floor space for the rest of us)! We were thrown around every which way while the vehicle wheezed and skidded up a mud track to the hostel, but the discomfort was made up for by the opportunity to stare goggle-eyed at all the goings on in village of Pedregal, where two kids were collecting water in a bucket and everyone else stood outside their houses alongside their various pigs, cows and chickens as we swung by.
The hostel itself was like a dream; Tarquin and Katherine (an Ozzie-Ecuadorian couple) are realising their venture of building a hostel up in the mountains near Cotopaxi and have done a great job with a cottage and three more buildings constructed in the Adobe method (which keeps those inside nice and warm) and running on energy-saving power methods. It is beautiful and in the evenings there we all crowded around the fire and apart from in the kitchen there was only candle-light for us to see by and one electrical socket to be used for our MP3 players. For around 70 pounds worth I got a warm bunk bed for four nights, hot showers, three meals a day, endless supplies of hot chocolate and beer, good company, plus all the activities we did throughout the week - really not a bad deal all in all!
The first day we set off on horseback and didn´t return until six hours later, which resulted in very sore muscles but a very happy Kate after being outside all day in indescribably stunning surroundings - I am so not a city person, I have finally realised! As with all sport I was pretty slow (and I also ended up with the slow horse!) and after losing a stirrup - which had no grip and looked more like a clog to me! - I managed to get completely lost on the way back and only realised when our very smiley Chechuan guide Janet started waving and yelling across the fields to me. The following day I had some strange reaction to the altitude (we were mucho mucho above sea level, even more than in Quito) and had to stay inside and recover for most of the day, but I only missed out on mountain biking and it left me much stronger and raring to go for the next day´s adventures. On Thursday it was the big climb up Cotopaxi (not to the top, but up to the refuge and on to the glacier, which stands at an awe-inspiring 5,000 metres above sea level) and once again we piled into a rickety truck, this time with a leaking exhaust which gave off a big bang and lots of fumes each time we went through a puddle; hilarious but not at all healthy for the lungs, and Hannah pointed out that we were practising a popular suicide method en masse (either that or a thrilling stimulated concentration camp experience - "is it the gas or the water?"!) Once at the national park, we began our ascent up the volcano and wow, what a weird, amazing experience that was. At that altitude, it was necessary to take things very slowly and to stop frequently to catch our breath, but I think the first bit was the hardest as after the refuge it was slippery but not as hard-going. As we climbed it began to snow (at which point I discovered my´waterproof coat was not in the least bit waterproof) and the mist rose all around us, which gave the whole thing quite an eerie, surreal feel. I think after all the frustrations and lonelinesses of the past few weeks, standing on the side of a volcano in South America having a snowball fight really made me realise that it is all absolutely worth it, and I feel incredibly lucky to be here on this diverse and ever-surprising continent.
The last day I was told we were going for a ´nice walk to see some waterfalls´and this is when I really surpassed myself as everyone who knows me well knows that I do not do adventure, but it seems that now in fact I do. Basically all the land around there is private land and the guys who own it are generally well disposed towards tourists because, well, there aren´t many that go up there. But this particular man next to the hostel is a cranky character because he reckons one of the hostel staff left a gate open, allowing a local bull through to impregnate all his cows, who usually only receive artificial insemination. The experience may have been a treat for them but the man has now told Tarquin that he doesn´t want to do any tourism, the result being that the nice walk to the waterfalls is a life-threatening scramble through a stream, across rocks and over the waterfalls themselves. I therefore spent my day clad in a pair of wellies and scrambling, falling, climbing and stumbling across all manner of natural formations, which I have to admit was a lot of fun (after getting over the fear of hanging precariously from a rope and clambering up an almost-vertical landslide). Predictably, as we neared the summit of the hill we were attempting to conquer, the heavens opened and our man Carlos decided it was unsafe to go back the way we had come, much to my relief. However, the alternative route home was equally traumatic and nightmarish, with it being impossible to see where our feet were heading and constantly falling down ditches. At one point we were standing in a ring surrounded by various waterproof clothing and shielding our faces from the hail stones, which reminded me strongly of my Manchester. We also then had to trespass across the said farmer´s land, which culminated in a farcical episode of us hiding very badly behind trees and bushes at any sight of a neighbour. Eventually we arrived back at the hostel, sporting scratches, bruises and other war wounds, just in time to catch our cabinas back to Machachi and from there our bus to Quito.
