Montañas and Molehills

In The Airport

2008-03-30T09:04:00.000-07:00

Journal Entry
18 March 2008
Cafe in the Lima Airport, Peru

I came to the airport this morning at 4am to find out that Jon´s flight from Miami had been delayed.

"When will it arrive?" I asked.

"We do not know."

"Why is it delayed?"

"It is cancelled."

"Why was it cancelled?"

"We do not know."

Now that I had that cleared up, I went to keep Sarah company while she waited for her 7am flight to the jungle. At least we´d been able to split the cab fare on this pre-dawn excursion. But I was in limbo. Is he arriving in 2 hours or 20? Do I stay and find a comfy corner somewhere and read my book, or do I go all the way back to Miraflores?

I bought another coffee.

I finally got in touch with Jon who was awaiting his not super Super-Shuttle from the airport hotel. His best estimate was that he´d arrive somewhere around 4pm. "It´s hard to say, sweetie, because technically my flight doesn´t exist." Always a good sign.

Now that I knew I had about 12 hours to wait, it was ridiculous to consider staying in the airport that long, but this meant I had to make the long and chaotic journey back to my quiet, tree-lined little neighborhood in Lima, and I could not afford the taxi. But the direct public transport wouldn´t be available until 10am. I finally decided I would take a combo of combis (small manic mini vans packed full of hurried Limeños on their way to work) and hope for the best.

As I got various sets of instructions from various men all around the airport, I was crossing the parking lot when approached by a "taxi economico" driver who I told straight away I had only 10 soles (average fare in a taxi economico is 30). He made his way down from 30 to 25 to 20, all the while following me across the mostly empty blacktop. I swung around and said with a big smile, "Seriously, I´d love to take a taxi, but I ONLY HAVE TEN." (I actually had 15). He repeated, "Only ten?" then looked at the sky, surveyed the obvious lack of early morning fares (American Airlines had screwed not only me and Jon, but also the fleet of taxis waiting for that 4:30am arrival) and said, "Okay. We go." I had just struck the best Lima airport taxi fare deal of all time. And so Jimmy and I walked out of the parking lot to find his secretly parked taxi and he took me all the way back to Miraflores as the sun came up to shine a pink light over the city.

Finally got "confirmation" that Jon´s flight would be in at 3:30, which of course turned out to be 4:30 and so I figured I would take the public bus back to the airport in order to save money, especially seeing as last night I received (angry, disappointed) word from Mom and Dad that I was overdrawn on the Connecticut account. My "magic card" was indeed playing magical tricks by giving me money when I had none.

I ended up sharing a taxi with Gareth, Chris, Wiktor and Tom to Lima Centro, the historical district, from where I would then walk about 30 minutes through the truly lovely colonial Lima streets, making my way to a less than quaint part of town where the Aeropuerto bus was supposed to be. After several stopoffs in shops to consult my map, helping a man carry a bucket of putty across an intersection, and another few inquiries of men on the street, some who had the right information and some who had the wrong, I finally made it to the correct side of the crazy boulevard and got on the correct utterly dilapidated bus.

1 sol (about 35 cents) took me through shanty towns and past desert-cliffside pueblos for about 40 minutes. I kept trying to locate my position on the Lonely Planet map cause I was worried I might miss my stop as there are no announcements on this kind of a ride. But I should know by now that when a gringa gets on a local bus, everyone knows and the driver and/or the driver´s mate make sure to tell me. And yes, as we began to enter a wider, flatter part of the city where the blacktop was blacker, the driver caught my eye in the rearview and said "Aeropuerto" while smiling and waving his hand in the direction I would need to go.

The fear of navigating the seemingly random and utterly chaotic public transport systems in a 3rd world capital city comes from it being so entirely unknown, like anything I suppose. It is a fear based only on something you have created in your imagination. A fear of standing out. A fear of "doing something wrong." Self-consciousness can be like a paralysis. The thing is, once you do it, your confidence expands exponentially and this sense of victoriousness glows like a light in the bell of your being. It is remarkable what 35 cents and little adventurousness can do for your sense of self. It´s often hilarious, comical, or fraught with confusion and missteps, and my god OF COURSE you stand out! You´re like the grenade on the birthday cake. But when you arrive the thrill is almost absurd in it´s simplicity and totality. I felt like I´d crossed the finish line in some mammoth race, and all I´d done was take a bus that thousands of people take every single day. And I was sitting down the whole time.

Lima has been a sweet surprise. Peruvian´s, too. The random acts of kindness, like Jimmy the taxi driver, or like my security guard at the 24 grocery store this morning who gave me a free cup of coffee from his own personal thermos since the coffee machine was broken, or the woman who gave me the free Chavin keychain even after she very reluctantly dropped the price of a scarf by only 2 soles; the smiling and genuinely friendly service in restaurants and shops; the old man who walked me to my hostel--all of this has found me falling quite unexpectedly in love with Peru, and here I thought Ecuador had my heart entire.

It´s like Togo, where I was pickpocketed and held at gunpoint by the military on a dark dirt road but nevertheless felt so charmed and besotted by the people in general that those incidents would not decide my ultimate opinion of the nation. And here, where I´ve been robbed at gunpoint on a mountainside and where money changers tried to cheat my during my first 3 minutes in the country and where I have to pay to take pictures of the llamas and where the threat of danger does sometimes feel more tangible in the streets, I am nevertheless enchanted and so very sad my time here is already half gone.

I was so afraid and reluctant to leave Ecuador, when in fact what I needed to was to go. My funk, my frustration, my listlessness came or stemmed from, I think, staying too long in one place I loved. Much like what I was going through in New York. I need change. It rejuvenates me. Inspires me. Activates some energy field deep within my muscles and mind. It opens my eyes. I´ve been hoping somehow on this trip I´d find a sense or a place or a reason to "settle down somewhere." Maybe that just isn´t me. Maybe I don´t have to think in terms of "forever." And maybe finally I will allow that to be okay.

Finding My Flock. Again.

2008-01-16T15:28:00.000-08:00

"In the end, we will conserve that which we love. We will love that which we understand. And we will understand that which we are taught." --Baba Dioum

It was at The Black Sheep Inn where I was first moved by clouds. I was moved because they moved. Hurtling swiftly down from their usual heavenly station, blanketing the crumpled and patchworked hills of Chugchilan.

The clouds in Ecuador, I realized in 2005, move in a way I have never seen weather move. Benign weather. Not the fierce, catastrophic movement of hurricane winds or twister funnels. This was a daily change, one that silenced the outside world in a hazy hush, signaling the end of a day, time to retreat to a woodfire, a cookstove, a warm blanket. Edges soften. Light dims. The clouds begin their descent like curling smoke, slowly loosening their bits from the greater cover above, to trickle down as nebulous garland--trimming the mountains; in some places slicing them in half and splitting the view, hanging in the balance between high and highest. And then, suddenly swift, magical mists would unfurl in great sheaves, falling over everything, filling the canyon below, milky dew in a giant green basket.

The clouds were not the only thing that moved me at The Black Sheep Inn. I wrote extensively about my few days high in the central Andes when I first visited this astonishing eco-lodge in 2005. It changed my perspective about what possibility there is to do right by the world, the planet, and the community around you.

The following is an excerpt from an email I sent on June 25th, 2005. Suffice it to say, I was even more impressed the second time around...

"It is a funny thing how life takes you places you never knew you needed to go; how you can come away from somewhere you never imagined being in the first place, and then find it impossible to imagine you could have lived without that place as a part of your past. I feel this way about Columbia Street, about The Red Rail, Ghana, Ecuador, and now, strangely and specifically, about The Black Sheep Inn, an ecologically conscious hotel in a "middle-of-nowhere" village--Chugchilan--high (very high) in the central Ecuadorian
Andes. The hotel itself--meaning the actual structure and construction of both building and grounds--is an inspiration, one that would not exist without Andres and Michelle, a North American couple who traveled to that nowhere village 12 years ago, before there was something such as a hotel to draw them there.

They were a couple in their late twenties, backpackers,¨off the beaten path¨seekers, black sheep if you will, who wound up there and discovered that this nothing village was in fact full of somethings. As I said, when they arrived, this poorest of the poor villages making up what the guidebooks call The Quilotoa Loop, had no hotels and so they knocked on some doors until a family allowed them to spend the night. That night turned into 2 weeks, and that family offered to sell them land.

Michelle and Andres, I imagine, then followed that indefinable sense, that some kind of feeling which defies definition or explanation, and allowed their hearts, minds and imaginations to be free enough, to be open enough, to vast, inconceivable possibilities. Possibilities which are terrifying and fraught with anxiety, but possibilities which have the potential to make one´s life better, if not the best it can be.

They arrived with no intentions or plans to buy land and build a hotel, to make this place, this nothing village with a population of less than 200 indigena mountain farmers, their home. But because of their philosophy--which at the time they didn´t even know was their philosophy--to think widely, to focus on the positives of problems and find solutions rather than hiding behind the obstacles these problems presented, to be stewards of the land--they discovered that they had ended up, by chance or by some divine, unconscious design, exactly where they were supposed to be. And then they seized upon this crazy dream of an opportunity to buy land in a foreign country, to lay down roots in a community which had never seen the likes of them before, to "own their work," to work endless hours, to chance together and commit themselves to a dream they maybe never thought they had. They pushed beyond difficulties, beyond the anxiety and the fear and the unknowns that usually find us coming up with reasons why we shouldn´t or couldn´t do something, rather than looking for reasons why we should and could. They took an enormous risk that had no guarantees of happiness or success, except the guarantee that they could look at each other, and at themselves, knowing that at the very least, they had tried.

Well, The Black Sheep Inn is an enormous success, and Andres and Michelle, since married, have changed the face of Chugchilan in only positive ways. It is still very poor
but they have provided new employment opportunities to the community. Other locally owned hostels have opened up in their wake. They use local guides for horseback riding and hiking, setting a standard of payment and service which in other places is so often abused and manipulated. A cooperative transportation network has evolved, providing much needed income to those in the community who have a truck, and much needed transport to those travelers who rarely do.

The entire structure of the hotel is sustainable, built from local materials like adobe mud brick and straw, without depleting natural resources. They have composting toilets from which they fertilize numerous vegetable gardens and tracts of land where they are reforesting with native species of trees. In the combination greenhouse-bathrooms, you wash
your hands with biodegradable soap purchased in Quito, and rainwater that has been collected on the roof and stored in a cistern. Those sinks then drain into flower gardens in the bathroom which also thrive from solar heat through transparent roofs. Ducks and chickens eat the excess insects which come from the composting, and the eggs they lay are used in the cooking. All meals are organically vegetarian, harvested primarily from BSI's land, and they are delicious! Breakfast and dinner are served family style around a big, rustic farm table in the main lodge, bringing all the guests together where stories are shared, ideas exchanged, laughter erupts, and wine flows.

