Adventures in Ecuador
Back in March 2012, while I was living in Buenos Aires, I took an amazing trip to Ecuador, with my friend Dale, who was then working as a travel writer. I recently rediscovered my diaries from that trip and I found them vivid and evocative, so I decided to share some excerpts with you. I hope they help transport you to that extraordinary place.
Day One: Quito
My first day was spent wandering through Quito old town. My companion Dale and I crisscrossed the place, following only our instincts, letting curiosity guide us. We walked through narrow streets where leaf-green buses belched evil black clouds of exhaust fumes. We climbed steep pavements under the heavy sky and my lungs strained a little as I tried to keep pace with Dale’s bouncy lope. The posher parts of Quito remind me of the rougher, grottier parts of Buenos Aires. I have travelled one step down on the ladder of global prosperity. The central square, housing the parliament building, is surprisingly leafy and quiet, landscaped with benches, tropical plants and giant red and orange flowers. Many of the buildings in that part of town are baroque confections: ornate, stuccoed, Italianate fantasies in ballerina pinks, spearmints, sky blues and online-chat-signal greens. I shuddered slightly as we pass the walls of the Carmelite monastery to think of the nuns enclosed within for life. Further up the hill, we passed a playground with a dour, forbidding statue of a priest and reached the Basilica del Voto Nacional (basilica of the national vow): a grey Gothic extravaganza whose gargoyles are native fauna: anteaters, capybaras, tapirs, armadillos and iguanas.
The narrower streets are remarkably quiet and peaceful here. The people’s Spanish has a bell-like, open-vowelled sound to my Argentine-trained ears. The younger women have beautiful rivers of jet-black, glossy hair and coal-black shiny eyes. But, for once, I feel slender as bodies are robuster and chunkier here and I am one of very few women without generous wodges of mutton top spilling out from the waistband of my jeans. A few of the hookers in their mini skirts and black leggings shouted after Dale as we walked, in an indecipherable mixture of English and Spanish. Stray dogs played in the streets, their fur stiff with mud.
Inviting food smells were everywhere: in every other doorway, there were pinchos (kebabs) grilling on braziers; vats with large chunks of pork stewing alongside beans and grains of every kind; corn cobs flashing their white, uneven rows of teeth; plantains roasting black in their skins. We stopped at a small cafe for steamed humita with generous dollops of fiery salsa.
As we strolled, my eyes were constantly drawn to the green hills around the city: their lower slopes are a rickety mass of houses, but above they are invitingly verdant. They surround us on all sides—you can never forget that this is a mountain place.
Day Two: Otovalo
The trip to Otovalo market involves a lengthy bus journey. We trundled along at walking pace through the outskirts of Quito for a seeming eternity. The bus conductor was a shock-headed youth in a T-shirt that proclaimed Vaya con Dios, Señora, que yo voy con su hija (“Go with God, Lady, I’m going with your daughter.”). His builder’s crack yawned at us as he leaned against the front windscreen. Every twenty minutes or so he would open the doors to allow another itinerant vendor on board. The first was a lady selling hand-printed recipe books. She stood at the front of the bus and patiently read off the title and description of every single recipe in the entire booklet in a shout before circulating through the bus to offer her wares. All the other vendors were selling more immediate sustenance: bottled water and fizzy drinks; packets of crisps; ice cream cornets wrapped in cellophane (which people eat by gradually unpeeling the cellophane and nibbling the ice creams from the bottom); empanadas stuffed with grits; various unidentifiable but pungent savoury things. The Quiteños seem to either sell food, buy food or eat food almost non stop. Everywhere the bus stopped—and it stop often—there were a dozen food stands. We passed many roadside stalls where entire pig carcasses, split down the middle, hung from hooks. Glazed pigs heads were displayed on platters, while flayed pigs, porcine Saint Bartholomews, rested beneath their crinkly brown skins, which were spread out over them like winding sheets. As I was jolted along in a state of extreme motion sickness, this continual spectacle of edibles was rather challenging to me. I nibbled dry crackers and tried to keep the bile from rising in my throat.