Now I am back in the big city and surprisingly after my break from it I am warming to its oddities and annoyances. I can no longer be bothered with any anger towards cabbies, who still constantly rip me off (but when it is a difference between 1 pound 50 and 2 pounds for a ride across the entire city, is it worth getting stressed?) and I am amused by the policemen who stand there in the road blowing whistles in some futile attempt to control the manic traffic in the torrential rain. Now I know that I am moving out in a week, I can deal quite serenely with the impatience and criticisms of my host family and am accustomed to the lack of a concept of privacy (I think it is acceptable for Latin American mothers to re-organise your stuff while you are out of your room). I can see an upside to being woken up at ludicrous o´clock at the weekend for breakfast, as the best weather is in the morning and it is pleasant to sit outside in the sunshine and drink a coffee while reading a book. I am interested in this culture where people can only be friends with people who are of the same wealth and class as themselves, and I am intrigued by a table service which necessitates its staff to avoid all eye contact with customers as far as possible to evade actually serving them.
However, I have grasped already that unlike in Europe, where any country could become my home within two or three years, I would always be a fish out of water in South America and there are so many cultural and social issues here that I could never quite understand, however strong my language ability became. I don´t know what hunger or curiousity drew me to this strange, beautiful, angry, jealous place, but I do know that I am glad that I came and that by the end of these three months I will see the world in a slightly different way because of it.
Sunday, 21 October 2007
Sunday, 14 October 2007
Too many gringos
The last few days have been really busy and tomorrow I am off to a place that has no internet connection until Friday, so I thought I ought to update this before I leave! My Spanish lessons have still been going spiffingly and I can really feel my language improving (although that doesn´t stop everyone in this bloody place from trying to rip me off all the time!) so I have been more able to hold conversations and find out more stuff about the culture here. My homestay has been generally draining and stressful and in hindsight I really wonder what brought me to think it would ever be a good idea to live with a family. So I am counting the days until I can move out - luckily as of tomorrow I will be in Cotopaxi so I will be freeee for a few days, hurray! Yesterday was possibly one of the worst days of my life as I had managed to really offend my homestay woman on Friday night and also had the hangover from hell. Basically I had popped out ´for a few drinks´with a friend from the Spanish school and her friends and ended up in the middle of gringoland (the Mariscal) at some club until the early hours, dancing about with my friends and a Kiwi guy I had met. The kiwi guy was walking me home and we were just walking round and round in circles giggling over this map and when I eventually found my way back I staggered in only to be faced with a VERY ANGRY homestay lady. She was shouting at me (I caught ´tu no respectes la casa´ but not much else of it) and I was desperately trying to look sober while slurring back at her, probably in French. Needless to say the next day I could not face her and I am still avoiding being in the apartment as much as possible. Cringe. Call it cultural difference but I think as they treat me like a lodger and never invite me to anything, it is a little odd to then tell me what time I should come in at night, but it is their house and I guess 5am is quite excessive! However, after a bad start the day turned out well and my friends and I went to see Ecuador play Venezuela (for 15 dollars - bargain!). The atmosphere was incredible, and so much less masculine and aggressive than the atmosphere at football matches in Manchester. It was truly amazing to be at that match, even in the torrential rain (now a daily occurence!). I have started writing stuff for Martijn´s website and a bit for the newspaper this week, so I feel more purposeful, and I am enjoying spending time with some of the people I have met here, mostly gringos, so not good for my Spanish! Today Catriona, Steve and I caught the bus to a nearby village to see the Mitad del Mundo and its cheesy gimmicks - it is a farce really but great fun doing the water and egg