“Liz” wrote:

I would like to request that occasionally you talk about the food you eat, I’m very interested in food, which might be because I’m hungry, but whatever.

I tried to focus a bit more on food than I otherwise would’ve during the food festival entry because of this, and when I nibbled on some Guinea Pig a week or two ago, I took some extra pictures with this in mind.  Actually, that’s not true.  I was eating an animal that is served in such a way that it’s still kind of grimacing at you while you eat it, with tiny little fried paws locked in a perpetual “Dude, what the hell..?” gesture.  I was going to take plenty of pictures of it regardless.

But, it does bring up that I’m more than willing to focus on things people might find interesting that I might otherwise overlook.  At the very least, any questions people have keep me connected to the rest of the world, and might get me checking out new things.  Comments, from friends, family or strangers, make me feel all warm inside and more importantly, let me know people are actually reading this thing.

And feedback helps make the site better, whether it be an anal spelling correction or “It really sucks navigating around your site.”  For instance, the Photos section as it currently stands is godawful.  I’m using something called Gallery2 and despite seeing it play nicely with other blogs, I find it a tremendous pain in the ass.  There doesn’t seem to be a way to turn off that bar on the left properly, and when I link to pictures in the Gallery, the blog entry ends up looking retarded.  All stuff for the to-do list.

For anyone out there actually reading this, thanks!  It’s a great way for me to stay connected, and the experiences so far have made for fun writing as well.

Later.

Bat. Snake.

The battle’s got all the makings of an epic fight — two creatures vying for second-place in the “most nightmarish animal” category, just behind the perennial winner since mankind had a vocabulary large enough to have a word that equates to “creepy,” the spider.

Snake: fierce predator, awkwardly legless, taunts women with apples.

Bat: mammalian flight, mosquito-tracking sonar, inspires handsome billionaires to fight crime.

In normal, Crocodile Hunter-free nature, I’m not entirely sure if there’d ever be a reason the bat would have to tussle with the snake in the first place.  Victory for the snake’s a hearty rodent burrito bunched together in a wing tortilla, but short of a hidden prize somewhere (“a Brand. New. Cave!“), there’s really nothing in it for the bat.  What’s important is that this duel answers the eternal question of “who would win in a fight between a snake and a bat?” that I oddly had never thought to ask before.  As an added bonus, the spectacle allows me to escape early from more densely mashed plantains and cheese, which will never give french toast, pancakes, scrambled eggs, grits, grape-nuts, leftover pizza or even a half-eaten twizzler a run for their money when it comes to craveable breakfast eats.

The snake in waiting

Crocodile Coci calls us over to the pigeon room (a small room that only seems to exist to hold two listless pigeons in an undersized cage) where a relatively small boa with an interesting color scheme is wrapped around a thin pipe running along the wall.  Coci’s got a dark towel in his hand and twists it about, producing a small bat, it’s paws locked down by a solid grip from within the towel.  Constantly thrashing, the bat’s wings vibrate with the fear of an animal knowing it’s about to be brunch.  Coci holds out the bat to me like a sommelier displaying a freshly popped cork and I nod with the same knowing glance I’ve given to everyone that speaks Spanish to me here and assumes I understand completely.

It’s not like I had any visions of what the arena for this battle was going to be.  Actually, that’s not true.  I spent a large portion of the prior night hoping for a miniature Tokyo made from cardboard, lego and twine ready to be laid waste by two uncaring forces of nature.  But I never once credited Coci with sharing either my creativity or my tremendous nerdish background, and my hopes for a miniature coliseum of some sort were low at best.  Somehow though, even in my least creative visions, the two beasts would be set upon each other in a confined space, allowing for the innate abilities of both to launch against one another in a vicious barrage of entertainment.

Instead, the bat’s looking every bit like the tiny, winged rodent that it is as Coci maneuvers it closer and closer to the listless serpent.  The imminent devouring is still nature at its finest, and I watch intently with Joe and a small subset of Luis’s enormous pool of cousins.  The snake, likely starved by consummate showman Coci, shifts its coil as it focuses on the imminently approaching bat.  We expect a fierce burst of serpentine energy, ending the spectacle at once in a spiral of asphyxiation, but despite the clearly fixed fight, the bat’s wings instinctively give the snake a flapping beatdown, causing its surprising wide-eyed retreat.  Every repeat approach follows the same pattern — initial, hunger-fueld curiosity from the snake, followed by profound irritation from each wing-slapping.

Snake: intense fear of wings, actually kind of a pussy.

Bat: decent wing-span, well harnessed panic.

We’re all much more into the fight now that it’s been evened out against Coci’s plans and expectations.  Whatever shared sensation of rooting for the underdog that humans tend to experience when watching other animals kill each other for entertainment has clearly overtaken the room, as the bewildered snake cowers as deeply behind the support pole as it can manage.  Unfazed by the enlivened crowd, our host seems bothered by the less than flesh-ripping display from the snake, and carries both creatures into the living room, dropping his now thoroughly confused and less-than-entertaining slithering contender on the ground.  Taking the bat in his left hand, Coci, with an almost effeminate flourish, shakes out the large black towel he’d been securing the bat with, and an unexpected second bat darts out, flying fearfully up to the rafters.

Thank you, Ecuador’s David Blaine.

At first we’re not sure what Coci’s doing, stretching out the bat’s wings while it still puts up a decent fight, ineffectually trying to nibble at his fingers.  Gripping the right wing at its main joint, he applys a bit of pressure and — the panic clearly visible on the bat’s face — SNAP.  The mood in the room has shifted drastically.

That bastard’s fixing the fight!

What once was a glimpse into the grittier side of nature has now taken on a cruel twist, exacerbated as the Panama-hatted (not Panama!  They’re from Ecuador.  ECUADOR) animal master perforrms the same action on the opposite wing.  Looking around the room, teeth are now gritted, eyes squinted with a mixture of pity and distaste.  Coci notices none of this, plopping the hobbled rodent down in front of the snake with a satisfied grin.  The bat flops around like a broken muppet as the snake hones in and, finally, wraps around the bat in a quick but deadly motion, slowly but inevitably draining it of air and life.

Are you not entertained?!  Is this not what you came here for?!

Gotten.

As the snake loosens its grip and starts the slow digestion process of the recently handicapped rodent, Coci is nodding his head, looking around the room smiling with the grin of success.  Polite smiles across the room, with locked teeth and furrowed brows.  The real Crocodile Hunter would never have done that! Then again, that sting ray’s barb would’ve been broken off if it even gestured tauntingly towards Coci, so maybe there’s a sad balance in there somewhere.  The snake, its mouth full of grounded chiroptera, sits frozen with dead-eyed stare of the semi-retarded, its overstretched mouth making no attempt to swallow.

Show’s over, folks.

Grabbing my still-useless gear (90% of it untouched since I arrived in town) I hand the borrowed pants, socks and belt to Fernando, gratefully thanking him with as much energy as I could muster after that performance.  I’d been around the house for four days now, and had a question about where the hidden bedrooms must be.

“Fernando, Ricardo… I’ve been wondering where your rooms were…”

“Well,” Ricardo says stoically, “You are in them.”

They open a small room I’d assumed was a large storage closet, and inside are two hammocks the pair of cousins had been sleeping in for the past four nights.  The weight of this gesture hits me squarely in the gut, as though having an extra pair of pants all weekend weren’t enough hospitality.  Our thanks trail off into silence as the point is reached where all the gratitude we muster, though clearly owed, begins to sound redundant, especially given that we’re sticking to basic English terms.

On horseback. Beats riding mules...

Downstairs, the German woman from the night before that had mentioned something about horses followed through on her drunken promise I’d long forgotten.  No one’s sure where they came from, and time’s beginning to be short if we’re to catch our bus, but we can’t pass up the unexpected parting equine gift.  It’s not much of a ride — just a quick circle around the front yard — but the horses are much more willing to be handled than the deathwish-laden mules from earlier in the trip, which makes the experience a bit more enjoyable.  It’s easier to relax when you’re not constantly imagining the creature carrying you considering giving into its suicidal tendencies and galloping off in front of a pick-up truck filled with three local families.

