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.