At last, we were out of the city. We drove for hours through lonely mountain landscapes that look like the Scottish Highlands on a grander scale. Finally, we reached Otovalo, a big, bustling, ugly town with a pleasant civic square, landscaped with flower beds and an enormous market. The fruits and vegetables were set out in a multicoloured array—the fruits were flamboyantly tropical, though disappointingly underripe, sour and watery (perhaps they need a warmer climate to fully mature?). The potatoes were tiny yellowy-white pebbles and taste like a cross beneath a chestnut and a macadamia. There were many more crucified and flayed pigs. Many of the female stallholders wear frilly white cotton blouses with colourful embroidery around the neckline and puff sleeves, often coupled with a long black cotton wrap skirt and a black sash worn across the chest. As usual here in Ecuador, when the weather changed from its daytime warmth to nighttime cool, everyone bundled up in boiled wool jackets, scarves and blankets.
We took a taxi out to the Laguna San Pablo and traced a route around the huge lake, which is surrounded by marshy reed beds and hemmed in on all sides by impressive volcanoes, their summits hidden in dense, dark grey cloud. We wandered down a path past small farms where we saw live pigs, mostly tethered to posts on long leashes, each wearing what looked like a toddler’s harness. Lazy dogs side-eyed us from a supine position as we passed, while the many cockerels burst out into loud warning cock-a-doodle-doos. After a while, the path winds upwards and downwards through some spectacular mountain scenery. We passed deep gorges and descended to a fast-flowing river, which we crossed on a precariously rickety wooden hanging bridge. And then, suddenly, we were in civilisation again, in a small tourist-trap hamlet with stalls selling trinkets, roasted bananas and the pretty but tasteless white sweetcorn that is ubiquitous here.
We returned to Quito on the interminable bus. I spent the entire journey in an agony of nausea, seconds from vomiting. The conductor (a different young man) hung out of the open doorway of the bus as we travelled through the suburbs. The bus slowed down every time the driver spotted a group of people and the conductor shouted“Quito? Quito?” hopefully at everyone, touting for custom.
Day Three: Quito
On Sundays, the old town in Quito is closed to traffic. I strolled for several hours in the surprisingly chill, grey weather, climbing one vertiginous street after another and was rewarded for my considerable efforts (my lungs are still straining for oxygen up here) with stunning views of mountains in every direction. This city is like San Francisco on speed, except with huge numbers of policemen and of nuns: both sporting the same navy blue and white colours. “Banana Republic,” I sang quietly to myself, “the black and blue uniforms … police and priests.”
Sunday is also the day they change the guard in the small, pretty, central square of Quito. It is a surprisingly intimate affair: you can get right up close to the guardsmen, who look like old-fashioned lead toy soldiers in their white trousers, black boots and navy blue jackets with gold epaulettes and red cuffs. The ceremony begins with a parade of guards on glossy horses and then of footman with flags on giant staffs. Then they announced, “Rafael Correa, PhD in economics, president of the nation” and the president and vice president and their retinue stepped, Peron and Evita style, out onto the balcony of the presidential palace. We sang the national anthem, which resembles the Argentine anthem in its operatic campy nineteenth-century feel, accompanied by a brass band of servicemen in khakis. A group of veterans, also in khaki with bright red berets, displayed certificates of their military honours to anyone who approached. There were ordinary police in their navy blue uniforms and riot police in brown and mandarine orange gear. There were large groups of schoolchildren: the girls linking arms and giggling, in kilts and navy blue blazers, and the boys slouching with their hands in the pockets of surprisingly formal navy blue suits. After the singing and playing, the officers made some brief formal speeches in a shouty military style with much presenting of arms, clicking of spurred heels and waving of flags. Viva Ecuador! And then, unexpectedly, the brass band broke out into the familiar strains of “Happy Birthday” and we learned that it is the vice president’s birthday today. After the ceremony, people milled around in the square. A large group of pro-presidential supporters stood on the steps of the municipal palace, waving flags and singing loud socialist songs, while next to them a group of black guys flanked a large banner which declared Proud to be African-Ecuadorian. We are the crucible of the nation.
Day Four: Mindo
Mindo is “a green thought in a green shade”—a profusion of leaves: pennate, pinnate, heart-shaped. There are ferns as tall as I am at full unfurl and tiny, frothy mosses. The tree-filled slopes below us alternate between shallow dips and vertiginous gorges extending as far as the eye can see. I feel as though I am in a moist, green womb, spotted with occasional tiny red flowers.