Gifts of ronpope and manjar are given to us with such abundance that they still fill a shelf in the refrigerator, and hugs and handshakes abound.  I talk with Luis a bit about the article as we drive to the bus station, and while much is still up in the air (Can I really promise tourists horse rides based on the off chance that a German woman could show up randomly after breakfast with a small herd?), Luis at least now knows what he can and can’t promise.  I’ll be listing his name in my article, so any grand adventures I plan to write about have to be things courageous tourists will be able to access with the help of our eccentric and oft-confused guide.

Coci lends me his hat and machete for a photo-op

My face seems to have stabilized, at the cost of spreading its biological terror to the rest of my body.  While the crater on my chin hasn’t grown, I’ve now got a foot-long vertical slash of wrongness along my entire right forearm.  Smaller patches seem to be thriving elsewhere — a bump or two on my left arm, a bit of red on my shoulder, an itch on my back.  Still, I’m superficial enough that I can live with some under-the-covers scratching so long as my visible parts are lookinng sharp.  Just so long as the rash doesn’t reach, you know, too far under the covers…

In eight hours, I’ll be back in Quito to unpack for the first time, and to see if my laptop still works (it does).  Bus rides are interesting affairs in Ecuador; having ridden many buses up to New York in the past year or so, I can honestly say that every major bus line I’ve gone with in Ecuador provides safer and more luxuorious vehicles than any I’ve see through Greyhound, Peter Pan or the wide variety of “Chinatown” buses.  The insides look and feel newer, and every vehicle comes with at  least one television (generally many, interspersed through the rows so everyone can see properly) and a large selection of DVDs.  This is a mixed blessing, as there seems to be an unwritten rule that not everyone will understand the language (they’re almost always in Spanish, though English occasionally drops in with subtitles), the safest bet is to play action movies.

Shitty action movies.

In my time spent riding Ecuadorian buses, I have seen:

Sylvester Stallone’s “Lock-up”, Ice Cube’s “XXX: State of the Union”, two nameless Jackie Chan movies from the 80s, The Last Boy Scout, The Rock, Con-Air, Con-Air (a second showing), and some movie with The Rock (the wrestler) before he retired the name.  I don’t know what the last film was called, but it involved an extensive fight scene with small monkeys.  Every video store has an elaborate Jean-Claude Van Damme section with movies of his most people have never heard of, though I’ve yet to be Van Dammed on any busrides despite his seeming Latin American popularity.

Short of death and/or dismemberment in the Chone highlands, there was never any doubt things would end in Quito, exactly where they began.  Same bed, same bathroom shared sixteen ways, same Australians on cocaine, same American veteran talking about his Iraqi PTSD and dreams of opening the perfect hostel in Thailand, same Swiss girl that volunteers at a local children’s hospital and has impossibly perfect eyes, all watching the same shitty movies on HBO (Hostel 2 tonight, of all things) while waiting for that same battered beautiful bucket of cuba libre (the near ubiquitous name for “rum and coke” here — if it went by the same nickname in the States, no one ever told me) to be served.  It’s all so very fascinating still, but I’m seeing it through a different lens.  I’m not harder, better, faster, stronger or smarter.  But Chone‘s lightspeed indoctrination into the polar opposite of what my life had been did expand my personal understanding of “frickin’ weird,” and my spectrum of what to expect from life here has grown by at least three or four hues.

That’s probably gonna come in useful this year.

It’s just about ten as we finish the bottle of ronpope.  Luis was supposed to be here by eight, but it’s no surprise he’s two hours late — “Ecuadorian time,” I’m told again.  The alcohol in the ronpope is strong, but the drink has the consistency of caramel, gritted up with just a bit of mud; not entirely bad, but at around a thousand calories per shot, it’s hardly a healthy way to get a morning buzz.  It does complement mashed plantains and cheese well.

It’s day three and I’m extremely sick of plantains.

Roberto comes in with a slightly taller Ecuadorian in a white hat, still carrying his machete inside.

“This is my cousin Coki.  He Chone’s Crocodile DunDEE.”

Coki sets his machete on the table, an immaculate specimen several steps above the scrap metal turned into jungle weaponry that most locals carry.  My Spanish was finally good enough for a quick joke.

“Ahhhh.  No es cuchara,”  I say, pointing at the dull butter knife on my plate.  Pointing at his machete “ESSS cuCHARA!!!”

Blank stares.  Polite smiles.

“That’s not a knife.  THAAAT’S a Knife!  Crocodile Dundee?  No?”

They shake their heads smiling, but clearly they don’t get it.  Turns out cuchara means spoon.

Crocodile Chone says something and Roberto translates:

“He want to know if you want to see a snake fight a bat.”

Completely offguard but thrilled: “I want to see a snake or a bat!”

“Too late today.  Tomorrow, he come in morning and we see snake fight a bat.”

“OK!”

Luis arrives, rushing us out the door as expected and into the back of a truck with several cousins and an uncle.

“How many cousins do you have, Luis?”

“Hmm.  I don’t know the number.  It is more than 80.  But not 90.  My grandfather, he have 15 children!”

Joe: “Bet Christmas gets pretty crazy.”

We take new roads through two small towns, and similar qualities begin to appear.  No matter how ragged or poor a town may be, there is always a central square, cris-crossed with paths, gardens and trees all immaculately maintained.  In the center, generally a large pavillion or gazebo depending on the size of the town, and it’s not difficult to imagine town dances and festivals all taking place within, even if I never see anhy.  We reach our obvious destination with permanent signs in place, despite the festival only taking place once a year:

Fiesta de Comida Tipica

“This is a festival of typical foods?”

“Yes.  The best in all of Chone!” proclaims Luis.

He speaks to the people at the gate and they waive the two dollar fee for the gringo journalists.  Already we are celebrities by appearance alone.  If my fair complexion might have been lost in the crowd, my gargantuan height — about a foot above any of the locals, at least — ensures it is not.  Children are told our professions and immediately want to investigate the tools of our trade.  A young boy looks at my notebook as though it’s some weird alchemy tome with dark secrets of nature within, and turns the pages reverently.  That he stared in awe was proof he understood no English, as this snippet shows:

Crazy, drunken horns guy

rooster irritating.  holes throughout floor chicken coup.  ask, roberto say for piss drain cows?  think luis ringtone is huey lewis power of love, midi version.  horrible.

A wild-eyed man carrying some kind of animal horns stumbles up and hones in on me and he starts rambling drunkenly.  I maintain a wide smile and constantly repeat “Si.  Siii. Oh, si!” hopefully implying I have some idea of what he’s saying.  In actuality, I do not, and he is frightening me.  One day this technique is certain to get me inadvertently married off or cost me my firstborn child, but for now it seems effective enough.  He continues ranting and pours out some of a brown drink he’s carrying along with him into a cup made of bone or horn, which I gladly accept.  Strong with alcohol, it again tastes of caramel, reminiscent of ronpope, though far less thick and more drinkable.  Downing the cup in one large sip earns his approval and he runs behind me to places his horns upon my head, either as a show of profound respect or as a means of saying “Yo, look what the stupid gringo’ll let me do.”

Me, with horns

The park’s much like Rennaissance festivals in the states, only focusing on a way of life just decades past, rather than centuries.  The only “garb” is a table full of Panama hats.  Locals are militant about these hats, as they apparently originated in Ecuador, but “Panama” stuck ever since Teddy donned one while checking out the budding canal.  Say “Panama” in front of an Ecuadorian selling these hats.  Make sure you have some time to kill.  Bamboo is all the rage in architecture here, from forts and treehouses for kids, to food stands, to a large stage for performances and beauty pagaents perpetually surrounded by people and chickens throughout the day.

A chicken watches a dance performance intently

The food stands are all active, clouds of thick humid smoke surround the heavyset local women that seem to be cooking behind each counter.  At the first food stand, a large man standing in front beckons to us, his arms spread like a religious gesture as he presents a wide assortment of foods ending in “-iche”.  Viche, ceviche, geviche and others line his board, as well as a brand of homemade chicha that even from my limited
Spanish, I can tell he lists as revolutionary.  He makes a proclamation to all of us, staring at me while I smile with my practiced blank stare.

The revolutionary chicha chef

Luis translates: “He say he change what everyone know about chicha.  Everyone else just make with corn, naranjilla (a popular citrus fruit) and spices.  No more.  He add the mani, the peanuts.”

