some sidenotes on Ecuador

Every Ecuadorian I have met is mind-blowing friendly and are so interesting to talk to. They are beautiful people who are very proud of their culture, and rightfully so despite so much political turmoil they have gone through (10 presidents in the last 8 years) as well dollarization (in 2001 Ecuador dropped their national currency the sucre and adopted the US dollar. The way of life in Quito compared to how it is just 2 hours north in Otavalo, a small indigenous village market town, is too unique to describe. Quito is divided in-half. There is Old town, which consists of old architectural buildings, cathedrals, and basically anything that hasn't been built for a while. Now take a guess as to what the other part is called?...... New Town! a Gringola central, a replica of 6th street with bars named things like Strawberry, No Bar, Dragonfly, and Texas Star American pop culture permeates everything.. From the moment I got off the plane in Quito there were people lining the streets selling stolen Michael Jackson memorabilia, and even a couple of people asked me how I felt about the Pop icons death...Thirty minutes west of Dragonfly and Michael Jackson, I'm having a 5 year old boy begging me for change and wanting to know if he can shine my shoes despite that they were flipflops. Although the dichotomy is strange, it is also honest. Poverty in Ecuador is not something hidden- it is evident and has been woven into the culture. I think I read that 40-60% of Ecuadorians live below poverty- and from what I've seen that sounds about right. Nearly every hostel and restaurant I've seen (unless they are cafeteria style) are owned by Europeans or Americans. The reason for this is that most Ecuadorians can't build up enough capital to start a business. It is the second poorest country in South America, however, it is considered the 4th most expensive, but I think, depending on what one may do, it is pretty cheap- no hostel has cost me more then $8 a night- there are markets everywhere that you can haggle any price down to a couple of bucks- and last night I even had cheese & beef fondue, salad, and a bottle of wine for $16! Unbelievable!

Another thing Ecuador leads in is bio-diversity. I really wanted to go to the Galapagos Islands but for about $1000 bucks a person- I had to pass... Ecuador has over 20,000 different species of plants when the rest of the Americas combined has only 17,000!
There is everything from active volcanoes, glorious beaches, the Amazon, mountains, Rainforest, there is rain, sun, snow, hot, and cold.. You can hike, white-water raft, visit waterfalls, ride bicycles up to a volcano, and then treat yourself to a tasty .80c beer at the end of the day. The climate and landscape of the country is really amazing. I found out yesterday from a Latacunga native that the US is Ecuador's number one importer of broccoli and roses. I would have never of guessed that because I haven't came across that many since I've been here. Their main diet consists of yucas, bananas, and some type of meat (not chicken, pork, or cow..) one of their traditional dishes that I'm a fan of is llapingachos


and when I say some type of meat I mean it is Lomo (alpaca meat), cuy (guinea pig) or parts of animals I've never seen before fried up at this huge outdoor food market. The lomo is good- taste like steak- the cuy... you will like only if you like dark meat chicken.

I've got more to explain about this tiny little country I'm starting to get a crush on, but I've got to go find my bus out of Baños today


__-------

more info on dollarization:
http://www.mindspring.com/~tbgray/dollar.htm

In the morning

Tomorrow morning I will be in Puyo- the jungle- with some guy named Marco. He is an Amazon warrior. His friend has a cabin in the middle of the Ecuadorian Amazon that I found on couchsurfing. Today I started taking my malaria pills. I look forward to the crazy dreams I'm going to have tonight. I hope I get food before then- for the past three days I've been eating tangerines & random meat on the street. Oh the luxuries of traveling!

The Bandits of Baños

After hiking Cotopaxi, eating food that is still alive, and trying to navigate new cities with no sense of direction, you'd figure that nothing would surprise me- let alone- kind of scare me, but then something did.. A friend that I met here in Baños and I decided that renting dune buggies like this



and driving through this



would be a fabulous idea! And for only $14 bucks for 2 hours I couldn't resist. So here we go whirling up and down hills, slinging mud, doing doughnuts, honking at cars, and driving through waterfalls- we were like Bonnie & Clyde, Batman & Robin- I named us the Bandits of Baños and no one was going to stop us until we heard baaa dumm, baaaa dummm, irkkk irkkk irrk, poofff. our get-away vehicle ran out of gas in the middle of a dark, one-way traffic tunnel, with no end in site. Fuck. Before I had time to think I heard one huge tour bus barreling through honking at us to get out of the way.

Push Eric! I yell.
What?
We gotta push, dude- go!

so he gets out and starts to push while I steer us back into civilization trying my best to get the thing to go. All of a sudden it starts so I floor it!

Run Eric! Run!! I shout
I'm trying, slow down! Eric screams with agitation
Nunca! Run faster! Jump in!

If you could just pause. take a moment and visualize this scene.

A huge tour bus stuck behind a skinny running boy wearing a baseball helmet (that is what they gave us) trying to jump in a dune buggie driven by me, a person who hasn't driven any type a vehicle in about a year. It was an astounding site.

We made it pretty far, but when you are out of gas you are out of gas, and eventually you just stop. So when this happened I had to pull out the good 'ol thumb and just start walking. I told Eric to stay behind and guard our piece of shit while I hitched a ride into town. A truck picked me up and thirty minutes later I rescued Eric and we celebrated over Ecuador's only type of beer- Pilsener.