Every light bulb is low energy wattage and they are hard at work to get off the main electric grid by turning to alternative energy sources like solar and hydroelectric power. They recycle EVERYTHING! The walls of the shower are ¨bottle walls¨made up entirely of used soda, beer and wine bottles, and anything they can´t reuse on site (like paper, empty wine cartons, used tea bag wrappers, all of which feed the fires of their woodburning stoves), they personally take to Quito for further processing. There is more, so much more, like all the donations of funds, books, supplies, electronics, and appliances they have donated to the local school and clinic, or the programs they run with volunteers to teach computers to locals, or the workshops they´ve held on permaculture to educate, encourage and assist other families to preserve their environment and improve their standard of living. They seem to have thought of everything, but continue to evolve, expand, teach and learn as time goes on.

The Black Sheep Inn is not simply a "hotel." It is an experience. It is an inspiration. It is a place where they are committed to doing right by the earth, by the community, and to leaving the land in a better state than when they found it."

This year during my stay at BSI, I was able to ask more deliberate questions of Michelle and Andres, hoping they'd share with me a little bit of their wisdom and creative ideas. I was given a book from which they culled design information for their "gray water" filter--one they built themselves with charcoal, rocks, screens and reeds. I found out about "red worm casings," where to buy these lombris, and how they help make composting low maintenance. I hope to experiment with some of these new ideas at one of the farms
I'm visiting in the next couple of weeks, for the most important thing I learned at BSI is that these sustainable and eco-sound ideas are done with little if any "high-tech" gadgets or gear. These are all relatively simple, homemade, creative and innovative ways of protecting the only planet we'll ever have--one we've already done a terrifying job of screwing up. There are elements in every one of BSI's eco-schemes that we could and should employ in our own homes and in our own daily lives.

At night, after the clouds have settled and it is clear, the sky dims to lavender and trees stand in black silhouette, tall and silent, surrounding The Inn and bathed in this ethereal glow. They are pillars rising as evidence of a commitment to replenish, sustain and protect the natural world. The clouds, the sky, the colors, the mountains, even the compost toilets: I just take it in with all of my senses, even that tricky one which no one can ever really explain, wondering how the place and the land will come to live inside of me and what will emerge from its planting.

A 3rd World Bitch Slap Will Open Your Eyes

2008-01-08T20:00:00.000-08:00

"True and serious traveling is no pastime, but is as serious as the grave." --Theroux
"There are no thieves in Ecuador. Only professionals." --Fellow Backpacker

The Linda I knew one year ago would have left. She would have paid to change her ticket and departed a week early. The Meghan I knew one year ago would have convinced her to. Why? Well, on her second day here in this fabulous little country, Linda was robbed by some fabulously talented (perhaps invisible) thieves. We were on a bus to Baños, a route targeted by thieves as it is the tourist destination in the country. I knew this. I was prepared. I gave my lecture about taking special care of her bag. And though Linda had her feet on her daypack the entire trip, they got in anyway, and removed her wallet. Just her wallet, without disturbing anything else in her bag, let alone us, as we chatted and laughed and reunited during the 4 hour journey.

We didn't discover the theft until much later that night, after she was alerted by American Express (god bless 'em) to suspected fraudelent activity on her card. That night was rough. We spent 45 minutes on the phone to the US (and, ironically, India) as she called to cancel her cards, and were informed the thieves had gone Christmas shopping immediately. At that point, the greatest loss was her beloved and handsome wallet and about $160 in cash. I had her passport and most of her cash strapped to my calf, and so once we joked about it and wished the thieves a Merry Christmas, she was really no worse for the wear, only a little bit wiser about the adept skills of Ecuadorian thieves.

Then, 4 days later, after a series of foiled plans, missed reservations, a bout of food poisoning, a headcold, several too-long, arduous, heinous bus rides, and a cold night spent in the Guayaquil bus terminal, the shit really hit the fan. We'd arrived at our first beach stop, one with zero sun and plenty of wind and rain, and on our second night Linda discovered that the checkbook she'd also lost, to which I said, "Oh, no worries, they can't do anything with that here!," had been opened and used, to the tune of nearly $7,000 in forged checks. Cashed no problema at a bank in Quito. Yeah, if we thought the night of the lost credit cards was rough, we were completely unprepared to deal with this on a Sunday night before Christmas. It was kinda meltdown central, but oddly more for me than for her. She needed me to be "a rock" and I was more like ugly mud. I was so angry, so frustrated, so sad, and felt guilty, responsible, all of those things. Linda had trusted me to take care of her, in a way, and though of course she didn't blame me, I blamed myself in many ways, and then felt guilty for making the catastrophe "my" problem. We were terrible company for one another that night. Nothing could be resolved until the morning when she could call home and talk to someone knowledgable at her bank about what recourse she had. This was her life savings, and she wasn't sure if she would be culpable for not reporting the checks stolen, too.

Long story made a bit shorter, Linda was NOT responsible for any of it, and her funds were returned in just 48 hours. And as soon as we arrived at the second beach, on Christmas morning, the sun literally and figuratively came out. The last half of our two weeks together were wonderful. And I am so proud of her--for letting Ecuador strip her of all sense of security, for withstanding and weathering this giant, 3rd world bitch-slap, for allowing this place to consume her in a way neither of us were expecting, and in a way no one should be consumed, but then, for not only recovering, but for thriving despite all of this. Linda truly let herself be here. And she stayed.

I got to thinking it was like Ecuador--or the universal force masking as Ecuador-- was forcing Linda to vacate, in every sense, her life in New York. And I was forced, to see my traveling-self through a friend's eyes. In my over eagerness to show Linda how awesome this country is, how much I love love love it, I ended up even spoiling the scenery. Linda was just so tired and frustrated and angry, that she basically refused to even look out the windows during our ample hours on busses, to enjoy the bountiful and breathtaking scenry as it passed us by. I was too ambitious, and had I been a little more patient, taken a less frenzied approach to her trip here, we may have avoided at least some of the problems we had. I went from being the laid back traveler with no set itinerary, to a mad-cap dasher of a pseudo tour guide with busses to catch and schedules to keep.

I went into my camp counselor mode, my girl scout self. I planned to do and see and go too much. I was so intent on Linda seeing this country as I do, wanting her to love it the way I have come to love it. But how could she? Two weeks is just not enough time. Between the 13 hour plane ride to get here, the less-than peaceful dorm room accomodaton, the altitude, the culture shock, the language barriers, all of it, one needs time to adjust. And I forgot about that. But once we settled into the easy palm tree sway-rhythm of Mompiche's beach, the pace of everything changed. And finally, I think, I hope, Linda loved Ecuador, at least just a little bit

I now remind myself: less is more. Think small. Go slow. It is a good lesson for life everywhere.

Ultimately, what happened to Linda forced us to slow down. And, it forged us yet another bond, found us ending up closer together than where we'd started.

After I left her at Quito's airport on New Year's Eve morning, I caught another bus alongside the highway to head back up to Otavalo in order to celebrate the festivities with my friends. I sat on the right. This was an unconscious decision. Just flopped where I landed, trying to avoid falling over as the bus swerved wildly back onto the PanAmerican. During that drive, I saw, for the first time, Laguna San Pablo--the sacred lake, reputedly a portel to the center of the earth. People had been astonished when I told them I'd never seen it. "But, it's right there, out the window on the bus from Quito to Otavalo," they cried. Maybe I'd never sat on the right before, or maybe I just hadn't paid attention. As I watched it glisten in the late morning sun, I thought of Linda. I cried again, sad to suddenly be without my best friend. And I took stock of how, suddenly, again, my vision was different.

With Linda here, I was awakened to the ugly. I saw the struggle, the discomfort, the fear, the scary parts of traveling. I was more conscious of how long a bus ride could be, how noisy, how bumpy. I couldn't sleep soundly, as I normally do, when we were in a dorm-room hostel. I heard every noise. I even shushed people! Wanting Linda to have a good night's sleep. I was paranoid about our bags being stolen from beneath the bus. (Never before have I jumped off, mid-ride, to check the undercarriage, making the controllador open the hatch so I could be certain our luggage was secure. With Linda, I did just that.) I mean, I knew all of this, but my awareness of these details were intensely hightened while trying to "take care" of my new traveling partner. I don't mean to say Linda needed special caring for, but it's like when you play one of your favorite songs for someone who's never heard it before. You loved it, enough to share it, but suddenly, with a new set of ears hearing it, you become conscious of how it might not be so great. "Is that chorus too cheesy? Does it repeat the same phrase too much? Is the beat annoying? The lyrics cliche? Do they like it?" You begin to doubt what you were so sure you loved. That was how I felt about Ecuador. "Is the scenery not as stunning as I'd thought? Are those clouds just like the clouds at home and not some supernatural phenomenon like I'd thought? Does she like it?" I have stopped doubting my love for Ecuador. It is as amazing as I believe. And I will never doubt my love for Linda. She helped me see.

Africa Revisited

2007-12-29T16:51:00.000-08:00

Saturday, 8 December 2007

So, I hauled out to this town , San Lorenzo, at the northernmost tip of coastal Ecuador, despite many telling me I shouldn't go, that I would get "kidnapped by Colombians" and so on. I went anyway, as you might imagine I would. I don't know if my spirit has gotten bolder or stupider as time has passed, but my luck has remained so well in tact that I feel blindingly confindent about being able to go wherever, whenever I want.

I arrived in San Lorenzo in the mid morning after 4 and half hours on a bus descending from the high mountains of the sierra through the dense, wet, tropicalish cloudforests of the lowlands, passing banana plantations and groves of palm oil trees, cacao and pineapple, to emerge in a dusty, dirty, chaotic fishing town. I worked my way from the bus to the dock where I first came into contact with coastal Spanish. Much, much different from that of the altiplano. Couldn't understand anything it seemed, even the cost of my fresh squeezed orange juice as I tried to replenish the sudden sweat loss that came from the sun and heat of the equatorial sun. And this after being all proud of my newly honed spanish language skills. It was like going to another country. Africa, to be exact. Suddenly, not only was there fierce sun and humid air, but everyone was black.

I knew this, of course. It was part of the reason I went. This is untouristed territory. The only person I've met who went there is this Belgian guy who also spent 6 months in the Colombian jungle. He was prepared.