He speaks again.

“He say is natural viagra.”

A cup is foisted on me by the proud, bulky chef, and I down the thick beverage, surprised that it’s actually very drinkable.  After handing the cup back, I pause to make notes in my notebook for the sake of good journalism, and as I try to put it away, he smiles and asks to see the journal.  I open to the last page and pass it his way.

Last line: chicha – corn, naranjilla usually.  with peanuts revolutionary.

He looks down and smiles at me, patting me on the shoulder enthusiastically.  Apparently happy with my report, he grants us a bowl of free soup as well, shockingly enough also made from corn and his state-of-the-art peanut blend, this time with crab and tuna tossed in as well, giving the soup some body.  To save room, we split the soup, then made our way through the stands, picking and choosing from amongst the best foods in Chone to be considered “typical.”

Corn and peanut soup, with seafood

Chame (CHAH-mey) is a surprisingly meaty fish with a great flavor, though the bones make up something of a culinary obstacle course.  Like everything else in Ecuador, it is served on rice with a fried plantain, and possibly a side of tomato salsa.  For a little extra cash, you can get chame eggs as well, which ended up being well worth it if you could get past the gooey texture.

Chame

Small empanadas filled with cheese, pork or chicken shaped like pierogies are fried and sold for 25 cents a piece; rather than being made from pasta, the pockets are, not surprisingly, smashed plantains worked into a tortilla-like consistency.

Empanadas

Performances go on throughout the day, leading up to the pagaent

Music blares constantly from the main bamboo hut, around which a rectangle of people have congregated watching a steady queue of events.  Upon our arrival, two couples in white preform an elaborate dance routine.  Games are interspersed with the dancing.  Sometimes the game is a dance, as couples sway across the dirt with oranges between their foreheads, fighting to be the last citrus-fueled couple dancing.

Luis speaks to a beautiful young woman named Paola, one of the tallest Ecuadorian girls I’ve seen yet, and after a brief discussion, she comes over and takes my hand, acting as my guide for the next hour.  Whether she was genuinely fascinated by the gringo or Luis talked her into the task by the director of tourism for the general good of Chone and she was taking one for the team, wasn’t certain.  Paola walks me over to a large cardboard display with pictures of beautiful girls dressed for some sort of pageant.

“These… Miss fiesta de comida tipica. End of day… con-test?… and all watch.”

Her English, while not quite the same level of competency as Luis’s, was absolutely adorable.

Far from the main square, a four-piece band starts up playing traditional music.

“Come!  You dance?”

“Sure.  Terribly!”

Bailamos (we dance)

Despite the dearth of other dancers, we take to the center of the uneven square of dirt that seemed to be a dance floor, and she took my left hand with her right while placing the other around my waist.  Far from salsa, rumba or any other official Spanish dance with a name (certainly light years from the lambada), the dance was a lot of simple spinning, twisting and reversing while a crowd built around the beautiful young local girl and the gringo.  The song ends and I kiss her on the cheek, and we walked over to a bamboo museum displaying life in Chone at the turn of the century.  I wasn’t entirely certain which century, as short of cable television and indoor plumbing, the lifestyle on display doesn’t seem terribly different from anything else I’d seen so far during my stay.

One of the more skimpily-dressed entrants

A loud noise signifies the beginning of the pagaent and we scurry back to the main stage in time to see the first entrant, a fairly dim-eyed girl with golden suns covering her breasts and a small golden plate around her groin, no underwear beneath it (I failed to get a good picture of this.  But I tried).  More girls walk across the stage, announcing their intentions in Spanish (“If I am elected, I will create dishes made from corn, and serve them with corn beverages.  And maybe peanuts.”  This is a guess).  Fans, family, friends and chickens watch intently as the final girl took the stage.  Wearing seven layers (she takes them all off, displaying even more intricate gowns underneath), and an enormous hat consisting of more fruit than the chiquita banana girl framed around a large, paper-mache parrot that bobbed precariously each time she turned her head, she was the one to beat.

Miss fruit hat wins decisively, but a runner-up is proclaimed as well, leaving two girls on display whose smiles aren’t fake and plastered on.  The crowd goes wild, including the chicken in the front row, who remains silent but shifts his head from side to side frantically with wild eyes and far more spirit than before the pronouncement, as though suffering from intense, drug-added chicken paranoia.  The other girls filter silently, dejectedly, into the crowd while the victors take the stage, and pose for pictures with the judges.

Miss Fruit Hat performs before the judges, currently in her fourth dress

Wait.  I’m a celebrity.

“Luis, can I pose with Miss Typical Foods?”

“Yes, you must.”

The ladies of typical food and me. I am a giant.

Grey clouds drop down on cue, and while the drizzle never becomes more, the ending of the main event hits the festival like a wet blanket.  We’ve got an appointment on a boat somewhere, and no one really wants more food at this point anyway.  Heading out of the festival, a string of trucks and buses pass us, similarly having seen enough.  In the back of a flatbed, a light-skinned, blonde-haired child stares out at us cherubically.

“LOOK!” says Luis, more excited than he’s been all day, “mica, mica Look at the mica! Ha ha.  Wave!  Wave to the mica.”

I give a very half-hearted wave and ask the obvious as the adorable little white freakshow waves back.  Around 1900, some Germans settled around Chone and got around enough that a great deal of recessive Aryan genes lie dormant, showing up from unexpectedly from time to time like little white, genetic landmines striking unexpectedly.  They’re rare enough to apparently get pointed at as they pass on trucks, but not so rare to not get their own nickname – mica.

“Isn’t that sort of racist, Luis?  Like ‘lets all point at the mica?’”

“Racist?  I don’t understand.  They are mica.”

“But are they treated differently because of their looks?”

“Of course.  When parents have two children, and one is mica, they treat it special and the other child, who is not mica is not treated as well and think ‘I wish I was mica.’  Is wonderful to be mica”

“Oh.”

Clearing out the fishing boat

The boat trip involves a single, oar-propelled fishing boat big enough for four people (eight of us get in) requiring the help of everyone to remove crates and fishing equipment so that people might fit into it.  I ask Luis if this is really something ready for a stream of tourists my article might bring in as I toss a fish-scented wooden crate into the mud.

“Yes.  We can take this boat any time.  I know the owner.  These waters, many chame.  Also the alligator.”

The overfilled metal boat is taking water and about three inches above the water’s surface.

“Ok, got enough to write about here — How about we head on back?”

This is becoming an underlying problem with the trip — I’m supposed to write an article raving about tourism in Chone, but the infrastructure simply isn’t there.  Short of Luis acting as a personal guide to every dreadlocked, backpacking hippie to come through town, most tourists would find themselves at a loss to do anything we’ve been experiencing thus far.  I explain this to Luis constantly, but he’s blinded by the desire to make Chone a tourist attraction, and he can’t help his reach painfully exceeding his grasp.

Through all this, my fingers are fumbling more and more with the bizarre growth on my chin, feeling out its slowly growing borders with trepidation.  What once was mistaken for a pimple now felt like a 50-cent piece sized bubble on my chin, smaller veins of red, swollen wrongness growing up my chin and further down my neck than they’d been even just that morning.  Luis drones on about small local festivals based on cacao production, shipping and leather that just any tourist would travel around the world for, and all that’s going through my head is: Fuck.  I’ve got the South American flesh-eating disease.

Thoughts of my chin are all-consuming now as Luis talks of a local birthday party he wants to take us to.  I like Chone.  I like the people, the food, the casual gringo danger.  But I’m sure that I like my face more, and now that the paranoia’s set in, I start to envision a jigsaw-like deformity crossing my entire body.  My fingers are glued to the aberration; it’s like a thick, hairy bubble constantly leaking something pinkish and sticky, not quite blood but still, well, icky.  Luis insists on the party — I can use the bathroom there.

We walk upstairs to a small apartment, the living room filled with people gleefully dancing the macarena, which is also played at least once a night in every club in Ecuador, despite a window of popularity that closed over a decade ago in the states.  The bathroom’s occupied but I stand in line, desperately in need of a mirror and a means of cleaning the thing eating into my good looks.  My turn arrives needlessly; the bathroom lacks both a mirror and running water.  The toilet clearly gets a steady, marginally fresh supply but repeated turns of the faucet produce nothing.