This morning, I woke up in the cold darkness before sunrise to a noisy croaky frog chorus, brekekek koax koax. I followed a nature guide’s pool of torchlight through the forest to a hide near a lek, from whence we watched the Andean cock of the rock (Rupicola peruvianus) perform his courtship dance before a jury of his female peers: sexual selection in live action. We were close enough to hear the wingbeats and the croaky saw-like call and to catch glimpses of plumage—bright scarlet striped with black and white—as the cockerels jiggled around on their branches, half-obscured by leaves, shaking a tail-feather at their prospective mistresses. Then, though the sunny morning, we followed the guide up and downhill, as she pointed out flycatchers—delightful, cheeky yellow puffballs—and black-billed toucans.
In the afternoon, as always here, the rains began. We sat out on the covered patio at the hostel, by a curtain of yellow, brown and orange hanging orchids, and watched dozens of hummingbirds greedily chugging down nectar down at the feeder: the hummingbirds here are variously petrol blue and iridescent green; dull brown and moss green; jet black; and black with a snowy breast. Beyond them, we could see a racing river and hills half-shrouded in a smoky mist.
Day Five: Milpe Bird Park
The forest here is, if possible, even more densely green and soggier than in Mindo. The trees immediately bordering the narrow, muddy path, covered in slippery leaf litter, look solid to the touch but crumble away like biscuits dunked in coffee under my touch. On my walk this morning, I was greeted by a loud cawing cry and spotted the first of several roadside hawks, curved of beak and with the broad-shouldered, no-necked look that always reminds me of a nightclub bouncer. The forest, like Caliban’s isle, is full of voices: bird song of every kind, the high-pitched sawing whine of crickets and the metallic sounds of frog calls. I saw climbing woodpeckers, puffy flycatchers and many yellow-bellied tanagers. Two bronze-winged green parrots darted out of a tree as I passed. Huge owl-eyed butterflies fluttered down from the treetops and in a clearing I spotted—to my delight—an armadillo snuffling in the undergrowth like an armoured pig. The leaves underfoot were alive with leaf-cutter ants carrying their neat green burdens on their backs and two-tone millipedes, orange and brown. And also with a leaping mass of creatures, which I took for beetles at first until, bending down to examine them more closely, I saw that they were teeny tiny frogs, ranging from size from a little fingernail to a large freckle. Most were dull coloured, but a few sported toxic-looking yellow blotches.
I reached the shelter of the gift shop as the afternoon rains began, and waited with an over-affectionate dog who persistently tried to mate with me—whining, licking at my ears, and thrusting a shiny pink penis at my shin—until a local taxi arrived and took me to lunch at the Rio Blanco Mirador. This restaurant on the main street, unassuming from the front, has a paradiasical garden with a dramatic view of a deeply wooded canyon. The view quickly disappeared beneath smoky clouds and driving rain, but the birds remained: the nectar feeders were buzzing with dozens of hummingbirds and tanagers. My favourites are the tiny iridescent blue and green ones, but the large duller green, long-billed species is more aggressive. As I drank my passion fruit juice and ate vegetable soup and fried plaintains, I watched them, rooting for the underdog hummingbirds. On a tree stump, someone had laid out split bananas, which grey and green parrots were fighting over.
Day Six: Mindo
Mindo is one big adventure playground for adults. I went ziplining above the forest canopy, accompanied by hawks overhead; I visited the butterfly farm to watch the giant owl-eyed butterflies emerge from their cocoons; I slid down a long, curvy outdoor slide into a freezing river at the Nambillo waterfall. Most fun of all, I drank caipirinhas with two local employees from the El Quetzal chocolate factory and cafe.
I counted seven toucans today: and one of them let me watch him for a long time from close up as he sidled along a low branch, turning his head from side to side to survey the scene before flapping away noisily with whirring wings. Against the green of the forest, they looked like hand-coloured images in a Hipstamatic print with a green filter on or like cartoon characters filmed against a real-life backdrop with their glossy black and Sleeping-Beauty-scarlet feathers and their marker-pen-yellow beaks.
Day Seven: Papallacta
On the bus to Papallacta, we passed some affluent suburbs south of Quito and I caught sight of my first Ecuadorian McDonald’s, followed in swift succession by Kentucky Fried Chicken, Payless Shoe Store and a Chevrolet dealer. The ugly strip malls we passed could have been in Anywhere, USA. A record number of vendors got on the bus today in quick succession and we listened to many lengthy sob stories in delivered in the beautiful soft-voiced local Spanish. “Please buy my chocolate bars, only five for a dollar, or my four children will starve,” one lady urged. After a while, the strip malls ended and we were climbing, climbing, climbing, climbing, until the bus finally let us off at a dusty corner stop, crowded with schoolchildren, and we walked up the steep main Papallacta street, which was eerily quiet. A truck stopped for us and took us up the further climb to the Termas de Papallacta hotel and spa, where we deposited our things in the lockers and went straight into the warm water.