From the dock I loaded myself and all my stuff onto a little canoe with an outboard motor and went zipping off into the open water where the Pacific meets some river estuary or something. Mangroves everywhere, their multi-branches penetrating the water in such a maze you couldn't tell which ones were descending from the tree, or sprouting up from the silt and sand. We were racing pelicans at one point, their large black sillhouettes flapping fiercely in the glare, keeping apace with our speed. Our first stop was some tiny, bleak outpost, little more than a dock and a sunburnt stall selling coconuts, where 10 naked black boys dove off the cement stairs into the water, unable to take their eyes off of me, the white blonde lady in the boat next to the crates of Coca Cola and Malta sodas being unloaded to stock up some unseen tienda. After picking up a few more passengers we fled to Limones, another dock at another tiny sandbar village, where I disembarked and waited in the sun, happy to stand and stretch my legs, while speaking in terribly broken spanish to the two "captains" of my boat. Answering questions about where I'm from, and how long a flight would be from New York to various other international locales. "How long is it from NY to China? To Japan? To Miami?" Having never been to any of these places, I could only answer, "No se. Depende."

Even though I was really thirsty, and really hot, in my long gringo sleeves and denim trousers, I refused offers of coconuts and their quenching juice. Why? I don't know. That weird apprehension, I guess, that comes with accepting any gift in a place where you don't the rules of gift giving. That, and the fact that I didn't know how long it would be until I could find myself in some semblance of a bathroom. Dehydrating by necessity.

After about an hour, wherein I was the main attraction, I boarded another boat and sailed off to La Tola. Remote by travellers standards, but at least connected to the rest of Ecuador by a road, albeit one of bumpy dirt. I had read that you could walk from La Tola to Olmedo, my destination, but as I peered down the road, through a shimmer of heat waves, I could see nothing but a girl pulling a baby boy on a flat piece of plastic. The reign, a piece of dingy rope, the boy naked. Beyond that, coconut palms and...nothing. I sought shelter and a moment to collect my land legs under the canopy of a comedora. I bought a diet coke and sucked it down thirstily, although now I was really ready and willing to drink from a coconut, regardless of rules. But oddly there were none. I asked how to get to Olmedo, and one person pointed in the direction of the sleigh driving girl, another told me of a bus. I didn't think I neeeded a bus, but was suddenly apprehensive, despite my aforementioned confident fearlessness, about walking through town, glowing white like a spotlight in a moonless night. It has been a long time since I was so bizarrely obvious in any place.

I waited for the bus. When it came, I got on board only to be let off less than 3 minutes later. And that was a 5 minute walk PAST the entrance to the village. As I hiked back in the direction the controllador had pointed, I came upon a locked gate that seemed to lead only to a noisy grinding silo of sorts. Then out of nowhere, a man in a pickup appeared. He asked where I was going. Anyone would have. I mean, look at me, if you can in your mind: a lone white girl with a heavy load on a dusty road in the middle of Afro-Ecuadorian nowhere. I got in, and he drove me through the proper entrada and deposited me amidst even more curious stares at the foot of a footbridge. There was supposed to be a hostal in the village, an eco-tourist endeavor, a cooperativa run by a group of women. "La Hostal?" I asked. People pointed with a curving motion of their arms over the bridge. I climbed up a plank and manuevered my way across a rocking, creaking piece of construction. At the other side, I swear to you, it was Apam, Ghana. It was that little muddy, dusty, litter-strewn and loving village where I lived in coastal west Africa. It was amazing. I had returned to Africa, somehow, by way of Ecuador. The moment I crossed the bridge I was embraced in a multitude of literal and figurative ways by the people that lived there.

Sometimes the immediate pleasure lies solely in the arrival. This is especially true when the journey is long, difficult, and confusing. A journey and an arrival I fretted about. One I feared. One I worried I would not make. One I was so relieved to have achieved. Just the arrival. I waited on the veranda of a beautifully constructed, if completely out of place, wooden hostel on stilts at the waters edge. Every other building around me was made of warping, blanched wood and deteriorating concrete. Windows were mere tiny open holes. Everything raised above the damp, sandy, watery earth. Families of 7, 8, 9 or more lived in one room separated only by curtains of thinning cloth. After meeting Sobeida, a grandmother or dozens and jefa of the cooperativa, I dropped my luggage on my bed, untucked a tank top from my pack, and went about seeing the village.

I was immediately met by a group of young children, 3 of them related to Sobeida. Marcial, Yuleici, and Harinson, who would come to be known to me affectionately as Hachi, and their mom, Marcia. I complimented Marcia's pedicure, all pink and cute little polka dots, fading on worn weather beaten toenails. "My daughter," she said. "You want?" Now? Yes, now. And so, looking down at the worn patchy red of a long ago New York pedicure on my own feet, I went with her to their house where Yuleici painted my toes by dimming light, creating the most perfect multicolored detailed butterflies on my busted up toes. She was 16. Cut the tips of her nailpolish brushes herself, making them fine and precise. All of this while sitting on their torn and stuffing-less sofa under a poster of Shakira, hips a-shaking, while the youngest, 6 years old, fried me some plantains and peeled me an orange. No money was ever asked for. When I left, I wrote Yuleici a note and enclosed a five dollar bill. Telling her, "For more colors." I had seen her drawings in a little notebook, they were really good, and her mother spoke of wanting to send her to colegio in another, larger, better town. But of course, there is no money. God how I hate that this story lives again and again, and all I can do is write sweet notes in purple ink and leave $5 in my wake.

The children claimed me as though I was a prize to be won. I shared my dinner with them, rice and fish. I took Harinson with me on my canoe tour the next day, and when he got to steer the boat, a smile ripping across his face from ear to adorable ear, I took a picture to preserve that memory of his simple, singular joy in being included in a rare adventure. I went crabbing in the morning with the grandmother and then ate those self same crabs we caught with lemon for our dinner in a tiny kitchen while I tried, tried so hard, to understand the stories she spun for me. I gave my guide my compass, though he asked for more, much more. We shared kisses under my mosquito net, but I could give him no direction other than a little grey green metal circle of north and south and east and west.

No one called me Obruni. Only Maggie.

About Friends

2007-12-14T15:04:00.000-08:00

"You don't have to go. I know, you know, you know. But if you gotta go, safe travels." --Peter and the Wolf, from Linda Feldman's Ecuador Mix, given to me the night before my departure.

Someone wrote me and said he's beginning to think my entire trip is about llamas and volcanoes. Well, he actually wasn't that far off the mark. I have spent nearly the entirety of my past 11 weeks in the northern and central sierra, Ecuador's Andes--host to llamas and volcanoes aplenty.

I have been living and working between 6,000 and 12,000 feet. My shoulders and face have freckled in the equatorial sun, but my legs have been ensconsed in rubber boots and knee high socks, and at night I am wrapped in wool and alpaca. Blankets, sweaters, scarves, the lot of them. Sometimes, all of them. But now, that is about to change. Sort of.

On Monday, Linda arrives from New York. Though we will spend about a week overall in the mountains, our shared goal is the beach. First, I am forcing her to ride some white water on a raft in one of Ecuador's many rivers. I am also taking her to both The Tungurahua Tea Room and to Misi Wasi so she, too, can experience llamas and volcanoes. But we are both looking forward to shedding clothes and swatting mosquitoes while lounging in the sun, eating fresh catch cevche from a triciclero beachside, and drinking tropical batidos--milkshakes of banana, coconut and pineapple, mango--adorned with a salad of fruits on the rim for breakfast, and sipping capirhiñas at sunset...or earlier. Who can wait for sunset?

The last time I visited Ecuador, in 2005, I went to the beach in July. Our summer, their winter. I searched for sun during my week, even forcing the two girls I was with to follow my hairbrained idea of leaving one beach in the south to go to one ABOVE the equator, where I rationalized it was still another hemisphere, and thus, another season. Um, I was wrong. Our search was fruitless. We only got stuck in a road strike and spent a full day on busses trying to work our way around it. We ended up in Atacames, but still "suffered" only warm, cloudy days, and one insanely reckless whale-watching excursion that involved shoddy lifejackets and a speedboat "captained" by a barefoot teenager balancing on the bow and shouting "Mira! Mira! Siga! Siga!" as we tore through the Pacific like modern day harpooners "hunting" humpbacks. But now, the end of December is approaching High Season for sun, surf (surfers!) and sand. So I will be liberally applying sunscreen hoping to lessen, with caution, the blinding white glare of my scabby and bruised lower body.

I am overwhelmed with excitement and gratitude as I anxiously await Linda's arrival. The fact that she has made the financial investment to come here and visit me is a most amazing Christmas gift. She is also acting as my "mule," carting down here a new stock of supplies (books, babywipes, SPF, saline solution, etc...) to replenish my waning stash. My parents have mailed her part of this carepack and I am immensely grateful to them as well, for hunting up an Argentina guide book and an electric voltage converter for my trips south after Ecuador. Linda is bearing this burden and bringing me all of this in her bulging pack. She's also taken time out of her life to search out some much desired books I've been wanting on Permaculture and South American politics. I am so constantly reminded of how blessed I am to have such incredible friends and family.

Perhaps most crucial is that Linda will be here with me when I move from the 12th into the 13th week of traveling, marking the longest period I've ever dared to be away from home. Having one of my absolute best friends by my side as I maneuver this odd, momentous, life-hump, is more that I ever could have hoped for.

As I was planning this trip for much of last year, she would joke about coming to visit, as many of my friends did. But she really meant it! And she has found a way to make it happen. I know it is damn near impossible for most people to find the money and the time to make such a trip, and really, my time here isn't about just going to the beach with my friends from home. But this--Linda coming--this is special for both of us. She will be my Christmas angel, my Hannukah blessing, my New Year's wish. I will get to watch her as she wonders at this little country that has captured my heart and astonished my imagination. She will be my companion, my girl talk, my co-conspirator, my dance partner, my sunscreen slatherer, my lookout, my wingwoman, my family. No llama can do all of that. I hope to be all of that for her, too.

I am so thankful, not only for her coming, but for her in general. At 23 this will be her first trip to the "3rd World". She will be stepping outside of her comfort zone, outside of the rectilineal 'hood in Brooklyn that we are both in love with, but that we also both need to leave now and again. She is daring to embrace discomfort and unanswerable questions and I am so proud of her, and so thrilled to be her witness.

We have had a frenzied and fabulous and somewhat tumultuous friendship that has changed both of us in unforseen and confusing ways in just 2 years. All of this makes her coming even more incredible and deepens my love for and gratitude towards her. We keep on figuring out how to love and trust each other even though we can both be difficult in our own ways. We have tested each other's capacity for patience and forgiveness. I think Linda may have taught me more about "relationships" than any boyfriend ever has.