The party’s actually not a bad time.  A large German woman promises to bring me horses early tomorrow morning, and the food and dancing help pass the unnecessary two hours we end up spending there.  Back at La Providencia, I finally get to see my newly deformed face.

Yikes

The rash woke me up in time to finally investigate the cow field more than the roosters did.  The infamous “cock-a-doodle-doo” onomatopoeia (surprisingly close to the mark) isn’t as much a signifier of dawn as I’d been led to believe, as roosters actually make the sound about 24 hours a day.  The frequency’s a bit higher at dawn, but interspersed throughout the night, all it takes is a single confused rooster to cackle out before another from an opposing farm chimes in to retort, starting off a long-distance sonic cock-fight.  I almost slept through this last night.

The potrero‘s like a cowpie minefield and it’s still dark out, making the little patties just a shade less dark than the ground they cover.  Dawn is silent except for the roosters and surreally dreamlike, with silhouettes of cows and calves standing frozen while dark figures attend to them.  Roberto’s nowhere to be seen so I stumble up to the first figure I see, a short man leaning over a large tin bucket and make my point in a mix of broken Spanish and broken international sign language.

“Roberto habla, uhh, yo” (Roberto speaks, uhhh, I)

I pause and make the universal gesture for milking a cow with a solid grip on two teats and hands going up and down opposite one another.  I point to myself ecstatically.

“Me!  Me!”

More confusion.  Apprehension.

Fuck.  Does he think I’m some pervy extranjero (foreigner) that wants to get milked??

“Me leche!”  Two more squeezing gestures for good measure.

He smiles with a slight laugh, friendly yet incredulous.  Silly gringo!

We hopscotch our way to the back of the field and he tosses the bucket down directly underneath a cow that throughout the process could best be described as motionless.  For having to sit back and suffer through an awkward lesson in the bovine equivalent of areola yanking, I would’ve expected a grunt, moo or at least a quick “That’s definitely not the right way, sir!” dart of its head back towards me at some point in my manhandling (cowhandling?) of it.  But unless the cow was rolling its eyes the whole time, it appeared fairly unconcerned.

Slightly less oblivious, a young calf stood just feet to the right of us, looking on intently.  It knew better than to get in the way of men at work, but clearly was quite ready for any leftovers.  The worker reached down placing a visibly solid grip around its mother’s teat and, tightening his grip at the same time, yanked downwards, letting out a single burst of firehouse intensity that shook the empty pail.  He then removed his hand and gestured for me to duplicate his feat.

“That’s it?  That’s the lesson?”

I wouldn’t have understood his response anyway, so it was probably for the best that he didn’t understand my question and remained silent, making the same “milk!!” motions with his hands.

As I began this paragraph with “The teat was hot and thick…” I knew it was hard to avoid this sounding like sweetbestialityblog.com, but I can only say the experience was more like being dropped into a strange science fiction novel than even moderately arousing for me.  And it certainly didn’t seem to be erotic or pleasant for my subject.

The udder itself was bloated and visibly taut, as though my retrieval of its liquid payload would be a tremendous relief for the cow, which made my awkward task a little bit easier.  Gingerly taking the closest teat in my right hand, I worked my fingers around it a few times, toying with the perfect grip before imitating my instructor with a quick squeeze/yank combo.

pssssssshhhht

A short but steady stream poured down into the pan; it was hardly of the intensity of the earlier burst, but undeniably milk.  The teat seemed to have a dense, inner-teat (no Tootsie Pop jokes here) that needed to be accessed in order to release each serving, though by modifying my squeeze, yank or both, I wasn’t sure.  For such a “seminal human experience,” the whole thing was pretty damned alien.

I pulled down on a slightly gimpier teat with my left hand, now taking the standard cow-milking posture (the alternate teat actually makes for pretty good support!), and attempted the action again with a similar reaction.  My two attempts combined didn’t seem to even come close to matching the demonstratory burst, but as a (uhhh) stranger to teats, I was fairly pleased.  Platonically, of course.

Being about an inch and a half longer than my fist, the teat fits perfectly for the task of repeated yanking with a soft, leather-like (obviously) texture allowing for a good grip.  I start yanking — right, left, right, left  — in the same steady pattern, with the din of the streams hitting into the bucket forming a nice background rhythm to the point where I lessen the left teat’s flow a bit to get a more techno beat.  Mistaking my untz’d output for difficulty, my instructor reaches in and stops me.

Through a series of hand gestures, I get to placing my hands, palms up, directly under the largest teat as he gives it a sharp pull.  Hotter than I’d anticipated (though about what anyone with common sense would expect given that it is a bodily fluid) my hands are now covered in fresh milk.  I stare at him quizzically, and, not getting an immediate response, sample the milk.  It was warm, rich and inherently fresh, but not terribly unlike any other of my myriad past experiences with the beverage.  He looks at me with a kind of pained shock, before making a series of hand motions.

The hand-coating was to ease the milking.  Not for drinking.  Oh.

My forearms and wrists increasingly more tired, I began to take note of just how little milk I was getting compared to my mentor and prepped to give up, lasting just long enough to make him take an almost scarily perfect picture.

One more thing off the list.

A fantastic shot of the prior day's ascent

On a mule

For no sensible reason, we’re back on the same mountain that nearly took out both my photographer and myself just one day prior, having cheated a bit this time by riding in the back of a flatbed as far as the truck could take us.  Except this time I’m on a mule.

Luis keeps referring to today as “the easy day” but as he tends to follow this up by explaining that the first two hours of our trip involve a path through the mountains he’s never taken before.  Joe’s right hand is fully bandaged from the rope burn and we explain in no uncertain terms that we will not be climbing again today.  Luis quickly agrees, reassuring us that today’s trek will be a simple mountain walk, before returning into deep conversation with Don Fernando where nearly every other word is “subimos” or some variation of subir.

subir – (sp) v.  to climb

With us today was Isalene, a trilingual French woman in her 40s with an amusing, if not exactly helpful, habit of translating for us from Spanish into Spanish, staring at me intently while speaking in the exact same language I couldn’t understand the first time.  Keeping with his habit of assuming people’s mountain trekking skills were far better than they actually were, Luis introduced her by proclaiming “Isalene has climbed the Alps and the Andes!”

“Oh Luis,” she said warily, “I like going on nice walks around the bottom of the mountains I suppose…”

“Yes” he said, smiling.

After the prior day’s adventure, my arms were lined with randomly occurring cris-crossed slashes, like cave etchings by a blind person.  Smalls rashes and bug bites interspersed between them like fleshy braille, my body had become a canvas for the sensory-impaired.  My feet, bloody and blistered, were covered in my entire stock of moleskin, and I opted against using the over-sized boots Luis had provided me with the day before (“to protect your legs from the snakes”) in favor of my shorter and far less snake-repelling sneakers.

Back up la montana, mule-bound

Spotting the animals from afar, I had actually asked if I could ride the horses (“no are horses.  are mular.”), so it’s my own fault for making the expedition more awkward.  The mules carry downed trees and supplies up and down the same path every day, so technically, the surly beast shouldn’t even notice I’m aboard as it goes about its daily trek up the hill.  Despite this, as I sat on the burlap saddle without any means of stearing, watching the mule wander as closely to the jagged edge of the mountain path as possible as though it had some bizarre phobia of even coming close the the center of the established road, I couldn’t help but picture a sudden bout of mule moodiness dropping me in a swirl of flailing limbs down la montana.

Though it carried on longer than I’d expected, the mule finally stops walking on its own by a steep, muddy drop descending back into the cloud forest.  Joe and I eye one another warily, but proceed.

“Look — the eagles!”

The sky is filled with dense, green overgrowth, small bits of blue sky permeating through in microscopic dots not nearly large enough to allow for birds of any size, let alone whatever eagles Luis thinks he’s spotted.  Today’s more humid, more thick, more muddy.  We haven’t hit any steep drops yet, but I’ve already fallen ass-first three times, all in the name of seeing a cave exact in every way to one we’d risked life and limb to see the day prior, though two to three feet taller.

“BLOODY HELL”

Joe’s slipped and fallen a couple feet down into some jungle filth.

“That’s it.  I can’t.  I can’t fuckin’ do it.  I can’t.”  Joe’s done.