Although we are only minutes of a degree from the equator here, the place reminds me of Scotland: the same slate grey smoky clouds; the same chilly pinpricks of drizzle against my face; the same lowering mountains. But the mountains here are much, much higher than in Scotland—dauntingly high—and thickly forested.
I stayed in the spa for a long time: watching the drops of rain bounce off the surface of the water, forming tiny peaks and craters like miniature meterorites, the needle-like peaks turning to thick nipples as the rain grew heavier. I had the spa to myself except for a single half hour in which two women entered the water in stripy swimsuits and huddled in a corner, talking incessantly, like two exotic stripy aquatic birds. I stayed until my toes and fingers were wrinkly sultanas, until I could feel a pleasant woozy faintness from low blood pressure, until the two stripy-swimsuit women had long gone, until the hawks were no longer circling overhead and finally until the pool man came to clean up for closing time. And now I am watching driving rain outside the window; clutching my head like a ham actor from time to time to try to ease my altitude headache.
Day Eight: Papallacta
This afternoon, I trekked up to a lake in the Coyambe-Coca national park. The path led alongside a foamy, noisy river with dense vegetation on either side: tulip trees with their scalloped red and yellow flutes; a tree I have yet to identify with lovely fingerfulls of narrow candle-shaped, dip-dyed red and yellow flowers some of which peeled open like slender bananas to reveal pornographic fuzzy yellow stamens; and the lovely big white lillies that are everywhere here, their rims folded neatly back like linen napkins on a wedding table. Every tree here is thickly bearded with pale greenish grey lichens and hung all over with giant bouquets of bromeliads. The path climbed beyond the river, up a snaky, disused stony road. The loaf-shaped mountains looked as though they were steaming and the sky was a uniform, threatening slate colour. I was reminded of the stylised mountains—also thickly wooded and mist-shrouded—on the cover of my dogeared childhood copy of The Hobbit, which always made me long for hiking and adventures. I climbed for around an hour and a half continuously, covering a height difference of 500m (I reached a signpost at one point which told me that I was now 3,800m, around 12,500 feet, above sea level). I passed several groups of llamas in their white, dark brown and black furry dreadlocks. They stopped and stared with their heavily-fringed Bambi eyes as I passed and turned their flexible necks, snake like, to look after me as I retreated from them. In the thin air, I was panting and light-headed and my nose and ears stung from the cold. As the walk progressed, the vegetation suddenly began to look very Scottish indeed: I reached a high plateau of marshy ground, full of tufty grass and shrubby yellow-flowered bushes: hillocky and dotted with algae-splodged shallow lakes. The air was noisy with the repetitive high-pitched call of an unidentified bird, while small dark birds flew low across the path in front of me. Just as I had rounded the first lake, the rain which had been threatening started to come down and I turned back. And now for some hot water on my cold, sore body.
Day Nine: Papallacta
With the charming, chatty local guide, Angel, as a companion, I took advantage of the sunny afternoon weather to climb to the top of a small nearby peak (3,900m above sea level—a climb of 600m from the Papallacta springs). The lovely thing about mountain walks is the way they are layered: the way the scenery and vegetation changes dramatically from one level to the next. We walked first along the banks of a river, past meadows thick with clover and with the oak-shaped leaves of an unfamiliar native shrub, which gave off a strong lemony scent.
Next, we entered a green tunnel and climbed up through a forest of bamboo, eucalyptus and flaky-barked native carob trees. Big bunches of leopard-spotted brown and yellow orchids hung across the path and smaller orchids abounded, too: modest burgundy flowers shyly ensconced in the centre of much larger dark green leaves and teeny tiny palest canary yellow orchids, so small that I could only just make out the familiar orchidian forms by squiting at them from close range. I suddenly realised that something was different about this forest, after the cloud forests of Mindo: I wasn’t wiping fine, sticky skeins of spider webs off my face every few minutes. There are few flying insects at this altitude and nothing for the arachnids to eat, I suspect. Instead, I was wiping my own nose, dripping with cold snot.