When we moved in together in the summer of last year, friends of ours, unbeknownst to us, made bets--with real money!--as to how long it would last. Like a Hollywood wedding, or as though our lives and our friendship were some sort of joke. We did make it the whole year, but I think sometimes we survived out of defiance to each other, ourselves, and our wagering friends. And we were both a bit relieved--yet sad--when that year was over. Our friends, I believe, were relieved, too. They got to stop listening to us complain! But our survival and definace has bonded us in a way I can't say I have with any other human being on earth. There were dismal moments during that year of co-habitation when I couldn't imagine we'd even remain friends, let alone that she'd be spending a whollop of money on airfare and her whole 2 weeks of yearly vacation time to come backpack around Ecuador with me.

I have written and spoken about the blessings that come from the challenge of travelling alone, but man oh man, it is an amazing gift, something to cherish beyond description, to create memories in a foreign place with a friend from home. Meeting new people, strangers, and travelling with them is phenomenal, but to know there is someone from your "real life" who will actually see some of what you've seen, with whom you can re-live those days you spent together in a world other than your own, someone who "gets it" when you describe a bus ride or a view, and someone with whom you, and no one else, can share those memories--it is far more special than I have words for here at this time.

Bienvenidos, Linda. Mi linda Linda. Y gracias, por el pasado y el futuro. Viaje con cuidado. Te amo.

On The Move

2007-12-05T17:04:00.001-08:00

"You lived in the mountains as if cupped in a puzzle of unclimbable blue ridges and uncrossable gorges. To travel through that place, you needed to know not only where you wanted to go but also that roundabout was often the only way to get there." --Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons.

Well, I have left Misi Wasi, the last farm I was working on, a week earlier than originally intended. The reasons shall not be made known in this forum. Suffice it to say I had some needs that could not be met, and some beliefs that could not be compromised. However, make no mistake, my three weeks high in the puzzle of unclimbable mountains above Otavalo were an incredible experience. Michaela went to great lengths to provide a comfortable home for her volunteers, complete with luxurious bedding and private rooms, a fireplace, hot showers and delicious vegan food. I planted over 40 trees and shrubs, tended to a burgeouning green house where I transplanted leafy greens like Chinese Mustard, Chard and Mesculun. I became acquainted for the first time with the concept of Lunar Farming, used by indigenous socities all over the world for centuries, dating as far back, maybe even farther, as the Incas. I learned how to use power tools when I built a door for her composting toilets, and also became familiar once again with good old fashioned hacksaws, hammer and nails. I made friends with llamas, and with young men from California and the UK. I even tried my hand at making tortillas.

Part of the impetus to leave early was the fact that I had to appear in "court" as a witness to a kind of crime, perpetrated against my friend Cherie who owns the cafe in Otavalo. One Sunday morning, at 7am, while she and I and her daughter, Sasha, were all sleeping, 2 young men busted down the door to the cafe in a drunken stupor, insisting on seeing Sasha. The ringleader was Sasha's exboyfriend. I woke to hear Cherie yelling and then some loud crashing as they threw several of her cafe benches into the courtyard and she then duly beat them with a stick until they went running out the door. I saw them from my window as they made their stumbly escape. I appeared in front of the sherrif twice, giving my testimony in English, which was then translated into Spanish by Cherie's lawyer who spent nearly 10 years in New York. In the end there was a victory, though it was unsatisfactory to all of our standards. Hiro had to pay a fine of $50. A hefty sum by Ecuadorian standards, but surely not good enough to teach this dirtbag a lesson. Cherie is concerned about future trouble. But next time...he goes to jail. I think Cherie is actually looking forward to another chance to beat him with a stick.

The day before our final testimony, I came down off the mountain to spend the day with Deb and Bob in Cotacachi. They are the American couple who hosted me for Thanksgiving. I adore them both. They treat me like a daughter in some ways, but as a friend in most others. Not only did I get to luxuriate in a steaming hot bathtub under a moonlit skylight, and sleep under 2 down comforters, they also treated me to dinner at La Mirage, a Relais-Chateaux restaurant in the middle of an Ecuadorian village. This French distinction is given to a select few restaurants around the world, and is better than what we know to be "5 Star." Not only is it the nicest restaurant in all of Ecuador, it is thus one of the best in all the world, and certainly the nicest I have ever been to in all my life. To get there, we walked down a grass and dirt road, having to move a cow out of the path at one point. It was the Dirt Road to the Five Stars. And despite the grand and elegant nature of the restaurant, part of the larger hacienda which serves as a hotel and spa, I was still able to wear my dirty jeans and sport sandals. God love Ecuador. Our amuse bouche, or pre-appetizer, was served...in a music box. A hand carved music box. Three indigenous women in full dress appeared and placed the wooden boxes down in front of us at the same time, and then simultaneously lifted the lid. I had a goat cheese tartlette with carmelized onions set to the theme of Ice Castles.

Two nights later I found myself sitting alone in a flourescent lit dormitory room in the tiny and silent town of La Esperanza, eating avocado smeared on bread with my swiss army knife. The contrasts speak for themselves, but what is most interesting is that I was equally happy in both situations.

La Esperanza is a town comprised of one long cobbled road leading up to the base of Volcan Imbabura. On either side of the road are houses, behind which are steep fields of green sloping down into the river valley. These fields are famous for possessing a microclimate perfect for growing magical mushrooms. In the 1970´s La Esperanza, and a woman named Aida who owns the only hostal in the area, made names for themselves with the hippies of the world. Including Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Joan Baez, and many others. Go to Casa Aida and she'll show you the notebooks she has full of everyone's names. I went with Sasha to see the town and to do an entirely different kind of farming for one day. We made out like a couple of hippie bandits. The mushrooms are easily identifiable, growing out of dried up splats of cow manure and sporting a gleaming, metallic top, in either gold or dark bronze. They have a "skirt" or little black ruffle in the middle of their stem, and they wrinkle and go purple or iridescent turquoise when picked. Even though they are a legal commodity here in Ecuador, the people of La Esperanza do not harvest or sell them, and so we were able to walk freely onto a huge, flat field at the end of a long grassy lane and pick freely of the bounty. Though Sasha enjoyed some of our harverst immediately, I was content to pick and search and gather, and to lie in the grass and look at the psychadelic surroundings--mushrooms not necessary.

La Esperanza was on my way from the farm to the coast--which is my next destination. Having decided to leave Misi Wasi, I was left with nearly 2 weeks before my friend Linda arrives from New York. Now that I've been in the mountains for 10 weeks, my skin is dry and whiter than it was when I left New York. I am yearning for some humidity and moisture and water that is not still in the middle of a mountain lake. Tomorrow morning I will leave Ibarra, the provincial capital of the Northern Sierra, and a town I explored today on foot, spending hours walking up and down and in and out of their palm tree lined plazas and central squares marked by grand cathedrals and butterscotch colored municipal buildings. From here I will head to San Lorenzo, the northernmost coastal town in Ecuador, an ill-advised crossing point into the lowlands of Colombia. When I went to buy my ticket to San Lorenzo, everyone I asked or told of my destination repeated the name with a quizzical look. "San Lorenzo?" Si, San Lorenzo. "Porque?" Their shock and concern is not solely because San Lorenzo is a rarely-touristed area. Many tell me it's dangerous, which, by virtue of being a frontier town, and this frontier on the edge of Colombia, it may well be. But much of the reputation is based only on the fact that San Lorenzo is "El pueblo de Negros." People are surprised I am going there not just because I am a tourist, but because I am white. San Lorenzo is in the heart of the Afro-Ecuadorian community, a community severely marginalized by the rest of Ecuador. Some things, no matter where you go, never change.

Now, before you go getting all worried, I'm not planning to hang out there. I'm catching a morning boat from the river port, taking it two-and-a-half hours south through the scarce remaining tangled mangrove forests of Ecuador's coast and lowlands. (I leave the puzzle of the unclimbable mountains for a maze of salt water vegetation.) After that, I will go by foot through one village to another, where there is a cooperativa-hostal run by a group of enterprising Afro-Ecuadorian women. It stands on stilts in the tidal pools and from there they can arrange canoe-excursions into deeper mangroves. I have never seen this part of Ecuador, and am insatiably curious. The Afro-Ecuadorian population is pretty much relegated to the Esmereldas province, but most of it is quickly by-passed for the beach resorts further south. I plan to take a little bit of time in this less travelled place before heading to the beach. And yes, the beach is where I will end up. More news soon from the mellow surf of the pacific.

Journal Entries, October 25th, 26th 2007

2007-11-12T16:14:00.000-08:00

And the story begins with a cleansing--a period of sobriety that exists on many different planes. Being present. Sleeping when it's dark. Waking in the light and walking and being silent, alone. Adjusting--relocating to a new frame of mind, not just a new place. Starting to occupy a different life, and now the constraints aren't easier or better, but necessary, and different. Welcome.

The Calendrio Agricola Lunar of 2007 tells me the "energetic sensibilities" are high today. Apparently this is a good thing. The day did find me with enough energy and sense to pen a letter to Rachel after a day in sun and dirt. I think of her belly swelling with new life and how I am not there to see it. I think of Cooper and his strawberries and how they rival the berries growing here. I miss them. Now that Freebird has taken off into a new era of flight, Rachel has no computer, no email. Being forced to write with ink and paper is hardly a disaster, but I have no return address...

After a week at the base of magestic and dormant Cotopaxi, I am now in a verdant valley below the black and active Volcan Tungurahua. It last erupted in 2005, covering the towns on the other side of Baños with ash and rubble and shutting down tourism in this tourist town. She makes noise every day, puffing out huge dark plumes of smoke that rise to mix with the clouds. I awake every morning to find my things covered in a fine, black grit and sometimes the pink and red petals of the dahlias are covered in it, too. Last night I saw magma spurt from the mouth and light up the sky, falling to the slope and crackling black and orange as it cooled. I wonder if I should tell Mom and Dad...

I arrived here at my first "farm" just 5 days ago and already my hands have taken on a greenish-yellow tint and the dirt under my nails seems permenant, but I'm enjoying every minute of it--the weeding, gathering volcanic stones that Tungurahua resupplies every day, harvesting cabbage, carrots, chard and lemons just a few feet from my bedroom door with which to prepare my meals. I gather mint and oregano and lemongrass for tea. I boil water to drink. I am the only volunteer here for now, and so my days are spent in a Spanish world, working with Mario and Don Victor, who is 97 years old and still wielding a machete and caring tenderly for young lettuces. At night I am alone save for the rhino beetles, the rumbling of the volcano, the rustling of cane grass and the whipping of tattered banana palms in the wind. I make tea. I write. I retire early. All of this is welcome, as my head had gotten so overwhelmed there in NY--too much of too much. No clear space in which to think, not even in my head, and so I'm happy for this quiet solitude

Today was my day to make lunch for the "crew" and I prepared a chicken soup, complete with feet--a first for me. I did not eat them, for it was enough to cook them. They kept sticking up out of the pot like a bad Chinatown joke. I am proud of these lunches, and of my creative culinary experiments with things called Camote and Papa Chino.