Luis: “We are almost to the path.”

This isn’t the path?

A fairly epic shot of Don Fernando

I chime in.  “Honestly, Luis, I have to write an article about how wonderful Chone is.  We’re taking up two days on the same small mountain.  No matter what happens today, I’ll be able to add about one to two sentences on whatever I’ve already got…”

“It’s a bloody waste of time.”

“Any pictures Joe takes are going to be of the exact same things he got yesterday…”

“It’s just stupid.”

Luis’s brow furrowed in consternation: “We talked of this last night.  You should have told me you wanted to do something different.”

Score one for the great language barrier, I guess.  We head back to the path down the mountain, this time sans mules.

Piling into the back of a flatbed with at least two random families, we head down a new route over dirt roads regularly crossed by small rivers.  On these roads, most of the locals get around by horses, as only the best trucks (read: miraculously held together by spare parts and twine, seemingly 2-5 ignitions away from a final fart of exhaust smoke) can make it through the regular deluges blocking passage deeper into the most rural parts of Chone.

Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads

A heavyset man wearing only a slight swimsuit bathes in a stream as we pass, and Luis points him out, as though it’d be possible to miss a solitary fat man in loose blue shorts splashing himself with the gleefulness of a child just beside us.  The man comes up to us and after a few words, hops in the back of the truck with a great deal more grace than I would’ve expected.  He talks to me for a while, as I smile on, waiting for Luis to give his words meaning.

“He say he is medicine man, and snake man of mountain.  He collect the bad snakes and when people they are bitten, they come to him and he make snake cure.”

“Neat.”

The man talks some more.

“He grow the medicine marijuana.”

“Neat.  What does he treat with it?”

“He say arthritis.  And lots of things.”

“Neat.” I find my vocabulary drops significantly when regular translation is necessary.

“He say he have.. um.. Diabetes and need Insulin but he no can get Insulin.  So he make own.”

“He makes his own?  Insulin??”

More chatter.

“Yes.  From bile of pig stomach.  And three special plants he mix.  He make Insulin.”

“Neat.”

The medicine man laughs, though it could’ve been about anything as he seemed fairly jolly in general, as though his temperament didn’t require comprehension for him to have a good time.  Or maybe it was just whatever fruits of the mountain he was on at the time…

I ask if any of the roadside streams are deep enough to swim in, and while they’re not, apparently the medicine man knows just the spot not too far from where we were at.  It’s off the road a bit, and though we were all a bit wary about reliving any epic adventure today, how difficult could it be to get to if a barefooted latin buddha could find his way down?

Fairly difficult, it turns out.

Isalene, climbing down to the pool

The shaman sort of hopped down from rock to rock with the unrealistic grace of a cartoon character, while Isalene and I gently slipped down each wet rock and vine we came across on our way to the “perfect” swimming spot.  Joe, hand throbbing with pain, had called it quits early on and promised to meet us at the road.  One last drop and we were there.  The perfect swimming spot.

Luis and the Medicine Man (soon to be a hit show on FOX)

Despite it being “the dry season,” two waterfalls converged to fill a crystal clear pool hidden in a cave to a depth suitable for swimming.  Water temperature was perfectly cool, and I was promised that no candiru used the spot as a breeding ground (my lone criteria for South American swimming).  One waterfall fell off into a smaller cave before making its way down into the main pool, and I climbed into the alcove before jumping back down into the water below, the medicine man watching silently the whole time with a slightly bemused look on his face.

This actually is what I came here for…

Completely revitalized, we spent the rest of the afternoon at a local cacao factory, recently built by local farmers that had just discovered the value of pooling together their resources.  Before, each sold off the cacao individually in small quantities with the others as competitors.  Now, they were a single unit, a chocolate city, if you will, setting the prices and handling all exports across the entire region.  In the main office area, poster paper hung from the walls with “why we’re the best!” outlines that, though in Spanish, immediately were recognizable to anyone that had ever worked in marketing and product branding as being in the international language of “marketing-ese”.

CACAO

The cacao seeds (which, when fresh taste remarkably like mango) go through a multi-step process before being shipped off in giant bags of soon-to-be-chocolate (the processing of the seeds into paste is still done elsewhere — generally Europe).  Fresh from the large, bulbous fruit that contains the white grape-sized seeds, the crop is placed in large burlap bags to sit out in the sun for at least two days to ferment.  After then being placed in a large wooden crate to ferment a bit longer (the best things on earth all seem to be brought about by fermentation), the seeds are spread out onto an enormous, white cement surface and left to dry in the sun.  As weather’s unpredictable, this final stage can can anywhere from three to twenty days depending on rain, humidity or the wrath of the gods.

As the process is explained, I squeeze lightly on a protrusion freshly discovered on my chin, its output the color and consistency of strawberry jam.  Sampling it and nauseatingly discovering it was not indeed jam, I washed my hand off in the grass and asked Joe, who said it looked like some sort of large pimple, still leaking a clear biological liquid of some kind.  Between this and a red, lumpy rash that had begun to spread about my person, Ecuador was wasting no time in making its mark on me.

With no significant plans this evening, it’s looking as though I might wake in time to satisfy a bizarre, decades-long dream…

Borracho: (sp) adj.  drunk

-ito: (sp) suff.  diminuitive.  added to words in Spanish to imply “little” or impart a degree of cuteness on a word not initially present.

Borrachito: (sp) n.  1. “adorable little drunk,” then.  2. an Ecuadorian drinking game

Belen (or is it Anita?) deals out the seven of hearts, and a makeshift shotglass is once again placed in front of me in a game that seems fixed (these Ecuadorian women keep giving me their hearts).  A club unsurprisingly is dropped to the next person in the circle, and a table full of Ecuadorians chants “IZQUIERDAAA IZQUIERDA A LA IZQUIERDA!!!” which by this point I’m only too aware means “to the left!!!” As in, my current location.

Cards and Cristal

As someone that went to college in the United States, I’m no stranger to drinking games, where through a combination of fate and strategy, cards determine exactly who is likely to be emptying their stomachs before dawn.  Decidedly short on strategy, Borrachito is basically a step away from sitting down and racing through a bottle of terrible fermented sugarcane juice while admiring a deck of Galapagos-themed playing cards.  Cards are slowly dealt clockwise around the table; clubs require the person to the left of the dealt player to drink, spades go A LA DERECHA!!!, hearts go to the current player and diamonds give him the ability to force Ecuador’s finest distilled out on any of the unsuspecting players.

As far as drinking games go, this one is decidedly lacking in both skill and subtlety, though it presented an excellent opportunity for a gringo such as myself to learn key Spanish phrases that would be imminently useful.  Besides “right” and “left,” I picked up “Drink!” “Poor baby!” and “Enjoy!” (“disfruta!“), for less than the normal five dollars an hour most Spanish lessons cost.  The drink, a local schnapps-like spirit called Cristal (not in any way to be confused with its Hip-hop beloved distant cousin) is fairly inoffensive for one to three dollars, and the obvious choice for locals as all foreign spirits of about the same size range from 10-40 dollars per bottle.  Much like many of the ingestibles I’ve tried in Ecuador though (guinea pigs, chicha, dried cow’s blood), it’s not terrible but simply not something most people would ever in any way crave.

We’d gotten back to La Providencia well after dark; had I known we’d be returning, my backpack — equal parts mud-soaked and deadweight — could’ve remained behind.  I had intended to sleep after our rough day trekking through Chone’s cloud forests, but as our gracious host Roberto had invited four local women over to welcome us, it seemed rude to opt for the company of my hammock instead.  My poorly chosen gear, well established by now as containing nothing remotely useful, also contained no additional clothing.  The day’s attire in a pile of cloth, mud and stowaway branches on the floor, I was forced to ask our already gracious host Roberto for an outfit of some sort, which fit remarkably well considering I’m taller than everyone in Ecuador by at least a foot.

Ignoring the party for a bit, I carried my clothing off to the washroom so that I’d have something vaguely clean to wear in the morning, and got well acquainted with the “old school” method of laundry.  Using a large stone basin, I dropped each article in individually and hosed it off, then got to work with a block of soap and brush, doing my best to rid the clothes of the bulk of dirt (and in some decidedly badass cases, blood) before hanging them on a clothesline to be dry by tomorrow.  Unfortunately, “dry by tomorrow” is an impossible description in Ecuador’s thick, humid climate, but I wouldn’t have to deal with that until morning.