Soon, we emerged from the forest to above the tree line. Here, we passed concentric-ringed spiky succulents: some were intact and others had had their leaves scattered and littered around messily and their tender hearts ripped out and eaten. Next to those meal remains—which reminded me of the plates of human diners after eating artichokes—were tell-tale pale greenish-grey turds and a few fresh paw marks, the signs of the local spectacled bears. I spotted a single hummingbird, its beak longer than its body, moving from one tiny red flower to another. The final stretch of the walk was tough. My breath grew jagged and my quadriceps muscles ached as we scrambled upwards. But at the top we were rewarded with swift-moving clouds which kept clearing to reveal lovely views of the town, the surrounding mountains and the huge glassy local lake.
As always, the return journey was almost improbably fast, with gravity to speed us along. But it was a slippery path and, despite Angel’s Good King Wenceslas duties, I slid down onto my arse on a couple of occasions. I also quickly realised why he walked with his hands stuffed into his pockets in seeming insouciance. When I slipped, I instinctively grasped at the tufts of grass on either side of us, only to find them surprisingly sharp. My fingers bled profusely from several paper cut-like gashes which stung later later when I entered the soothing hot water down at the thermal baths.
Day Ten: Quito
Today, the streets were full of people clutching large bouquets of foliage adorned with the occasional single rose or bird of paradise flower. We caught up with the main procession as they passed through the presidential square. They were headed by Franciscan monks in their traditional dark brown robes and five women, dressed as different representations of the Virgin Mary, in bulky costumes festooned with shiny fabric and cardboard wings and rays of light, so that they looked halfway between the familiar icons of Medieval altar triptyches and girls at a quinceañera fiesta. They held serious-faced china doll Jesuses in their arms.
We followed them through the streets of the Old Town for a short distance, walking a few rows behind a group of cornet players. I joined in with the extremely catchy and repetitive songs. Finally, we reached a stage, where there were brief speeches and the Virgins lined up to be admired in their costumes. The Virgin of Guadalupe, the most popular of the Maries, looked like a giant green burrito in her cape. (She wasn’t carrying a Christ child since, in religious iconography, her Baby Jesus stands beneath her and supports her feet, improbably, in his chubby little hands.) The monks consulted their mobile phones a great deal and then there was more communal singing, including salsa music with Catholic lyrics. Then the sun came out and everyone unfurled umbrellas to shade themselves, obscuring my view. At that point, we two heathen onlookers decided to leave.
Day Eleven: Quito
In uncharacteristically bright sunshine, Dale and I took the teleférico (cable car) up into the mountains surrounding Quito. It was a disappointingly smooth ride to me—I had hoped for more vertiginous thrills—but with stunningly impressive vistas of the city and suburbs: a Legoland of pastel-coloured houses scattered over a riverless valley and surrounded on all sides by a continuous range of mountains, with a cone-shaped volcano in the distance. With its snowy summit, the volcano looked as if icing had been poured over a cake and had dripped unevenly down the sides before solidifying.
Above the city, at 4,100m (13,500ft) above sea level, you reach a land of deep ravines, dramatic views, craggy, snowy peaks that look deceptively close, tufty grass and muddy paths. We walked past the tiny, hooded yellow flowers of wild potato plants, purple wildflowers and thistle-like bushes with fuzzy-headed peachy-orange flowers the exact colour of Munchi’s rosehip ice cream (fellow Buenos Aires residents will know what shade that is). My lungs were straining slightly and I felt as though someone had cinched in my rib cage and left less space inside. After only a kilometre of climbing, we stopped to rest and swig from twin Coke bottles. And, suddenly, there overhead, flying above us in a pair and swooping down so low over the tops of our heads that I flinched, were a pair of condors. As they passed, I looked straight up at daunting wing spans, fierce hooked beaks and razor claws. We watched them glide elegantly and swiftly away but for an hour afterwards they accompanied us, circling the path. After an hour or two of walking, the sky darkened and the rocky volcano in front of us was obscured by the slaty clouds. The air grew chill and fizzy with electricity and hailstones began to fall: split pea-sized opaque white spheres of ice. They looked strangely unreal: like styrofoam or as if there had been a giant wedding and confetti had been scattered everywhere. The path quickly turned into a stream, with muddy, icy banks. My fingers stung from the cold and my nose and eyes hurt from the impact of the tiny frozen missiles. Where my nose jutted out from under my windcheater, it was bombarded by hailstones. It felt like the most characteristically, perfect Ecuadorian day we’d had so far.