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…