Wall Decorations

A little should be said about the sparse decorations in La Providencia.  Few adornments cover the wall and, with the exception of a large soccer — sorry, futbol — banner, can be broken into two categories: solemn religious Catholic dogma and big-titted ladies calendars advertising agricultural products.  My room contained two of such calendars, a cross and an austere portrait of Jesus seemingly glancing over towards the nearest calendar.  On the door of the kitchen, a sign reads (loosely translated): “This is a Catholic house.  Please keep other dogmas, Protestant and otherwise, out.”

The Pigeons' Room

Despite no screens over any of the windows or balconies, there was a pleasant lack of insects (mosquitos or otherwise) inside the house.  The wood making up the floors and ceiling beams had been gatherered from La Providencia’s predecessor (also La Providencia), which had been built at the turn of the last century.  The wood felt dense and strong, though at times wide gaps between beams displayed parts of the storage area downstairs.  Like anywhere else in Chone, dogs wandered the yard that could best be described as “mangy,” cats howled in the mornings in tandem with roosters though were never seen, and a lone bird cage contained two pigeons, clearly cramped but nonplussed about the situation.

Back in the kitchen, I joined Joe and met up with Fernando (Roberto’s cousin) and Roberto’s four friends that had dropped into to meet the gringos; our rarity in the region had elevated us to near celebrity status at times.  Mariella, Belen, Anita and Gabriella (whose names I would almost never apply correctly) sat at the table with two bottles of their finest $1.50 Cristal.  The game proceeded as described above, until I attempted to dissuade Roberto from using his “give a drink” power on me by teaching him “Bro’s before Ho’s” which immediately denigrated into a curious sharing of language and cultures with Roberto acting as translator.

We talked for a few minutes about when and where and if one should use the word “Dude” when, after a brief silence, Roberto asked:

“Do you say nig-ger?”

“Uhh… No.  I can’t.”

“I see movies and in movies they say ‘hey nig-ger hey nig-ger’…” he says, while gesturing two fists coming together in a friendly greeting.

“Well, for one, I think it’s nig-ga.  Like the ‘ERRR’ isn’t really said.”

“Nig-GUH”

Belen (or is it Mariella): “NIGGA!”

“Yes yes.  I mean no.  like…”

“I go to New York and say ‘hello nigga’”  It was phrased like it should’ve been a question but there was no querying tone to the statement.

“No, you can’t do that.  I mean, Chris Rock probably explains it better but, like, white people mostly shouldn’t say it.  And maybe the rules are a little different for hispanics but I’m pretty sure you can’t get away with it.”

He stares at me perplexed, not entirely getting me.

“No say nigga you.”

“Oh.”  I expect him to be disappointed but he accepts the cultural limitation with ease, as though the topic of conversation were as interesting to him as ice hockey, Jerry Springer or any other bizarre North American curiosity.

Luis arrives to talk about the next day’s exploration of Chone, not even attempting to disguise the fact that it will be more of the same relentless cheating of serious bodily harm.  While the girls and Roberto continue drinking, Luis, Joe and I huddle on the other side of the table around a small paper map of Chone and a recently printed tourist brochure.

“Tomorrow,” he says, “I take you to the Tombas.”

Entomb(as)ed

Tombas, meaning tomb, is a cave-like outcropping in the middle of a particularly muddy hill that cuts about seven feet into the moutain before stopping, a fairly level five feet tall all around.  We’d made it there towards the end of the day, already beaten and exhausted, and while it did indeed seem like it’d be a fun spot for tourists to camp at, I’d simply had too much natural grandeur that day to take in any more, collapsing on the surprisingly smooth stone surface while Luis explained why this natural equivalent of a storage closet was a thing of magnificence.

“We saw the tombas already, Luis.  I think I have some tombas stuck in this scab on my arm…”

“We saw ehh.. pequeno.. the small tombas.  I wanted you see big tombas.  You saw smaller.  You can even stand in big tombas.”

“Big tombas is deeper in mountain?”

“Not deeper, no.  Is taller.  In wet season, big waterfall pour over tombas.  You stand behind.”

“There’s a waterfall there?”

“Yes.  In January is waterfall.”

The brochure in front of me, I try to point out cave etchings, opulent old churches and displays of rich, varied foods to take advantage of throughout the region.  Each offer to take part in the rich culture of Chone was immediately deflected by a reminder of the mindblowing resplendence of a rocky outcropping three feet taller than the one we had just seen earlier.

He also brought up the Tembladeras, another natural occurrence he was never quite able to accurately describe.

“Horses, Luis!  Didn’t you say there were horses in the area that were great for riding?  Why don’t we do that instead of going back to the mountain?”

“The horses here are wonderful.  Yes.  We will go to see them after la tombas.  You will really like.”

Joe, fresh from a particularly bad ropeburn, was trying as hard as I was to keep things a bit more tame, but eventually dropped “Well, this is what we were sent here for, so we go where you say,” and once journalistic ethics have been brought into things I had no more outs.

Still buzzed, I went to sleep with no intention of waking in time to milk anything the next morning.

Room with a view

This is what I came here for.  Sunshine burning past a plantain treeline just beyond the screenless balcony of my bedroom.  An optional hammock just slightly too small for me next to the bed (great for watching cable television, seemingly an anachronism in a homestead devoid of most other forms of “modern” technology).  Serenity now.

Had I awakened at 5:30, a field of dairy cows would’ve been mine for the milking, satisfying a longstanding desire of mine that’s admittedly weird but assuredly not in any way perverse.  Throughout the world, cold, mechanical efficiency had replaced the gingerly connection between hand and udder so long a seminal part of the cream-loving human experience.  Getting another check off of my peculiar to-do list would have to wait.

La Providencia

La Providencia, my home away from my home away from home deep in the coastal cantone of Chone is an all-purpose farm, specializing in nearly everything the region is known to produce.  The countryside is lined with trees producing plantains, bananas, passion-fruit, mandarins and most importantly, cacao.  Until World War II, this reason was one of the top cacao exporters in the world, sending the bulk of their supply off to Germany.  While we debated guns versus butter, Germans apparently had a similar battle with chocolate, and the sweets lost, sending the region into an abject if tasty poverty it never again escaped from.

Breakfast consists of pancakes made from plantains and fresh cheese, served with equally fresh butter, papaya marmalade, cheese and salpietro, an corn/peanut/cilantro mix with an orange tint described as “natural viagra,” the first of many things in Chone to be described as such (which, along with Catholicism, did much to help explain why nearly every person we met was a direct cousin of our host), which is outstandingly good, with just a hint of savory sweetness.

Luis, the head of Chone’s tourism department and one of two people within 50 miles — sorry, kilometers — that can speak English, arrives two hours late in time to rush us through our breakfast as though we were responsible for the delay.  It would be a common theme in area: consistently rushing, yet always a few hours behind schedule.  Uncertain of where to leave my belongings, I opted to lug my backpack, replete with laptop and any number of unnecessary supplies that would serve no purpose on any mountain expedition, along with me.

A rare, un-bumpy moment...

Transportation to nearly everywhere in the region involves jumping into the back of a pickup truck (generally a Nissan, pronounced “Nixon”.  Spouting off “I am not a crook” with two fingers in the air receives neither laughs nor a hint of recognition from the locals) to be carried around the countryside as far as any given driver might be going.  Random pit stops are often made to pick up families from the side of the road, sometimes getting as many as twelve people in the back of a flatbed, along with supplies, children and livestock.  My initial rides involved holding on for dear life while being violently shaken like a Home Depot paint mixer; by the end of the weekend, I would be standing freely, arms in the air and wind in my hair.  When in Ecuador…

After a quick stop to pick up tonga, a local delicacy involving rice, hen, plantains and a special salsa, all wrapped in plantain leaves and allowed to continue cooking in its own juices throughout the day while being lugged in my backpack, we met our guide at the base of the mountain.  The original guide was a notorious drunk and true to form was incapble of either guiding or walking.  Luckily, every mountain in Chone seems to have at least one spare local with intimate knowledge of properly menacing machete usage.  Our spare was Don Bartholo, a local hunter, more than willing to take us through his mountain.  Armed with a machete in one hand and shotgun in the other, Bartholo added a compelling intensity to the start of our trip as he led the way up the fairly steep mountain path.