It was humbling to realize I'd come here to farm and yet couldn't tell a weed from a plant. But I have learned. I have learned that carrots need little water, gentle earth cover, and lots of sun. Cilantro on the other hand needs very moist ground and plenty of shade. Clover secures nitrogen to the soil and can be sown as a natural fertilizer that has the added bonus of being beautiful and smelling delicious. Potatos grow by planting potatos, leeks by planting the ends of leeks, but still no one can tell me where to find the seeds on a carrot.

Conversations with Carol have been incredibly rewarding. Women like her, and Cherie (my hippie in Otavalo), offer me an understanding of how Ecuador moves, and how it has changed, in a language I can understand. They are like key masters, opening up doors that would otherwise remain closed. Thier knowledge is invaluable to me. Were I just playing tourist I would never get this--these relaxed moments at the end of a day where worlds of understanding unexpectedly unfold. One likes wine, the other walnut leaf tea. There it was a darkening garden cafe in a city, here it is a darkening garden in the mountains. I speak with Carol while lemonade cools on the stovetop, and leftover soup from lunch awaits me for dinner. Here a conversation meanders, it is not an interview or an interrogation, and it winds its way from talk of dogs and medicinal plants to politics and history.

Despite our language barriers, Mario and I have developed a rhythm of work and play. We struggle along, but we are also able to joke with each other, though sometimes I wonder if we're both just laughing because I have no idea what is going on! The work day is short when measured in hours. We begin between 7:30 and 8:00, work until Noon, depending on which one of us is making lunch, for then we get to stop at 11:00. We eat and then "siesta" or rest until 1:00. Then it's just two more hours until quitting time. On my first day I hoped for hot water in my much needed shower, but found myself luxuriating under the frigid spray regardless. It is as cold showers are: bracing, rejuvinating, a reminder that you're no longer at home. And right now, this is fine by me.

At The Tungurahua Tea Room: Planting Radishes, Raising Awareness

2007-11-12T10:46:00.000-08:00

*Disclaimer: This blog entry is not about refrigerators.

"Look at the mess we've got ourselves into, just because we invited a gringo to eat some bananas." --Colonel Aureliano Buendia, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude

Photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch

Carol told me her favorite book growing up was The Secret Garden. While her garden, The Tungurahua Tea Room, may be no secret, it certainly is a wonder, and from many an Ecuadorian point of view, it's a mystery, an incongruity, and a waste of time. They think she's crazy--just another gringa loca transplanted here from the land of promises above Mexico. Despite her bountiful garden, they don't think she knows the first thing about farming. And this is partially true. She came here not even realizing she wanted to have this garden-meets-farm, nor knowing how to do it, and so her mind was wide and free as it began to take shape, and her methods are often...unconventional.

You see, Carol doesn't hate weeds. If a wild cabbage seeds itself in the middle of the mandarin orange orchard, so be it. "If it wanted to grace us here, with its growth, well it's more than welcome. We'll just plant around it." This is one Carol-inian sentiment, and it's not just another hippie notion. While we certainly do an extraordinary amount of weeding, nothing is wasted. Some of them are edible--the dandelion and wild mustard have leaves that spice up a salad. Nettles, though brutal on your hands, are medicinal in many, many ways. With them we can make a tea, a poultice, a soup. Some have flowers that become bouquets on our little log table. And those that are, sigh, simply just weeds, those get tossed into the compost pile where they will become rich soil, or burned on the bon fire to become ash for fertilizer.

Her neighbors hate her living walls--cane grass and agave plants, trailing vines of passion fruit and tall spiky palms. Their dried leaves and baby fruits fall into their yards and paths. They throw the broken branches and the often still ripe fruits back over onto her property. "Why can't she build a normal concrete wall like the rest of us?"

Tobacco, which grows wild here, is something that Carol cultivates--not as a cash crop or as something to smoke, but as a natural pesticide. The leaves can be soaked for a week in water and then sprayed on plants to keep bugs away. The prolific seeds of the plants are easily distributed by birds and the wind, which means they often end up in the neighbors fields, sewing tobacco all around town. For many Ecuadorians here in Baños, tobacco is a weed to be eradicated--this is maybe how they view Carol, too. Many now prefer chemical pesticides, having left behind the traditional methods of farming in their culture in favor of "modern technology" which the world laughably lauds as "progress."

When you see women at the market, their baskets full of gleaming mangoes and tender avocadoes, you can easily imagine both woman and fruit have come from a utopian farm somewhere in the mountaneous distance, where they've cheefully grown and hand chosen each and every one just the day before, cows grazing dumbly and happily in the pastoral scene. The truth looks more like young women and men emerging from an entrance to a field somewhere alongside the PanAmerican highway, wearing a bright orange hazmat suit, goggles, gasmask, and a plastic backpack full of poison.

How is this better? How is this progress? Becoming a free market means having to compete with global markets. Competing successfuly means moving at a pace that cannot be supported by the simpler, more patient, healthier practices of the past. And too often, despite trying to change "for the better," all collapses anyway.

Carol does not have to worry about feeding her family, or supporting herself, or her land, from the produce she produces. Her utopia hinges on the resources she had at her disposal upon moving here. Her farm is worlds apart from the farms surrounding her. They need to make money. Carol wants peace. She can enjoy the luxury of experimentation. Her strawberries can fail, having generated maybe one or two plants out of 30 that bore fruit, and she can say, "That's alright. What matters is that they grew. We'll try again next time." The woman on the hill next door, with the tent-like green houses full of hundreds of tomato plants can't just "try again next time." But this is not to say that chemicals are therefore the only answer, the only way the poor campesino woman can survive. So what is it that stops her from using tobacco water instead of chemicals? A misguided belief that the chemicals are foolproof, that they guarantee the bugs won't destroy the crop, and a deliberately disseminated campaign of fear that methods like tobacco are "a risk." And yes, protecting hundreds of plants as opposed to 30 requires a different kind of diligence, but the earth was never really meant to support hundreds upon hundreds of just one solitary crop on one patch of ground. The tobacco would work, but as family farms turn into gigantic agrobusinesses, the integrity of the fields, the cycle of nature that works best and has worked best for thousands of years becomes disrupted and destroyed. Whereas before, if you had tomatoes and corn and cabbage all growing around each other, the corn bugs and the tomato bugs and the cabbage bugs would all sort of cancel each other out, and if one crop did fail, you had two others to rely on. Now, if the tomatoes go, there's nothing to back you up.

It would be easy to point fingers and blame the Ecuadorians (or the Africans or the Peruvians, or the fill in the blank) for their poor, impetuous, blind-faith kinds of choices. But what choice have they other than the limited ones thrust and forced upon them by powers greater than they are? Maybe Carol and her farm are a faint suggestion of a different kind of possible choice.

As Ecuador swiftly hurtles into the "modern" era, gently and steadily shedding this label of "3rd world," the 1st world steadily and not so gently rushes in to reap the benefits of a population who want so desperately to "advance." When you care to look closely, foreign investments and the farce of international development--which more often than not ends up destroying not developing--are revealed as hydroelectric dam projects that have poisoned rivers, displaced ancient cultures, decimated ecosystems and community networks that stretch for miles and millenia. They are oil fields where rainforests used to grow. They are giant supermarkets importing apples from Chile when you could just as easily buy them from the woman up the road--but she can't afford to sell hers for less than twenty cents apiece. It's dollarization, when the US dollar replaced the Ecuadorian Sucre in 2000, that purportedly saved the Ecuadorians but that now means people can't afford to keep their farms and so they sell off land that has been in their families for centuries. Who buys it? Well, a lot of them are being bought up by Colombian drug lords who are seeing their fields sprayed with an agent-orange like substance in Colombia, compliments of the United States Government, and so they're moving here. 30,000 Colombian refugees live in shanty towns on the Ecuadorian border because their crops died, and they fled lest their children die, too. This is modernity. This is what it looks like to emerge from a so-called darkness. It looks like hell.

Carol told me some of Ecuador's recent history through her eyes. She's been here 14 years, the last 7 of which have seen Ecuador going through its most rapid rate of change. It used to be that lines in the airport stretched for what seemed like miles. People traveling back to Ecuador traveled with everything imaginable--refrigerators, ovens, new tires, garden hoses--because none was readily available here. Then: Dollarization. Walk through Quito today and you can get Japanese meditation stones, french cheeses, Converese sneakers, not to mention refrigerators and tires. It is easy to mistake the flashing lights and bars and cute restaurants and new pickup trucks and other western amenities that now abound here in Ecuador for "progress" and "success." It all depends on how you measure such things, and whether or not you take them at face value or dare to search out their underside.

After 2000, the Ecuadorian economy became "lower risk" and "more stable" for foreign investment, and suddenly anyone could import anything, which meant that stores and markets were flooded, mostly with cheap crap from China. This country is drowning in plastic, drowning in disposable garbage that infiltrates and crowds out their culture and all things cultural. And they buy it. People who hadn't needed a refrigerator for centuries suddenly needed one simply because it was available. So, they saved and saved and spent their money, which maybe could have sent the youngest child to school, and inevitably, in few months, maybe a year, it broke. They can't afford to fix it or buy a new one, and so it gets tossed to rot somewhere, usually beside a river in town, poisoning the ground, and the Ecuadorian goes back to buying milk from a neighbor farmer and not from Nestle, and back to leaving their eggs on the counter--which, by the way, is totally harmless anyway.

This flooding of a formerly local, indigenous -goods market with foreign imports also meant a decrease in the profits for Ecuadorian people themselves. The dollar meant stabilization of a rapidly devaluaing sucre, but it also meant $1 ended up having a lot less local purchasing power than 25,000 sucres. But why had the sucred plummeted so far so fast? Partially because of national debt--owing foreign investors more than they could ever pay back for those aforementioned so-called development projects.