What a day what a day.

the reason why

There is a reason why I haven't been able to update ask much as I'd like... in brief, it is because I've been hiking 15,000ft snow-capped active volcanoes like Cotopaxi (Ecuador's highest active volcano)



I'm from Mississippi which means I don't know the meaning of snow or cold or anything that freezes. In this 2 day hike to the summit I could feel my lungs do cartweels in my chest angry that I thought defying gravity was a good idea. I made it, finally.. and as much as I hated it at first, it was an amazing experience.



_____________________________________
I also hiked another crazy mountain (14,000 ft) and have been hitchiking- I'll explain later, but right now I've got to figure out a way to the jungle....

¿Qué hora es?

Hmmmmmmm. well today marks my 4th and last day in Quito. It is a sprawling city with sooo much to do.. Everyday has been extremely busy so far and I don't foresee me slowing down at all. My days have started at 6:00AM and have ended somewhere along midnight, which is something I discovered by walking down the street and noticing that every coffeeshop was closed. Was it a holiday? I thought. Probably not. ¿Qué hora es? I asked. Son las cinco y media the lonely guy on the street informed. Ohhhhh, that explained everything. If only I had a watch I wouldn't wake us early and maybe I could get to places on time, but I am on a budget (a strict one at that and one I'm probably going to greatly bust) so I'd rather use my money to buy Alpaca sweaters, strange food on the street, and of coarse- cerveza:) For now, asking someone what time it is actually is a pretty good conversation starter.

A serendipitious experience in Colombia.

Serendipity the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

This word accurately sums up the strange unfolding of events that luckily happened to me in Colombia. One minute I'm waiting in the airport in Bogota, and the next I'm having a flight attendant apologize to me while I stare dumbfounded by what is happening. I couldn't tell if my bag got lost or if I was about to get deported. All I could catch in the riff-raff of airport lunacy was,
Lo siento, lo siento. Venga, por favor.

Damn, I thought, whatever she was saying was probably really terrible so I decided my best defense was to play the "no entiendo" card and keep a firm stance. I had a list of excuses and practiced phrases for when the time was going to come when they asked about my onward going ticket. I had already sneaked through two gates and was not about to get sent home on the third. I was going to tell them that I left the flight copy in my check-in bag, or I have buss ticket, or I'm a student, or pleaseee just don't send me back!! Then this girl from Miami who I had been talking to started to congratulate me,
"Wow! That is great. I can't believe you just got a free round-trip ticket to anywhere in the world!"

Huh? I said.

"Yeah" the girl from Miami continued "Since they overbooked your flight they are compensating you with a round-trip ticket, putting you up in a hotel for the night with a free dinner and breakfast, and you are getting on the first-class flight to Quito in the morning."

At this point my confusion had escalated into baffled enthusiasm! I had purchased a ticket to Quito, Ecuador with a layover in Bogota because it was cheaper to fly there instead of Colombia, but I had no intention to hop on the connecting flight. If only the dear flight attendant lady knew that this wasn't a problem at all, but a dream come true! I only paid $175 bucks for the flight from Costa Rica to Bogota and now they are giving me an open ended voucher good for one year to anywhere Avianca fly's to. Wahooooooo!

Anyway the lady takes my hand and leads me and a handful of pissed off others to this underground VIP room in the Bogota airport. Alright, now I'm going to get to see how the drugs are smuggled through:) We wait and wait and wait and finally we get our new tickets for the morning, the round-trip voucher, and airport pick-up to the hotel which ended up not being a hotel but a resort! It took me nearly 30 minutes to clean the drool from my face because of how far my jaw dropped when I opened the door to my room. There was a huge walk-in glass shower with more showerheads then I have fingers or toes. I had never been so excited about showering in my life until I saw that bathroom! There was a surround sound IPOD system, 30inch flat screen, bottled room service, 2 themperpedic mattress beds, and an entrance to a garden..

I still can't believe it. I have a ticket back to the States or Europe or Asia or who cares! I'm just glad serendipity finally found me.

-----------

Word History: We are indebted to the English author Horace Walpole for the word serendipity.Walpole formed the word on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of "a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of...."

-----
what I've learned from this fabulous tale is that quests are meant for conquering and conquering means possession and anything possessed can be lost. The only thing that matters is what one may discover along the way. So keep your eyes open and your mind wider to all things thought impossible because nothing ever was to begin with. Impossible is just the stuff that hasn't been discovered yet.

mis amigos!!

Since I got to the airport ridiculously too early (i.e 6 hours...) I figure now is the time to upload more pics. I'll keep posting more as soon as my friends post them on facebook or whatever else they got because I haven't taken a single photo since I've been here. Why? ohhhh well because I brought the camera, but left the memory card. Brilliant!



an assortment of us folks in front of the school.



these are two very handsome folks named Jerry & Shae. Jerry likes to smoke cigars and get "rowdy". Shae likes Regina Spektor as much as I do and lives in Arizona. We all like coffee & bicycles. And this is starting to sound like a personal add on craigslist. My apologies.



Sometimes I would be walking down the street and a horse would randomly appear, like this one.



Puerto Viejo.. the best napping spot in the entire world.



Shae is a lot cooler then I am, probably smarter too, and definitely better looking, which all equates to freakin' awesome!



Andres is a pretty upstanding fellow as well! We were going to rent bicycles and ride them to the beach (which was about 50 miles away..) but decided that was a silly idea after we saw the San Jose traffic and the Costa Rican mountains. So we took the bus instead.



I just like this one.



Sabinilla bar. Right across the street from my house and is Costa Rica's version of a dive bar. Cheap drinks, dirty, and always has regulars.



this was karaoke night and me being ridiculous