Along for the ride were Fernando and Jose (two Red Cross volunteers), Luis, Joe the photographer and Lider, a 63 year old schoolteacher along for the ride whose sole purpose seemed to be making me feel like a tremendous pussy while ambling up seemingly unclimbable passes with almost no visible effort.  The ground leveled off in a large open mandarin tree field, and I realized I was already breathing like an emphysema victim well into his second pack of the day, too aware of my body’s mass and my own lack of useful degrees of both muscles and endurance.

“Are you good for this?”  Luis, curious over my panting so early into the expedition.

“Sure sure.  How far up are we going?”

A brief moment of confusion on his face before, slowly “…to the top?  The places I want to take you we can only get to from the top of the mountain.”

“Oh.”

To myself: This is what I came here for.

A surge of confidence.  A naive sense of gonzo adventure.  An arrogant surety in abilities I only wish I could describe as “untested,” when the reality is that they’ve traditionally had about the success rate of chastity rings on Prom Night.

Mandarin season

Bartholo gestures to a mandarin tree and I take one, refreshing and sweet, from a low-hanging branch.  The day would at times seem like a sweaty, unending adrenaline rush, but it would almost consistently be punctuated by a wide variety of fresh fruits, always impeccably placed at times of near collapse on my part.  Crossing a field of downed trees, Luis points at the still-wet sap on a remaining stump and says sadly “Sangre.. the blood of the forest.”  He’s been trying to teach the owners of the land about conservation and they understand, but idyllic views don’t put bacon on the table.

The uphill trail steadily becomes more uphill and less trail, Bartholo making broad surgical strokes with his machete to clear wild vines, bamboo and limitless thorny bramble from our way in the name of making something vaguely path-like where clearly no man has ever walked before.  A tree-less section of mountain opens up, with loose dirt slipping below our feet with every step.  Bartholo cuts a sharp stick from the bramble with his machete and jabs the dirt in various spots making short, makeshift steps to ease our climb, the ground descending wildly below us with few places to break a fall.

This is what I came here for.  Heartbeat and breathing erratic.  Wide-eyed and uncertain, my hands gripping the occasional loose roots for any added support at all.  Trying not to look down.

Uhh...

Glancing at the younger Red Cross volunteer, I see he’s got the fear in his eyes and can’t tell if this makes me feel better or not.  As both he and I speak only one language and it’s not the same one, I had a hard time getting out of him earlier why he was coming along — “por Trabajo or, uhhh, por fun-o?“  Fun-o apparently didn’t translate well, but he answered “trabajo” (work) anyway.  I climbed for a while wondering what kind of work a Red Cross person could possibly be up to deep in the mountainsides before it occurred to me, while danging awkwardly from a tattered rope with a helmet freshly placed over my head: “They’re here for us.”

Only Joe and I have helmets, the locals clearly competent enough to scurry upwards over relentlessly uncertain footing.  Thankfully, Joe was having a miserable time of it as well, which at least left me feeling like this was far beyond the normal mountain trek.  After climbing around a particularly difficult precipice — no harness or actual gear, so much as a rope burning tightly into my hand as i dangle there for dear life — Bartholo looks at me and says “Spiderman, si?  Ha ha.  SPIDERMAN!!!” proving that the international language of superhero crosses all cultures.

This is what I came here for.  Absolute bloody — to borrow a term from Joe — madness.  Meaningless danger as we crossed a trail that never existed before and would never exist again.  The nagging fear that any non-fatal accident would be followed by the inevitable impossibility of trying to escape down the mountain in a bloody — literal, not British this time — maimed state with the help of South American machete ninjas unaccustomed to yankee gawkishness.

While Joe was trapped below, Luis and Bartholo had a worried tone in their voices and finally brought me to “the hard part.”  A waterfall of rough vines flowed down from a muddy, 20 foot vertical wall.  As reliable and trustworthy as any of Quito’s limitless corner drug dealers, I had learned throughout the day that about one in six vines were actually worth holding onto in the name of remaining safely un-mangled, so I wasn’t instilled with much faith in my chances of using any of the natural options to reach the summit.

“You say if you can do this,” said Luis, “or we go back.”

“I’m pretty sure I can’t do this, actually.  But as I’m 100% positive I’m not going back the way we came, uhh, mas Spiderman, si?”

It wasn’t clear if Luis understood I had agreed to attempt the climb or not from my response’s sharp descent into silence, but I pushed forward and started my way up.  Vines gave way relentlessly as I dry-humped forward not unlike performing a vertical worm, but I eventually settled on two vines that seemed fairly reliable.  Bartholo, in the meantime, seemed to lock himself into the face of mountain in such a way to single-handedly grip my ass and propel it upwards, a gesture I normally would’ve been extremely uncomfortable with, but at the time was imminently grateful for.  Soaked in sweat, mud and bramble, with the deadweight of a laptop, Gameboy Advance, two notebooks, a Spanish dictionary, two padlocks, four condoms, a portable magnetic chess set and a mostly unread Tom Robbins novel hanging from my back, I crested the summit and collapsed.

Tonga

Despite being unaware at the time that Joe wouldn’t make it up for an hour, so I took out the Tonga and had lunch in the jungle to the sounds of birds and howler monkeys (which sound oddly like a mix between a miniature King Kong and a braying mule).  Lider, the consistently bemused 63-year old sat with me and pulled out a bag of mandarin juice.  For some reason, juice is served and sold in clear plastic bags similar to those used to bag produce in supermarkets, hastily tied up at one end to secure them.  They’re opened by gently chewing a corner off and then proceeding to down the entire bag in one sitting, feeling the soft plastic bladder steadily shrink in your hands while vampirically draining it of its life-giving fluids.

We called a brief meeting with Luis and explained that the intense climbing was no over for the day and any path taken from this point on would be “the easy route.”  It was four in the afternoon, and according to the altimeter on my watch, we had ascended 1600 feet.

“You are mountain climbers, though!” said Luis, confused at our near-exhausted states.

“What?”

“Mountain climbers.  I see in your newspaper pictures of you do mountain climbing.”

A moment of silence and confusion before Joe chimed in.

“Luis, those are stock photos.  From the Internet.”

He stared at us, smiling, not in any way comprehending.

This is what I came here for.  I am retarded.

This was the first clear view of the sky in about five hours

The treeline finally gave way, exposing the sky for the first time in hours with a sprawling vista of rich green, yellow, and orange in every direction with a vividness rarely found in standard reality.  Lush, green uninhabited mountains in every directions with no signs of humanity, it was very much like being on the set of Lost.  A lone horse stood to the side of the field, staring at us curiously but not moving as we passed by.  Luis was intent on a particular path, though admitted that like much of the day’s trails, he’d never actually been on it, and it could potentially be an impossible route.

We immediately vetoed this plan.

Instead, we connected with an actual trail that led to a local farmer’s property, and eventually a road that led down the mountain untrecherously.  Several houses lined the side of the path, all “casas abandonedas,” which unsurprisingly means “abandoned houses.”  They’re open to all, should anyone need  shelter, though the remoteness makes it unlikely anyone would just stumble upon them, short of gringos being foolish enough to agree to check out some “new trails.”

Absolutely disgusting

The last leg the the walk was unwelcome on blistered feet and sore muscles, but we hobbled down, making our way to the “main” road by nightfall.  I collapsed into the back of a pickup truck, hypnotically staring upwards for the first time at the Southern Cross as we sped back at high speeds on poorly paved roads to Lider’s house.  There, keeping up with an almost irrational hospitality that would characterize the entire region, Lider’s family ran out to our truck with oranges, drinks, crackers and fresh papaya marmalade, the latter he would provide us with jars of before leaving.

Coated in mud and thorns, starving and thirsty, we poured out of the flatbed and made our way back to La Providencia ostensibly in one piece.

This is what I came here for.  Hell.  Beats working.