experiments to show that it really is the equator (which it isn´t - it is about 150 metres off!). We also met up with my Spanish teacher Nancy, who is an absolute star and the most wonderful Ecuadorian person I have met so far, and she and her husband took us to see the Inca remains (stunning) and the crater (beautiful). I have realised that I am most happy when I am out of this scary, polluted city and out in the fresh air and mountains, so I plan to travel about quite a bit more. As you may have picked up, I am still not thrilled by Quito itself and am getting quite tired of being tricked out of extra dollars by taxi drivers. I am trying to be positive about Quito but it is difficult when you don´t even feel safe walking around alone and every local you meet seems to be out for themselves (and as for the majority of Brits and Ozzies I have met - they are like those awful obnoxious people I avoided at university!) I have heard that my boss at the paper is a pretty shady character with quite a bad reputation in the area, so I am in two minds whether to disassociate myself, but then again it is only a few weeks and I have a laugh with the others in the office, plus I am adding to my portfolio so will probably stick with it. On the up side, Quito is a good base for visiting other places (and transport is so easy and cheap), I am enjoying my writing, I´m meeting lots of people and there are plenty of cultural things I still want to go to in the old and new towns. I also think once I have moved into the apartment with the other young chicos and chicas I will have a very different perspective of the place andI certainly won´t have to worry about reporting where I´m going and when, and being back for meals etc etc. Still got lots of language to learn too, including remembering simple phrases and words. There was an amusing incident the other day when I was in a bar and I asked for the bill and the guy didn´t understand me, then I was ranting for about ten minutes about how nobody here understands me even when I´m speaking perfectly clearly, before Catriona´s friend Mike informed me that I had said ´cuesta´instead of ´cuenta´and it wasn´t even the right word! So yeah, I have a long way to go. I can´t wait for tomorrow as bus journeys here are my favourite thing, with so many different types of people getting on and off and cramming on and hanging out of the doorway, and traders jumping on to sell their fruit and bread and so on. So next time I write I will hopefully have stopped moaning about everything!
Monday, 8 October 2007
Quito days and nights
My first full week in Quito was a bit more of a struggle than I had envisaged, as my memories of living abroad had somehow blotted out the difficulties of mastering a language and settling in to another culture. So for a few days, I was feeling quite fragile and come my birthday I resembled a leaky tap as I was ready to burst into tears at the slightest drawback or, indeed, nicety (not much hope there either way!). However, all in all the week was good and I had already met a great group of people with whom to spend the evening of my 25th – at Quito´s cheesy, gringoid, sticky-floored answer to the Raz in Liverpool or Brest´s Red Lion! - so I was alright really and I would put my fragile state down to the overhang of jet lag and general fatigue.
The Spanish school that I have been attending, Apu-Inti (which apparently means senor-sol or Mister Sun in an indigenous language), is absolutely wonderful and the profesors and profesoras there seemingly would do anything for anyone. Alongside the superb intensive one-to-one language classes we are invited to take part in Ecuadorian cookery classes and visits to various museums, which breaks the week up well. On my birthday they made me a cake and sang happy birthday to me in Spanish; admittedly this was slightly embarrassing but I was touched by it. Last Friday night I headed to a salsa club called Seseribo in the Mariscal with one of the teachers and some other students and I was pretty enchanted by the atmosphere and the music, although my own salsa dancing leaves a lot to be desired and I intend to take classes before I attempt to go again! Some guy tried to sweep me away and teach me to salsa but alas he himself was fairly ridiculous with two left feet and reminded me of a Latino uncle at a wedding, so I won´t be practising any of his steps in a hurry. Just to watch other people dancing was amazing and although Ecuador isn´t renowned for its dancing like Cuba is, there are clearly plenty of enthusiasts here to learn from.