No, I have not flown south and become a raging communist. I am not saying that Ecuadorians (or Africans, or fill in the blank) don't need or shouldn't have refrigerators. But development could be more cautious; it should be. And in our global society where greed and want trump everything requiring patience, caution is thrown into the poisonous wind. Those who benefit, those who horde the resources and windfall with which they can escape the catastrophic fall when it comes, those people are not the Ecuadorians selling tomatoes in the market. Sell your land for a satelite dish. Sell your soul for a can of Coke. These are not just hyper-reactionary statements. In the longest run, they will be the truth. They will be the the only things we'll be able to say when we look back if we don't start doing something different now. How do we stop the corporotocracy steamroller, where those manning the controls live by privatization, capitalist zeal and corruption, all in the name of an insatiable greed that snares everyone and benefits few? Maybe we look to Carol and how she and her farm fit into all of this...

The Tungurahua Tea Room offers an example of an alternative kind of change. A tempered progress that makes lasting, positive impacts on the land and the people who work it. There you can see a balance between the ways of the past and the future of a globalized universe where everyone sports Nike sneakers and a satelite dish and where there is no time line, only instant gratification. Globalization is not a bad thing in and of itself. It was, after all, the thing that helped lead me to Carol in the first place. It can be a tool, or a weapon of destruction. It is up to us how we choose to wield it.

The Gringo Back Road

2007-10-28T19:11:00.000-07:00

New Pictures Available for Viewing at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch

This trip is different. Despite the obvious. It is different from the last time I flew off to Ecuador. My approach this time, and thus my experience, is different. It is not at all how it was two years and some months ago. My intentions, different. My time frame, different. My goals, different. My route, different.

Last time I arrived I checked in to a "party hostel." A backpacker haunt full of other seekers. I met people instantly, and those I met that first night would factor in again and again throughout my two months in this tiny country. It began a link--the Gringo Trail was more than a route, it was a network. I would meet people who would lead me to places where I would meet other people who often knew the first group. A reccomended hosteria in the hills would turn into a gathering of friends who had met at one time or another throughout the country or the continent. Then I would meet the old friends of my new friends, and so on. It was amazing. My 3 weeks volunteering in the jungle left weekends free for exploring, and the 4 or 5 great people I'd met there would accompany me on a 2 day adventure away from the planting of trees and the silent racket of jungle nights. I had company the entire time.

Now, a full month into this trip, other than Cherie at the Hippie Den, I have been pretty much alone. Blazing a gringo back road, not a well traversed trail. Part of this happens to do with the "season." Traveler infestation is at its peak during our summer months. Now I observe lots more couples and, quite unexpectedly, many middle aged or genuinely O-L-D people. Many are on tours, but regardless, it warms my heart and makes me smile to see the 70 year old French-Canadian with his 27 friends, huffing up the steep climb from the tour bus to the lodge in Cotopaxi Park, all kitted out in his brand spanking new khaki, convertible, waterproof hiking pants--not a speck of dirt on them! But hey, at least he's prepared.

The other part of this lonely equation is that I have sought solitude, partially with the intention for it, and partially because something unconscious pushed me in this direction. I chose the cheapest, shittiest hostel possible in Quito upon arrival, and then I went out to a lodge that is written up in only one guidebook, and it's the guidebook rarely used by the "typical" backpacker (Lonely Planet is the most popular choice, but I prefer Rough Guides, for the obvious reasons I suppose.). And then I went for a whole week, whereas most stay for one or two nights. Tambopaxi is most popular with tour agencies and climbing guides. It serves as a luxury luncheon spot where there are no other choices but for brown bagging, and other than the mountain refuge, it is the only acclimitization lodging option. It is a departure point for those ascending the Volcano. As I have zero budget for alpine climbing, and a terrible fear of those icy heights, I was alone at Tambopaxi--no guide, no plans except to wander. I watched many a group come and go, while I bonded with the staff! Well, there was Matt, but he was 20, and could talk of nothing but his iPod and climbing the Volcano and he complained that no one spoke English. Not my first choice in company.

In Otavalo I met Marco, the sexy Swiss. He was staying at my hostel with me, but then I only stayed for 3 nights before moving in with Cherie. I loved her. I loved my time there, but mostly, if I wasn't hanging out with her, I was studying or in class, or, you guessed it...wandering some more. Otavalo is "dead" midweek, as the typical traveler only comes for the Saturday market. Having spent 2 and half weeks there, I can tell you this is a shame. I purposefully chose to study Spanish there and not in Quito, even though prices were slightly higher. Why? Because Quito can be a madhouse and distractions abound. (I am very easily distracted.) And I had just left the mad, distracting house of NYC! Quito and its bars and parties and people were the last thing on my mind. Otavalo was perfect. And I did meet Jan, a 64 year old Alaskan who had studied indigenous "Eskimo" tribes for the last 2 decades and was here scoping out a place to retire. I met Deb, a friend of Cherie's, who was a retired adevertising big wig from New York. She and her husband Tom moved here permenantly 2 years ago. They bought property in a "development," yup, a white adobe suburb outside of Otavalo, close to Laguna Cuicocha, reputedly a portal to the center of the world. We went to the Chachimbiro baths together, got stoned, and swam and talked about the energy of the equator. She's invited me to visit her at her home when I head back up north, and I plan to take her up on it. How she ended up here, the story of her life, it fascinates me!

Then, as soon as I completed my lessons, despite Cherie's pleas for me to stay with her (for free!) I left for this first farm--The Tungurahua Tea Room--where I am, for now, the sole volunteer. Always budgeting, I stayed farm-bound for the first 6 days, spending a total of $12 at the local tienda on eggs and milk and things we don't produce. I`ve only just ventured into the town center this weekend. I have spent my time with Mario, the head worker, and even more time with just the dogs, Ellá, Leo and Princessa (the Lady, the Lion and the Princess). Carol, the Dueña, or owner, is rarely there, and though our few encounters have been full of incredible conversation, they have been brief.

Baños, the town I'm closest to, is the place in Ecuador from which to base outdoors-ing adventures. And so what I have observed this weekend are groups of tourists all on 4-wheel, ATV contraptions or bicycles or atop garishly colored tour busses blasting music, bounding off on their way to fun. Anyone who has traveled alone will confirm that you are much more open and willing to meet people than you are when you're ensconsed in the safety net of friends. You are much more willing to engage with the local population, much more open to being open, much more likely to look in windows or explore doors to nowhere. You have a quiet in your head that gets drowned out by company. A bus ride becomes a tour, or time for refelction. You are looking out the window, not gossiping about life at home. You ask questions of yourself, not of your seatmate. You read the map. You figure out where you're going. You lead. You don't follow. What you are not more open to are group activities, or chatting up tightly knit circles of other travelers. At least I 'm not. I remember Africa, and being in Bolgatanga, the northermost town in Ghana, at the border of Burkina Faso. I remember how desperate I was for some companionship that I perservered and pursued this very unfriendly girl who I met while we were both on seperate guided hikes to visit some sacred crocodiles. I was determined to hang out with her, friendly or not, because that was near the end of my trip and my only other alternative was more conversation with prepubescent boys who all wanted to "guide" me further or become my "friend." My determination paid off and Kate and I had a dinner and a few beers and it turned out she wasn't horrible--just not as desperate as me, at least not yet.

Ecuador is completely different in this regard to Africa. No one here is desperate, not even me. I am relishing this quiet for I predict it will change soon and I will be again wishing for solitude. This is me, trying to enjoy exactly where I am while I'm there. Already a month has passed. Too soon it will be over, I know.

On Tuesday, 2 new volunteers are scheduled to arrive at TTR. I look forward to it. People my age, on a similar mission if you will. I will have company while I fertilize the mandarin orchard and weed the broad beans. We'll be cooking for 5 and the kitchen atmosphere will be livlier, and messier! Tomorrow, my last day alone, I will pay close attention to the silence, a quiet broken only by the rumbling volcano, the rustling of the cane grass, the flapping of the tattered banana palms as the wind whips up the canyon. I will head to my mosquito-netted bed around 7:30 , just as the rhino beetles begin to descend in earnest, and I will read myself to sleep after a cup of freshly picked peppermint tea. At 6 am I will hear Mario arrive and unlock the shed, turn on the radio and begin boiling the kettle for coffee. I will rise, and share coffee, pull on my rubber boots and smelly socks, and prepare to meet, at some point in the day, my new compatriots, who will break the silence but offer me new stories and a new path to follow, for however long it lasts, until I pack up and happily move on to the next place, alone.

Listening In, and Learning Spanish

2007-10-12T18:44:00.000-07:00

New photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch

"Confronted by the foreign we grow newly attentive to the details of the world." --Pico Iyer

Tomorrow I leave Otavalo after 2 and half truly wonderful weeks in this mountain town, center of a certain kind of world. I have had to change my original plans to farm outside of this town, and so I will head south to a farm in a small village near Baños, a major tourist center situated in yet another valley. But whereas Otavalo is dropped down in the middle of the two parallel strips of Andes mountains (the Eastern and Western Cordilleras) Baños borders the eastern Andes range and the Amazon basin. It's subtropical, so it's lush and green but still hemmed in by some of the largest peaks in the cordillera, including Volcan Tungurahua, which last erupted in 2006. Mom, Dad, don't worry. Right now, she just belches bunches of tourist-thrilling smoke. (There is no current concern regarding the danger of Tungurahua, promise.)

While here I have been living above a cafe, La Casa de Fruta, with a woman named Cherie and her daughter, Sasha. Old School Hippie and Hippie Nuevo. They have made me so welcome and have opened not only their home and their kitchen to me, but their lives as well. And while I have had so much fun here with them, it is time to go and begin the sweaty, muddy labor of love that is the farming. The question remains: will I love it?

The most important thing I've been doing in Otavalo is studying Spanish. I've had lessons for two weeks, 4 hours a day, one on one with a woman who speaks zero English. I have come away from these classes with more than just a larger Spanish vocabulary and the understanding, finally, of what the Present Perfect Tense is. Learning a new language is an exercise in humiliation, frustration, and well, it can make you feel like a total elementary idiot. However, if you let it, it can change the approach to and the experience of traveling.

One can choose to travel and hear nothing, or one can choose to treat it as a constant exercise in becoming a better listener. We get so used to anticipating what someone is going to say that we often answer without having listened to the question. I find myself newly attuned to everything going on around me. As an English speaker in this Spanish speaking world it would be so much easier to shut out the conversations around me, or to conclude what I want to hear. And often it wouldn't even matter. Not to them. People here are so used to gringos and tourists not understanding that they make concessions for us all the time, like when we say yes to a question when we mean to say no. Or when we say "yes" to a question that requires a response like, "blackberry" or "double occupancy" or "later this afternoon." I know I could go a whole year here and scrape by on my meager vocabulary and survive, but why would I? Because I'm insecure? Embarrassed? Self-conscious? Yes. I am all of those things. But what I missed on my last trip here was the deeper experience of getting into people's lives, histories, stories.