And so it was on my second morning in Ecuador that I woke up in the oldest farmhouse in the Chone Cantón of the province of Manabi, seven hours west of Quito by bus, far from a stable internet connection, a change of clothes, or indeed, most of my gear.  Unscreened wooden doors along the eastern wall of my bedroom were spread wide, allowing in both the morning sun and an unspoiled vista of plantain, passion-fruit and cacao trees spreading off into the horizon.  Located in the central western section of Ecuador, Chone lay just miles from the coast on one side and the Andes on the other, with the proximity to the former giving the air a cool, fresh quality.

The Common Room, rum and coke in pot (stock photo)

I had awakened the day before at El Centro del Mundo in La Mariscal district of Quito at around 11 in the morning, still recovering from the hostel’s famous “Free Rum and Coke Night,” a local holiday so beloved by guests that it is celebrated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  Basically, guests congregate in the main common area around a low table topped by a large metal pail filled with coca-cola and the cheapest possible local rum.  In a world of Captain Morgans and Admiral Nelsons, the variety used here was Ensign Pedro at best, but it got the job done.  La Mariscal is easily the most touristy region of Quito, widely known as “Gringolandia” to locals and travel books alike.

The hostel was a mostly younger crowd of Australians, South Africans and Israelis with a single other American, and we traveled from room to room sharing travel stories, of which I had none.  Drug use is apparently quite prevalent in hostels, with nearly everyone smoking joints of tobacco mixed with surprisingly dry and unattractive marijuana.  The 50/50 joint is apparently the norm in all of the world but North America, and I was grilled on why Americans like smoking pot alone, though I didn’t really have any answers for them.  At one point the Australians blatantly partook of cocaine in a room full of people, and while no one else joined them, I was surprised at how little anyone seemed to take notice of it.  I asked if it was as good as South America’s most notorious contraband is known to be and was told that not only was it better than anything they had ever come across, but it was only ten dollars a gram.  Without context, I asked if that was a good deal and  they explained gleefully that the same quantity of far inferior product ran $300 in Australia.  Yikes.  I was fascinated but stuck to the rum and coke, which despite any apparent bargains on other things was still the best deal in the house.

Ecuadorian showerhead, with heater

Remarkably hungover for not having spent a single cent on alcohol the night before, I stumbled out of my bunkbed and made my way to the showers to clean both myself and my laundry.  Hot water heaters don’t seem to exist anywhere in Ecuador, so showers are instead heated by an electrical attachment above the dangling showerhead, exposed wires ominously sticking out above the clearly well-aged contraption, as though every bather were a mishap away from an electrically charged cleansing.  Water temperature then is directly proportional to water pressure, as the heater can only handle a limited amount of flow at a time.  A trickle, then, is scaldingly hot.  Powerful torrents are almost entirely frigid.  And somewhere in the middle is a rich, drizzly warmth that does well to counter Quito’s regularly chilly mornings.

In lieu of detergent or a washing machine, I gave my clothes a good shampooing and did my best to rinse everything out.  Clearly I wasn’t successful, as I’m now wearing them again and find myself a walking miasma of Herbal Essence.  While drying off, I thought I distinctly heard my name being called, and upon investigating found the hostel receptionist calling for me with a blond-haired Englishman in a crumpled blue sport jacket, likely in his late 20s, standing next to her and staring at me expectantly.

“Yancy?”

I nodded blankly.

“Tom Nicolson, Ecuador Reporter…”

Oh yeah.

My writing gig.  I had emailed him a few months ago asking if  I could write for the paper while in town and I assumed he was just humoring me when he wrote back to offer me an intern position.  Somehow I assumed we’d casually meet up within a week or two of my arrival, and I’d get the occasional paragraph to eke out here and there.  That he’d seek me out on my first morning caught me a bit off guard, but it was a welcome surprise.  And I certainly didn’t have anywhere I particularly needed to be.

We made small talk for a good fifteen seconds or so before he jumped into it.

“I’ve got a piece lined up this weekend that really needs to be done and my travel writer suddenly can’t make it.  What are your thoughts on going off the deep end?”

“This whole trip’s off the deep end…”

Knowing absolutely nothing about  what I would be writing about or where I’d be going, I immediately agreed to it.

He explained that to the west lay a region of Ecuador untouched by tourism that’s trying to get its name on the vacationer’s travel map.  Cloud forests are common throughout Ecuador – misty, vivid regions not quite as thick or wet as their rain forest cousins.  The majority of them are located between Ecuador’s mountain and jungle regions, so Chone (pronounced “Cho-nay”) was unique for having one instead between the mountains and coast to the west, with its own specialized agriculture and landscapes.

“When would I leave?”

“Well, we’d need you there tonight, and the trip takes about 6-8 hours by bus, so pretty soon, basically.  We just need to meet up with the photographer Joe, my number two guy.”

I quickly pardoned myself and packed my day bag with a vast assortment of things I wouldn’t need, like my laptop and South American Handbook (no entry on Chone), and avoided some things I really would need, like a single change of clothes.  Back in the common room, Tom was talking in fluent Spanish to our contact in Chone, Luis sorting out the details of the trip.

Vastly unprepared, I left my belongings locked up in El Centro del Mundo and made my exit with Tom, heading two blocks down the street to Finn McCool’s, an unexpectedly authentic Irish pub save the lack of Guinness – it’s nearly impossible to get most standard beers down to Ecuador.  Most bars and restaurants only have the two locals, Club and Pilsener, with Budweiser or Heineken tossed onto the menu sometimes as exotic foreign fare.  The bar was mostly dead, though an older Englishman with a nose-ring and partial mohawk entertained me with local stories while tearing through a small glass of dark alcohol, a large beer and a fizzy strawberry drink with liberal amounts of vodka, simultaneously.

Joe arrived and we headed out by cab to Quito’s main bus terminal.  The fifteen minute trip cost $2.20, and we left no tip.  Quito to Chone by bus would be eight dollars a person and take approximately seven hours.  An older bus making many more local stops would’ve only cost five, but we were in a hurry and not afraid to shell out the three extra bucks for more comfort and a mid-trip showing of Sylvester Stallone’s 80s prison classic “Lock-Up,” dubbed remarkably well in Spanish, potentially making the film better than it was in its original incarnation.

We darted down the Pan-American highway, often in the rain, over windy mountainous roads with little space between the railing at the edge of the road and continuous (yet quite idyllic) sudden death below us.  Despite the unnerving view and a seemingly frantic driver, it’s no Yungas Death Road and thus not known for a large amount of accidents or fatalities.  The mountains rose and fell, draped in misty clouds and their green outer coating was lush and vivid.

A woman sat at a desk outside the bathroom at the Chone bus station, saying “derecha” (“right”) as I entered, as though I couldn’t tell the stick figure on the door to the right without a dress on was an hombre.  The seemingly public terminal restroom had walls that were entirely blank save for two posters, arbitrarily hung: Shakira and Hillary Duff.  Upon walking out, the woman yelled “cinco centamos” as I walked past her, and I returned to pay the five cents, suddenly understanding her (fairly terrible) reason for sitting there.

Our contact, Luis picked us up and gave us a brief history of Chone and its history of political instability.  With a ratio of two cows for every one person, it’s somewhat of a cowboy town, “like, you know, ehh John Wayne movie,” he said.  The city has a bit of an attitude, and the people are a bit more hale than is typical in Ecuador so when fights get out of hand, it can be a bit problematic.  Several years ago, a mayor with a fairly large following was ousted and replaced with another man beloved by the other half of Chone’s citizens.  This split the town disasterously, and soon supporters of both men were fighting in the streets and, much like the Tenacious D song, burnt down City Hall.  Things have been calm for the past two years, but there’s still an unspoken rift and distrust between the groups, which has split up families and given the town a somewhat shady reputation.

In stark contrast to the irrational behavior and unbridled machismo of the city’s inhabitants, Luis assured us the people of the countryside would be warm and inviting, and the landscapes as beautiful as anywhere else in South America.  In the city center, we met with Roberto, the first of Luis’s many cousins.  Roberto had a decent understanding of English, which made things a bit easier since I’d yet to have a single Spanish class, and would spend the next four days being the most gracious host I’ve ever had the honor of knowing.  He drove us from town over dark, bumpy roads past homes made of wood, sugarcane and bamboo, almost always with clothes-strewn clotheslines taking up much of the front yard.  Just before midnight, we arrived at one of the oldest homes on the coast of Ecuador, La Providencia.