Saturday night saw me join the Ozzies (Hannah is Australian) and other westerners at the Secret Garden hostel in the Old Town for an all-you-can-drink slap-up meal complete with burgers and familiar feel-good humour. Much as I would love to integrate, it is quite difficult to do so in this city and I was well in need of some light relief. Feeling much more myself, I then went to meet up with Erin and some others for Martijn´s birthday drinks in the Mariscal and we ended up at a raucous house party full of beautiful Latino boys (I don´t think it was just beer goggles) and muchos language-swapping. Using my frog-radar I managed accidentally to suss out the only French boy in Quito and there we embarked on a conversation that began in Spanish, lapsed into French and ended in English – all very confusing, especially when mixed with tequila.
Although I seem to be managing a social life quite well, I do find my homestay a little bit restricting and exhausting but I appreciate that it is really the best thing for my Spanish. It has been fascinating finding out what Ecuadorians eat for their various meals, and in these parts dinner is invariably sopa (a lovely, thick creamy soup with lots of veggies) followed by rice, meat and fried banana (delicious) and for breakfast scrambled eggs on toast with a hot drink, fresh fruits of all kinds and fresh fruit juice. It is a very ´wholesome´ diet and I could probably never tire of the gorgeous selection of fruits they have here, although perhaps after a month I will be sick of the meat and rice combo (but never the fried platano!). Seriously, Martha and Alejandro are the perfect host family but I value my independence far too much and can´t bear to have everything done for me, so I have found a room to rent in an apartment for my second month here.
Quito is a beautiful city full of charismatic people but I haven´t fallen in love with it as I have with many other cities – perhaps I just like my cities industrial and faceless! Quito is a massive city which is very narrow but stretches for an eternity alongside its mountainous backdrop. On Saturday morning, having been woken up early by my surrogate family, I paid a visit to the Museo del Banco Central, with its varied and interesting array of perfectly crafted Inca domestic tools and ceramics, colonial art and modern paintings, before wandering to the Parque Carolina to catch up on some reading and then lunching in the old town near the Plaza Grande. On the downside it is hard for me to adjust to being somewhere where it is completely unsafe to walk around at night – honestly, all the guide books are like “you WILL get a taxi even if it just two blocks away”and the locals echo the same thing – but I will get used to it. Plus on Saturday afternoon three girls tried to mug me in the old town using the charming method of spitting on my hand to distract me and then opening my front pocket, but luckily I had my arm around it so they were unable to get away with their dirty trick. Definitely not carrying all my stuff around again though! I haven´t seen as much poverty as I expected to (save that awakening for Peru) but there is supposedly a lot of petty crime and random attacks here, sadly, on both tourists and natives.
The Quito City Paper itself is quite shambolic and disorganised, which got me down last week as I felt as though I had no purpose and not enough work (no really, after Adfero that is particularly hard to deal with!!) but I have just sent Martijn an extensive list of my story ideas and I am excited that my next few weeks of work consists of exploring various bars, restaurants and music venues and writing about them; jammy, huh?! I am also considering going with Hannah to Cotopaxi next week to do some horseback riding and to climb the volcano itself, if I can rearrange my lessons and convince Martijn to let us both be out of the office. Either way, I am anticipating much more fun to be had in the weeks to come, and I am quite amazed by how much Spanish I am coming to understand and speak, so I think that will enrich my experiences along the way too.
I hope Manchester and your various other towns are treating you all well; you will all no doubt be amused to hear that once again I have chosen a location with high rainfall - every time! Although the mornings are hot and sunny and I know that approximately what time it will rain each day and when I need to take my trendy cagoule along with my other highly trendy travelling clothes (wearing the same three outfits day in day out is also quite hard to fathom at first!).
The Spanish school that I have been attending, Apu-Inti (which apparently means senor-sol or Mister Sun in an indigenous language), is absolutely wonderful and the profesors and profesoras there seemingly would do anything for anyone. Alongside the superb intensive one-to-one language classes we are invited to take part in Ecuadorian cookery classes and visits to various museums, which breaks the week up well. On my birthday they made me a cake and sang happy birthday to me in Spanish; admittedly this was slightly embarrassing but I was touched by it. Last Friday night I headed to a salsa club called Seseribo in the Mariscal with one of the teachers and some other students and I was pretty enchanted by the atmosphere and the music, although my own salsa dancing leaves a lot to be desired and I intend to take classes before I attempt to go again! Some guy tried to sweep me away and teach me to salsa but alas he himself was fairly ridiculous with two left feet and reminded me of a Latino uncle at a wedding, so I won´t be practising any of his steps in a hurry. Just to watch other people dancing was amazing and although Ecuador isn´t renowned for its dancing like Cuba is, there are clearly plenty of enthusiasts here to learn from.
Saturday night saw me join the Ozzies (Hannah is Australian) and other westerners at the Secret Garden hostel in the Old Town for an all-you-can-drink slap-up meal complete with burgers and familiar feel-good humour. Much as I would love to integrate, it is quite difficult to do so in this city and I was well in need of some light relief. Feeling much more myself, I then went to meet up with Erin and some others for Martijn´s birthday drinks in the Mariscal and we ended up at a raucous house party full of beautiful Latino boys (I don´t think it was just beer goggles) and muchos language-swapping. Using my frog-radar I managed accidentally to suss out the only French boy in Quito and there we embarked on a conversation that began in Spanish, lapsed into French and ended in English – all very confusing, especially when mixed with tequila.
Although I seem to be managing a social life quite well, I do find my homestay a little bit restricting and exhausting but I appreciate that it is really the best thing for my Spanish. It has been fascinating finding out what Ecuadorians eat for their various meals, and in these parts dinner is invariably sopa (a lovely, thick creamy soup with lots of veggies) followed by rice, meat and fried banana (delicious) and for breakfast scrambled eggs on toast with a hot drink, fresh fruits of all kinds and fresh fruit juice. It is a very ´wholesome´ diet and I could probably never tire of the gorgeous selection of fruits they have here, although perhaps after a month I will be sick of the meat and rice combo (but never the fried platano!). Seriously, Martha and Alejandro are the perfect host family but I value my independence far too much and can´t bear to have everything done for me, so I have found a room to rent in an apartment for my second month here.
Quito is a beautiful city full of charismatic people but I haven´t fallen in love with it as I have with many other cities – perhaps I just like my cities industrial and faceless! Quito is a massive city which is very narrow but stretches for an eternity alongside its mountainous backdrop. On Saturday morning, having been woken up early by my surrogate family, I paid a visit to the Museo del Banco Central, with its varied and interesting array of perfectly crafted Inca domestic tools and ceramics, colonial art and modern paintings, before wandering to the Parque Carolina to catch up on some reading and then lunching in the old town near the Plaza Grande. On the downside it is hard for me to adjust to being somewhere where it is completely unsafe to walk around at night – honestly, all the guide books are like “you WILL get a taxi even if it just two blocks away”and the locals echo the same thing – but I will get used to it. Plus on Saturday afternoon three girls tried to mug me in the old town using the charming method of spitting on my hand to distract me and then opening my front pocket, but luckily I had my arm around it so they were unable to get away with their dirty trick. Definitely not carrying all my stuff around again though! I haven´t seen as much poverty as I expected to (save that awakening for Peru) but there is supposedly a lot of petty crime and random attacks here, sadly, on both tourists and natives.
The Quito City Paper itself is quite shambolic and disorganised, which got me down last week as I felt as though I had no purpose and not enough work (no really, after Adfero that is particularly hard to deal with!!) but I have just sent Martijn an extensive list of my story ideas and I am excited that my next few weeks of work consists of exploring various bars, restaurants and music venues and writing about them; jammy, huh?! I am also considering going with Hannah to Cotopaxi next week to do some horseback riding and to climb the volcano itself, if I can rearrange my lessons and convince Martijn to let us both be out of the office. Either way, I am anticipating much more fun to be had in the weeks to come, and I am quite amazed by how much Spanish I am coming to understand and speak, so I think that will enrich my experiences along the way too.
I hope Manchester and your various other towns are treating you all well; you will all no doubt be amused to hear that once again I have chosen a location with high rainfall - every time! Although the mornings are hot and sunny and I know that approximately what time it will rain each day and when I need to take my trendy cagoule along with my other highly trendy travelling clothes (wearing the same three outfits day in day out is also quite hard to fathom at first!).
Monday, 1 October 2007
Culture shock
Only a few days in Ecuador and already I feel as though I have a lifetime of stories to tell. This country is so diverse and constantly surprising and although it may be clichéd to say so, my life is being transformed by the things I have seen. Where to start…
Before I had really even had chance to settle in to life in Quito, I set off on Friday on a trip with the other writers from the paper, a few hours´bus ride away to the northern highlands. We were based in Ibarra, the ´white city´ of this region – which basically means it is a major colonial town with pretty Spanish-stylee white houses.
Ibarra itself is gorgeous and we had a bit of a hike around the city, as well as a couple of nice evenings eating Mexican food and drinking wine in its Café Arte (which was the only place serving alcohol). Sunday was the big election for Ecuadorians and they have this rule over here that the weekend of an election is a ´dry weekend´. I think the logic is that a lot of people spend their weekends getting blind drunk (esp in the villages) and they would then go and vote for some random politican whilst in their inebriated state. As all the politicians seem to be as corrupt as one another, I don´t think it would make much difference either way.
On Saturday we set off early to take the áutoferro´(a curious, colourful open decked bus on rails) to Salinas, an Afro-Ecuadorian town named after its salt mines, which should strictly have taken around two hours but we were sharing the ride with Ecuador´s four ´reinas´-beauty queens – and a film crew, the purpose of which was to raise the profile of the region, but resulted in us stopping, reversing and re-filming things several times over.
Nonetheless, it was a stunningly beautiful journey around the valley of the Rio Chota with its breath-grasping fields of sugar cane and mountainous backdrop. As we tootled along the tracks we were obliged to duck to avoid being beheaded by stray cables hanging down and then plunged into darkness as we travelled underneath a rocky tunnel, after which the train proceeded across a precarious looking bridge with no rails, straddling the deep valley. All a bit of a safety certificate-less fairground ride but muchos fun anyway.
On reaching our destination, Erin and I hopped on another bus to the Oasis hotel and water park, joined by the beauty queens and a band playing the area´s bewitching mixture of salsa and bumba, while Martijn and Hannah went off to interview someone else about something else.
The day then took Erin and I to Huncal, another Afro-Ecuadorian community, where she interviewed people and I attempted to converse with the kids who were mobbing me and we both watched the guys playing football on their gravely pitch. Apparently one third of the country´s professional footballers originate from the village and so despite their poverty most of the young lads dream of fame.
A few erroneous bus rides later and we were on our way towards Mascarilla, a hub of creative activity, where a passing truck carrying half the village´s population picked us up and took us to our destination, giving me a real authentic taste of their lifestyle and the true bohemian dream of travelling South America. We came back down the hill at sundown and saw our surroundings in their full beauty; I can hardly believe all I have seen is real, as it is so far removed from what I know.
Yesterday was equally eye-opening as I went to Otavalo with Hannah and Erin and skimmed the market before hiring bikes and undertaking a strenuous and long ride up the mountain to see the lake and the indigenous communities that surround it. At one point, I became separated from the others and all my false sense of security fell away as I realised I was stranded on a mountain top, without my purse or water, exhausted and unable to communicate. The scenario ended with me waving my arms around dramatically at some indigenous women and attempting some poor schmangle of English, French and Spanish at them to communicate that ´jái perdu mis amigas´– at which point Erin came cycling around the corner (what relief!) and enlightened me that the people I was speaking to hardly spoke Spanish let alone any other European languages.
The only frustration that I have is that I have such limited Spanish and that even when I understand what is being said to me, I cannot reply coherently as yet and I intend to work on this as rapidly as possible to make the most of my time in this beautiful country. I had my first Spanish lesson this morning and moved in with my host family at lunchtime so with that and my guessing-the-word-from-the-French-word technique I am expecting myself to progress in no time!
Before I had really even had chance to settle in to life in Quito, I set off on Friday on a trip with the other writers from the paper, a few hours´bus ride away to the northern highlands. We were based in Ibarra, the ´white city´ of this region – which basically means it is a major colonial town with pretty Spanish-stylee white houses.
Ibarra itself is gorgeous and we had a bit of a hike around the city, as well as a couple of nice evenings eating Mexican food and drinking wine in its Café Arte (which was the only place serving alcohol). Sunday was the big election for Ecuadorians and they have this rule over here that the weekend of an election is a ´dry weekend´. I think the logic is that a lot of people spend their weekends getting blind drunk (esp in the villages) and they would then go and vote for some random politican whilst in their inebriated state. As all the politicians seem to be as corrupt as one another, I don´t think it would make much difference either way.
On Saturday we set off early to take the áutoferro´(a curious, colourful open decked bus on rails) to Salinas, an Afro-Ecuadorian town named after its salt mines, which should strictly have taken around two hours but we were sharing the ride with Ecuador´s four ´reinas´-beauty queens – and a film crew, the purpose of which was to raise the profile of the region, but resulted in us stopping, reversing and re-filming things several times over.
Nonetheless, it was a stunningly beautiful journey around the valley of the Rio Chota with its breath-grasping fields of sugar cane and mountainous backdrop. As we tootled along the tracks we were obliged to duck to avoid being beheaded by stray cables hanging down and then plunged into darkness as we travelled underneath a rocky tunnel, after which the train proceeded across a precarious looking bridge with no rails, straddling the deep valley. All a bit of a safety certificate-less fairground ride but muchos fun anyway.
On reaching our destination, Erin and I hopped on another bus to the Oasis hotel and water park, joined by the beauty queens and a band playing the area´s bewitching mixture of salsa and bumba, while Martijn and Hannah went off to interview someone else about something else.
The day then took Erin and I to Huncal, another Afro-Ecuadorian community, where she interviewed people and I attempted to converse with the kids who were mobbing me and we both watched the guys playing football on their gravely pitch. Apparently one third of the country´s professional footballers originate from the village and so despite their poverty most of the young lads dream of fame.
A few erroneous bus rides later and we were on our way towards Mascarilla, a hub of creative activity, where a passing truck carrying half the village´s population picked us up and took us to our destination, giving me a real authentic taste of their lifestyle and the true bohemian dream of travelling South America. We came back down the hill at sundown and saw our surroundings in their full beauty; I can hardly believe all I have seen is real, as it is so far removed from what I know.
Yesterday was equally eye-opening as I went to Otavalo with Hannah and Erin and skimmed the market before hiring bikes and undertaking a strenuous and long ride up the mountain to see the lake and the indigenous communities that surround it. At one point, I became separated from the others and all my false sense of security fell away as I realised I was stranded on a mountain top, without my purse or water, exhausted and unable to communicate. The scenario ended with me waving my arms around dramatically at some indigenous women and attempting some poor schmangle of English, French and Spanish at them to communicate that ´jái perdu mis amigas´– at which point Erin came cycling around the corner (what relief!) and enlightened me that the people I was speaking to hardly spoke Spanish let alone any other European languages.
The only frustration that I have is that I have such limited Spanish and that even when I understand what is being said to me, I cannot reply coherently as yet and I intend to work on this as rapidly as possible to make the most of my time in this beautiful country. I had my first Spanish lesson this morning and moved in with my host family at lunchtime so with that and my guessing-the-word-from-the-French-word technique I am expecting myself to progress in no time!
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