As I often do I compare all traveling experiences to that Ghanaian summer. I had such profound moments there, so much worthy of writing about, so many conversations that blew the lid off of everything I thought I knew, things that made me ponder and think and question. And it was because I was able to talk with people. Yes, as I said many times, the English there was far and away different from the English I was used to, and much was lost in translation, but still I could ask questions, respond, inquire, joke, explain. I want to have those moments here, in Spanish. Fluency may be a far off dream, but this is not the point.

Spending 4 hours a day in a room with no respite, no English moments, forced me to think differently, and to let go of a rigidity that is natural but unconscious. I think in English. Why wouldn't I? But expressing myself in Spanish beyond telling people what I want to eat or what kind of room I'd like to sleep in, this requires thinking in Spanish, mentally uprooting nearly 3 decades of what I've learned and honed and practiced as an English speaker. That is the trickiest and most elusive practice in learning a new language. To put forth my thoughts or to ask the simplest of questions means constantly rearranging the structure of my phrases and changing the words.

In most cases you cannot directly translate an English sentence into a Spanish one, and this goes beyond just putting the adjective after the noun. Spanish will have one single word for an entire phrase, and this is magical and concise and confounding. The verbs for To Be (Ser) and To Go (Ir) are the exact same words in the past tense (Fui, Fuiste, Fue...). "Um, excuse me, Señora, so, were you going, or were you being? I missed something..." You can say "Espera" and can mean "Hold on" or "Wait" or "I wish." Sometimes it's as though certain words are just...missing from the language, or so it seems, but then I read Marquez´s One Hundred Years of Solitude in English and I am awed by how phenomenal and expansive the Spanish language must be, and how terribly little I will ever really know.

During my lessons I sometimes felt like my brain would not allow a new language to seep in. Maybe I'm too old, it's too late for me. My mind is certain and set in its English speaking way. I nearly wept with frustration at how I would constantly repeat the same mistakes again and again, or how I could never remember the difference between To Put and To Be Able To. Nancy would see my anger, or would hear me say Mierda! under my breath, and she'd respond, "Es normal, normal."

Sometimes I hear people speaking Spanish out my window, and I think that if I just look out I would see them with subtitles. Perhaps it is an American trait, but I'm so used to getting what I want, when I want it, and how I asked for it just by asking for it, that this is not only a lesson in listening, but one in humility as well. I must adapt. I must learn. Or despite the many memories and trinkets and bracelets, I risk going home empty handed.

On our last day of class, Nancy told me that I surprised her again and again throughout our lessons. She said I was "muy differente" than other students. I asked her what she meant and she said that I was bold; that I dared to ask questions, and that I attempted to construct complex sentences and stories whereas others routinely stick to the basics and just silently copy down what she says or writes on the board. She told me to be confident in my Spanish voice, and to keep daring. With this in my mind, I head south...

Local Transport

2007-10-06T15:42:00.000-07:00

Photos available at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch

October 4, 2007

Location, The Panamerican Highway North to Otavalo

I began this morning's journey by helping my new friends at Tambopaxi unload the pickup truck, or camioneta, that would take me out of the park. Junior and Maria seemed surprised when I leaned over the side and began stacking firewood, then moving it to the wood pile by the kitchen door. Not only did I know how essential that firewood is in keeping people warm while at the lodge, for it was frigid some nights! But I also really wanted to get a move on and assisting with firewood, huge bags of sugar, giant melons and squash, among other things in the bi-weekly delivery, would speed things along.

With a hug from Maria and the ubiquitous gift of a bracelet from Junior, I was off. The aging camioneta bounced its way out of the park, down the steep and winding hill through 2 small communities until we got to the larger town at the bottom, Machachi, where I caught a bus to Quito.

Bus rides, no matter what, are never comfortable. And I don't mean just the position of the seat. Even if your butt is relatively cushioned, and you have the miracle of leg room, your body and your mind will be imprinted with the stresses of traveling.

After one hour on that bus (which was after 30 minutes in the camioneta on cobbled hills) I arrived in Quito, where I hopped off in the middle of the street and made my way past a line of young men attempting to coerce me to ride their bus to Otavalo. But I stood firm, pushing my way through, gripping my bags, as I searched out Compañia Los Lagos--one of only two operators that drop passengers off directly in town, not on the outskirts on the edge of the highway.

No matter how far the journey, for the first hour or so the bus acts like a local city bus would, meaning that it stops and starts every few minutes, lurching to the side to either pick someone up or let someone off. The passenegers are actually lucky if the bus comes to a complete stop. Usually people are jumping on as the bus continues moving. Old women with heavy burdens in each of their hands, like sacks of root vegetables or bags of grain, a chicken or a bolt of cloth strapped to their backs, heave themselves on board, their two feet barely off the asphalt before the bus swerves back out into traffic. Then there are the mothers: some pregnant, some with babies crushed to their chests, and some with both baby and belly! They balance with one hand outstretched, clutching whatever support they can reach as they swing up onto the raised staircase of the bus. I've even observed women doing all of this in high heeled sandals. The balance, the bravado, the simple normalcy of these practices never fails to capture my attention. And so this, too, adds to the constant distraction, the stimulation of multiple senses, on what should be a simple bus ride.

I never really sleep. I'm always watching to make sure my bags don't disappear, or I'm captivated by the television hanging from the ceiling--I mean really, who can resist Blood Diamond with bad Spanish dubbing?--or I'm watching the endless parade of people and possessions and the occasional barnyard animal get up and on and off the bus, or I'm holding my breath, simultaneously amazed and terrified by the views beyond my window, and silently calculating how I might survive if the bus is to plummet off this mountain highway...

If I leave the windows closed, I'm usually sweltering. If I open the windows, I'm eating dust, closing my eyes against the stinging fumes of diesl exhaust and burning trash. I must then try to hear Blood Diamond en Espanol over the sound of honking horns, when it was already in competition with the baby crying in the back seat and the little boy selling his wares up and down the aisle: "Helados! Helados!"

As we came upon the last hour of the journey, I realized the tension that had built up in my face--my forhead was creased, my eyes squinting and sore from both staring at a too-far away television and from closing them against the dust that filtered in despite my closed window. My teeth crunched a fine grit, and I was thirsty but hesitant to drink water for there were no convenient rest stops. I had a dull headache, and my left butt cheek had fallen asleep (now that's a weird feeling!). But I realized what I was grateful for, despite all of this: I was grateful that I'd gotten on the bus early enough to claim the weird padded section between the driver and the front passenger. It was there I was able to rest my giant pack and keep it in view for the whole ride. I was grateful that I had the first section of seats, where I could stretch out my legs. I was grateful to be on a bus that doesn't wait for a full house to depart, and so I had no seat mate and therefore a place to rest my smaller day bag. I was grateful that the money collector gave me back my change without my having to ask, in an uncertain gringa voice, "¿Tienes mi cambio?" because I never really know what the actual fare is supposed to be.

And then, when I got off the bus in Otavalo, though dusty and aching, I was grateful for the woman who pointed me in the right direction toward town, and for the short, scenic walk needed to reach my hostel, where I was surprised (and grateful again) for clean, floral sheets, a bed with a real mattress, and a bathroom right outside my door. Sometimes the little things are just enough.

Journal Entry, October 2, 2007 8:30pm

2007-10-06T11:31:00.000-07:00

"On foot, in a van, on a fleet motorcycle or on a bicycle, a person must be very careful not to become overly concerned with arriving." --Peter Jenkins, A Walk Across America

At night the silence is as massive as the mountain. The vault of stars above in the very black sky both surprises and enchants me--I see so few stars at home in New York.

Home? Is it? Will it be again? Though this journey has just begun I cannot help but think of where I will find myself at its end. Truth be told I´ve been thinking of the future long before this present even began--such is my way. Cursed or blessed, it is who I am and how I think.

I did cry today. Not over some emotional break-through or -down, but by reading that damn book my Mom sent me off with!! Needless to say, it's engaging, enthralling even. I´ve read over 800 pages in 3 days. This speaks not only to the greatness of the book, but to how much time I have, suddenly, on my hands. I can't help but feel guilty as each chapter ends and I plunge into the next. Shouldn't I be doing something? Like figuring out my life, for one? It's too soon, I suppose, for that kind of thing. I need to let these wide open spaces (spaces I asked for) engulf me for a bit, consume me both mentally and physically for awhile. It seems I have a harder time living in the moment than I'd like to admit . And like I said, cursed or blessed, it's the only way I know how to be, and I can only hope that this is a good thing, or at least that it will be in the end, when the trip is over and I return home, wherever that may be.

The End of the Hike

2007-10-06T10:56:00.000-07:00

All photos are available at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch/

This is Part 2 of the story of my lungs and the bulls and the search for the hummingbird cave...(scroll down for Part 1)

Now here's the thing about the first substantial hike at altitude: it all goes to your head. This giddy elation takes over, combined with a subtle sense of invincibility. Just when you should be weary or disoriented, having reached 4,000 meters after 2 or 3 hours of steady climbing, you are energized instead.

It's as though you are being moved by a force within, and your vision clears as your chest expands. Sometimes on hikes like this one, my heart is pumping so vigorously it's as though my brain is moving inside my skull, pulsing behind my eyes. It feels like oxygen is reaching parts of my body that have never breathed before: the skin of my forehead, the very bone of my eye sockets, the muscles deep within my back, under my shoulderblades, the inbetween spaces of my spine, even my teeth and gums begin to tingle with fresh, oxygenated blood. My diaphragm never lifted so high! I forget how hard it is, and instead feel an insane desire to push through and overcome the struggle of going up and up and up. I have lungs used to the bars of Brooklyn, and now they must adapt to the high altitude plains of the Ecuadorian Andes.

Having found those tire tracks, I turned right and followed them along flat ground for about 15 minutes before they began to descend. Now the energy and elation came from heading down! When I tell you I danced down the mountain, I mean I danced! With no one around for miles, standing atop this giant, looking across to the massive Cotopaxi, I let loose and boogied with abandon all the way to the bottom and across the canyon, continuing down the dirt road toward home. I turned up the volume on my iPod, conveniently attached to my belt, and heard only the sounds of Phoenix's "If I Ever Feel Better," Metric's "Combat Baby," and Mr. Wainwright's "Oh What a World." I was no longer concerned with any bulls, but rather felt like I was in my own movie, specifically the last frame, where the fabulous, independent protagonist (the one who conquered the bulls) gets further and further out of focus, as her legs carry her proud and strong...and groovy. Now, I dance a lot, and often in unexpected places, but this was a first. And let me tell you, there is nothing like shakin´one's money maker down the side of a lichen laced, wind blown little mountain in the middle of a wilderness nowhere! It was pure freedom, pure joy--complete uninhibited elation manifesting itself in the movement of my hips, my hands above my head, and my hiking boots kicking up impressive dust as I twirled and twisted; my smile as boundless as those hills.

Why am I always on a plane, or a fast train?
Oh what a world my parents gave me!
Always travelin, but not in love.

Still I think I'm doing fine.
Wouldn't it be a lovely headline:
"Life is...Beautiful!"
on a New York Times?

--Rufus Wainwright

Mis Pulmones y los Torros y la Búsqueda para la Cueva del Pájaro del Tarareo

2007-10-06T09:48:00.000-07:00

All photos available for viewing at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch/

Monday October 1, 2007
Location, Parque Nacional de Cotopaxi

This is the story of my lungs and the bulls and the search for the hummingbird cave...(part 1)

Today I took my first real hike, and mis pulmones de Nueva York took a beating! I was heading for a cave of hummingbirds, tucked into the base of Volcán Rumiñahui. I had been told to head south, go left at the little abandoned shack on the other side of the small canyon, and to then look for a stand of pines--not hard to find here in this tree-less park--which would be at the end of a trail of tire tracks. This all seemed straightforward enough, but my host failed to mention that these tracks and these trees would be up and over on the other side of an enormous and steep hill.

Well, I saw some pines, though they were bent and drowning in a stream, but they were near this shack and so I went left. I knew I'd missed a vital clue somewhere along the way, for I never did see any tire tracks, but I also knew that if I went left and crossed up over the hill at some point I could walk along the ridge until I spied the cave at the base of the volcano on the other side. The only problem was getting to that ridge, the ridge, because standing inbetween me and the right ridge were many other ridges of many other hills, summited only by heaving steps up severely steep inclines. I would get to what I assumed to be the top, only to see a slight downward slope that led to where another hill began anew. The wind had picked up, sweeping in grey storm clouds that sprinkled some cold rain on my pack and further dampened my sweat soaked hairline.

I passed by creeks in the hills, alongside of which were a shocking amount of bleached-out, dried animal bones, including the huge, entirely intact head of one wild horse. As I looked at it lying there, mouth open, teeth bared, too white against the green grass, I had a melodramatic vision of never reaching the top of this hill and succumbing to the same fate. But what fate was it? What natural predators of horses lived in these hills? Pumas. Did I remember hearing something about Pumas? I moved with newfound speed and bountiful breath up those hillsides.

Finally, finally, after nearly 2 and a half hours of climbing and questioning, I reached the height of the last ridge. Down below to my left were a herd of bulls, black and brownish red, their horns visible even at this distance. I stopped for a moment to rest and to survey the scene ahead. I had certainly gone at least one hour out of my way, too far south. Now how far would I have to go to get to this cave...? I turned to my right and standing there, not 10 feet in front of me, was one lone bull, all by his huge and terrifying self. I gasped and immediately turned and walked the other way, down the hill and away from my hard won ridge. I listened for his movement, wondering if bulls were the type of fierce animal to search me out. I heard nothing. I kept walking, making my way back up the ridge but in the opposite and once again out of the way direction of el torro, and promptly removed my RED hooded sweatshirt. Yes, that's right, red. And though I've heard that red being the color of provocation for bulls is just a myth, I couldn't help but think that exchanging it for my more subdued blue tee shirt wouldn't hurt matters.

Fifteen minutes later, believing the bull was now far behind me, I crested the ridge only to turn around and find that damn bull directly behind me! Apparently he'd been moving in the same direction as I had, only above me. I dropped to my knees, hiding as much of myself as I could behind the tall grasses, and started talking to myself (unconsciously, really) most likely saying something like, "Oh, shit. What does a person do when confronting a lone bull on a mountainside?" Well, apparently what you do is you crouch down and start talking to yourself! Cause that bull gave a grunt and when I peered up over the grassy bush, he had turned and was off running in the other direction. I watched until I could see him no longer. (I would return to the lodge later and tell my host, Victoria, about seeing the bulls. She replied, "Well at least you didn't come upon just one. A herd won't bother you, but a lonely one? They'll usually charge. In that case, just throw yourself out of his way." I was grateful to whatever force kept me from throwing myself anywhere....)

Now that my heart-in-the-throat moment had passed, I proceeded up onto flatter terrain, heading for Rumiñahui and the elusive cave. I looked off into the distance and saw pine trees. I looked down at my feet and saw tire tracks. Pine trees?! Tire tracks?! Now?! But...? I then realized my mistake. From this point on it was a good 4 hours to the cave and back. I had gone hours out of my way! Followed the wrong pines, the wrong ridge, the wrong hills. I just started laughing. I decided to follow the tracks down the hill to their origin, figuring that if I could find out where they started I could come back and do the cave the next day. Rain clouds were heavier now, Cotopaxi completely hidden in the grey fog, it was time to head home...

Journal Entry, September 29th, 2007

2007-10-06T09:27:00.001-07:00

All photos available for viewing at http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch/

Location: Parque Nacional de Cotopaxi, First Day

It seems we are all waiting for Cotopaxi to rear her head, display her perfect peak. Everyone in the lodge's dining room is looking out the windows, including a very tall Scandinavian man who must bend down to look up, all squinting into the blinding brightness. But the mountain is teasing her guests, playfully hiding and partially appearing from behind swirling mists.

A bowlful of traditional potato and cheese soup, locro, has filled my belly; two cups of Mate de Coca have warmed me and should reputedly ease the 1,000 meter ascent made today in the back of a pickup truck from the valley below.

I left Quito early this morning and have now arrived at Tambopaxi, the one and only accomodation inside of Cotopaxi National Park. Cotopaxi is the 2nd highest volcano in Ecuador--standing at 5897 m, or 19,347 feet! It also boasts the most perfectly shaped cone of any volcano in this cordillera. It is, in more ways than one, breathtaking. The majesty of this mountain is made all the more dramatic because it stands alone, exploding out of the surrounding low hills and vast, tundra-like plains.

The park is comprised of 33,000 hectares of parámo--hauntingly beautiful wind swept grasslands, rocky and rugged, arid and cold, often shrouded in mists, and not an environment for the weary among us, animal, plant and human included. The plains are covered in lichen and mosses, either as dried out embroidery on rocks, or moist and thriving near a sudden stream. There are few trees to speak of, and the most dominant plant life are large tufts of long grass, resembling straw bushes that when viewed from a distance appear lush like wheat bending soft in the wind.

I will try, and certainly fail, to properly describe Volcán Cotopaxi. Nor could my camera capture what it is like to stand here just a few kilometers from her base. As I watch, the mists move eerliy, like fluid or like dancers with scarves at some Hindu ritual, hiding the identity of the royalty, teasing the audience. They part, almost directly down the middle, the curtain now revealing Her Majesty´s massive mount--snow covered, the texture of the glacier ice in full relief, and brighter than the white clouds behind. The audience applauds in their minds. We move outside to see her unobstructed, silently moving together, in awe of what we are witnessing. Viewing her northern face, the rock below the snow line stands very red, like a russet potato, between the shadow of the base and the icy gleam at the summit. The size of it nearly dwarfs the sky. I feel my face bathed in this cold, clear light, and I am amazed.

Suddenly from the East comes a stampede of a hundred horses. They fly across the hills, through a small canyon and up over onto the plain in front of the lodge. Behind them, a rainbow shimmers--I kid you not. The silence of the onlookers is broken and cameras click crazily. These are wild horses, belonging to no one but themselves. However, once a year they are rounded up rodeo style, their hooves are manicured so they don't develop the horse equivalent of ingrown toenails, and their tails are cut. Apparently horse tails can grow too long, getting caught up in their legs as they run. This effort to keep the horses healthy is a community project. They are protected but left wild, whereas they used to be stolen by locals in the villages below. Now the locals, combining their energies with those of the park and Tambopaxi, have helped to nurture these animals, preserving their lives and the spirit of these wild lands.

And So It Begins.....

2007-09-27T19:44:00.000-07:00

Arrival September 27th, 2007
Quito, Ecuador

My roomate is a petite, insane, pregnant, weed-smoking Bulgarian with cornrows who is off tommorow to Colombia where she hopes to remain long enough to give birth to her Nigerian-Colombian rastaman's child. He's still here surfing in Ecuador, and did I mention they began their romance just one month ago? I met her upon entering my $4 a night hostel.

Hostal Villamara is, um... quaint. The bed has a pronounced concave center and the entire first floor is nothing but broken rubble. But it has a lovely balcony and I know I mentioned that it's only $4 a night. It's also very centrally located which means no long nighttime walks back from this internet cafe, which is essential to this young solo woman traveling in this lively and lovely but unpredictable South American city.

I have not cried. For me this is a strange thing. Between the exhaustion, the hangover, the total and utter upheaval of my life I have just thrust upon myself, a good crying jag would be a predicatable occurance. I did have a sick feeling in my stomach as I hung up the phone after speaking with my parents earlier today. I believe it came from realizing how far away I have gone, again. And from realizing how hard this is for them, but how incredibly supportive they remain, and how committed they are to understanding it and letting me go. As they are stupefied by me, I am awed by their courage. It's just a lot to absorb and the sheer distance makes it sit heavy inside of me.

And then as I lay down to a much needed nap I had that panicky, dizzy feeling that has met me before--in Ghana three years ago, and in Ecuador the first time around--that seems to scream directly into my brain with a menacing intent to unravel my carefully spun web of mental security, "What are you doing? Why did you come here? You can't do this. Go home!" I thought, "My only connection here is Crazy Cornrows, and though she seems to really like me, she's stoned!!" Not very comforting. But I realized, as I quieted my mind with willpower alone (no Xanax yet), that this feeling only comes from being so suddenly without a place, a friend, a distraction, a purpose. I focused on what will come in just a few days, when I will go from being a brand new idle tourist to being an active participant in this land.

I focused on the Andean mountain air coming in from the balcony. I listened to the rhythmic breathing of Cornrows, who'd passed out in a sleepy stoner slumber. I remembered Maggie, a mother of two twenty-something's, who I'd met on the plane and who practiced Spanish with me and invited me to her house and who made sure I had a sweater. I thought of my last night in New York: my friends and their amazing gifts of support and awe and encouragement, surrounding me and embracing me even as I travel. I fell asleep in my concave bed, my fingers clasped round my Christopher pendant, and awoke to the Colombian band members upstairs playing the congas. Life is good.

For all pics, please go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch/