Before We Dropped

This footage was shot after our return from dinner that first night in Lima.



I refer, in the video, to flight scheduling. Specifically, Miriam had, during our fine time with the ladies of LAN, noticed both an abundance of domestic airline offices and an advertisement for flights to Cuzco that seemed within the realm of financial possibility. Our plan for the following morning consisted of booking one of these flights and getting the hell out of Lima for three days of Ruins and mountains before returning to fly to Buenos Aires. Nothing to it...

Parque ??

Sorry again for the absence. Summer and whatnot. How about a short film?

Lima Part 2: Boston is not the only great bean town on a coast in the Americas

There's something incredible that happens when travel gives way to accommodation. There's a peaceful lull in the pace of action and a person gets to take a minute to shake themselves in their own flesh and see what time has wrought. For me, that morning in room four of the Stop and Drop hostel in Lima, the results of this assay were greasy, generally under-maintained, and deeply creased with the lines indicative of clothing worn for days as it gradually distorts. Everything I wore peeled-off with a perceptible grip reminiscent of the sensation that one feels in removing thin plastic from food that has been thoroughly packaged, and I recall doing a great deal of stretching, shuddering, yawning and rubbing.

In an attempt to push this reinvigoration regimen to its logical zenith, I gathered all of my necessary artifacts and made my way to the men's bath. The shower was, at first glance and with growing intensity as my investigation continued, an object of profound mystery, and strangeness from showers I had known previously. The bathroom itself was a somewhat dirty, wet-floored location with cubicles formed at odd angles inside a superstructure with ceilings unnecessarily high for its current purpose as communal bathroom.

Unlike the electric fixtures of Quito (which require, at once, both adept maneuvering to find a rate at which water is heated fast enough to provide warmth and wetness simultaneously and an iron will to remain below a stream of water emanating from a cheesy plastic device attached to outlets of both the water and the power systems of a given building by shoddy looking pipe and even shoddier looking wiring that is producing thin wisps smoke and a vague scent of burnt electrical tape) this was a return to water heated elsewhere, presumably by gas, and pumped to many locations on demand. The head of this shower was merely a rounded, metal cap with a single circular opening about half an inch in diameter, and so the shower unleashed what amounted to a warm pee, aimed in a fixed direction, at approximately eye-level. To describe it in words, and think back on it now, it seems nearly impossible to explain the refreshment that such an obviously flawed device, such a vague and degraded facsimile of an idealized form of the shower, provided me with that morning. It was amazing.

Having both bathed and broken fast, we went out into the city to take care of a few things (read: eat), to bask in the pure coastal-ness of everything, and to have some words with the good people at LAN about changing our return date to Lima and making our newly-gotten bus tickets usable. We began with LAN, which was only a few blocks away on a street filled with banks and gigantic gringo restaurants.

I have been having some difficulty reconciling the jokes we made about them at the time, and my overall memory of them as something generally helpful and innocuous into a fitting description of the ladies of LAN offices throughout the continent. By this point in the trip we had had roughly three contacts with computer-manning LAN employees (ladies) during the course of our airport check-ins and in Piura, and now in Lima it became humorously apparent that there was a sort of aesthetic division of labor in play throughout the airline. Women with a blonde dye-job, a particularly flashy style of dress or hair or adornment, and men were placed in positions of flight attendance, whereas, their other homelier comrades, were dressed in the trademark vests and ties of McDonald's management everywhere and made-up to look roughly like Frieda Kahlo with her hair pulled back really tightly.

We entered the office, smiled at the guard, took a number and were amused to find ourselves classed, for the purpose of this interaction, as disabled and our number called at the designated handicapped window. The Friedas also, seemed to chuckle nervously to one another when they noticed us noticing this and talking about it with one another in Spanish. Continuing in this vein we goofed our way through our requests, and managed to get the tickets changed by one day for a mere fifty bucks each. Galapagos was saved for now, we thought, and left the air conditioned office for the hot street again.

Once outside again, we decided that the focus for the rest of that day ought to be Lima, because despite our foiled Nazca hopes, we planned to leave it as soon as we could, and after that day we'd only really have about five days left before our scheduled flight to Buenos Aires.

We strolled in the sun, got some sidewalk fruit, had a conversation with an old man who had augmented his begging routine by adding a young retarded boy who made trinkets and passed them out to everyone in a great and weighty showcase of pathetic generosity, surveyed the nearby parks,

From 2010-02-26

ate some lunch,

From 2010-02-26

and then promptly fell asleep in our room. It was an involuntary but extraordinary six-hour siesta, and afterwards we somehow managed to get more food

From 2010-02-26

before going back to sleep.

Lima - Not Like the Beans

Piura, as I believe I mentioned before, was somewhere around the temperature of melting flesh. The bus station was being vaguely fanned by an air conditioner that was exhausted into the very room that it sought to cool. For some diversion from the wait, we took turns watching the bags while one of us went to the bathroom and tried to cool off by bathing in the sink. To keep the level of stress in the waiting room high, the space was equipped with a television playing a strange talk show, a la the Today show but hosted in part by an Elvis impersonator and a few mischievous muppets, and in the corner several coolers full of refreshing foods and beverages with no one to sell them to the sweating masses.

When the time finally came to board our bus, the procedure was somewhat different from what had been the norm on our previous rides on the continent. After checking our larger bags we were asked to line up and proceed through a vaguely airport-like security line that involved having our bags and ourselves metal-detected and our identification checked against our tickets. Following this, we got settled on the top floor, and were treated to an airline-style video explication of the safety and convenience features to be found on bus. Most of this, as in the case of airline announcements, was really blase. The exception to this boring list of amenities and rules, was the repeated statement that the toilets onboard were for urine only. URINE ONLY. Just urine! Anyone in need of a more realistic bathroom experience was instructed to knock on the door to the drivers' cabin and request a stop, an action which seemed to me to be a clear violation of the "Don't talk to the driver!" policy which was both announced and also posted in a number of places around the bus.

The bus ride was a funny combination of the intense professionalism and robotic ineffectuality of plane flights everywhere and the down-home, personalized style of service that had come to characterize most of our bus trips up to that point. We played a goofy version of bingo that was, apparent to everyone else in the bus (I couldn't resist calling bingo upon actually getting five in a row), blackout only. We were fed a meal of chicken, yellow rice and a lot of other odd crap that was somewhere roughly on par with airline food. We watched a promotional film that contained a ringing bimbo endorsement of the Nazca area of Peru, and was accompanied by a portion of a catholic sermon taken from 60's era Spanish cinema. After this, we watched an overdubbed version of a moody Jonathan Demme film. Hearing the bellowingly overdubbed Spanish words attempt to carry this film with its subtle themes of familial angst, drug abuse, race relations in the United States and the institution of marriage was fascinatingly confusing, and the only time during the trip that a bus line would elect to pit its passengers against such weighty material :-P.

Outside the bus, was an ongoing parade of landscapes reaching from the arid to the verdant and domiciles made of concrete and rebar, ambiguous in their positions on the continuum of new construction to disrepair.

Before the sun went down, Miriam and I spent a good long time poring over our guides and trying to figure out what to do in Peru in the four or five days that we'd be spending there. Because of the state of the sacred valley, and the apparent lack of things curious, ancient and/or beautiful in the Lima area, we decided on a mosey down toward Nazca in hopes of seeing some lines and perhaps some other coastal archaeological sites as well.

As usual, we arrived very early in the morning, overdressed and partially mummified in cool dry bus air. We had found out from one of our maps that our first task of finding the Grupo Ormeno bus terminal and getting tickets back to Quito ought to be an easy one, due to its location of less than one centimeter away from our present location on the map. We got our bags, adjusted ourselves to the heat and weight, and pushed through a throng of taxi drivers to walk along a major highway. After a couple of circles, we got headed in the right direction and arrived at another bus terminal. We bought the tickets and felt a slight monetary sting, and also much relief. As it turned out, we would still have to change our plane flight from Santiago to Lima to make the schedule fit properly.

Miriam went to the bathroom and I sat in the terminal, feeling as tired and dirty as I had up to that point in the trip. My gaze bounced around the room, out of the windows and into the bustle of the roadways surrounding the terminal, and finally up to the large flat television above the counter. We were watching news and, as I looked, the story took on a more urgent tone, a redder color, and more of the screen. A series of images flashed: small planes, desert shots, ambulances, stretchers and finally petroglyphs. The news from Nazca, our latest destination of choice, was "Plane Crash". Our Peru plans had hit another snag, and we were in need of a fresh Lima alternative.

Miriam returned, and I pointed to the screen and let her watch our plans unravel for herself. We got briefly mad, but we were still just way too filthy to be overly caught up in our misfortune. For now, we needed lodging and hot, running water.

Back outside, on the edge of the great thoroughfare of eighteen or twenty lanes, we started the process of taxi haggling, aided by the price quote we'd received from the woman selling bus tickets. The first driver we asked looked back at us, puzzling over this question himself for a good long time. After a few seconds, he agreed and we tossed our stuff into the back of his taxi station wagon, house-painted yellow with boom box speakers wired up in the back. As we entered the cab, I looked around the vehicle to compare it to those we'd seen before and those we were likely to see in the coming weeks. This was the cab in which it dawned on me that none of the cars we'd ridden in were ever holding even a full half-tank of gas. Also, after we re-entered the cab, our driver asked again what our destination was, and then, seeing that we had a map, asked to borrow our map. This man, with his car full of everyday stuff, was playing cabbie for a day. After watching him drive past our street, in what should have been a well-known tourist district, twice, we finally had him pull over to the corner, and walked the final block.

We'd pre-chosen our hostel, on the corner of Berlin & Bellavista,

From 2010-02-26

using the quadruple vector of cheapness, proximity to the bus station at which we'd arrived, its presence in our guidebook and the advertised opportunity to pay with plastic. Aside from those critical features, the Stop and Drop didn't sound like too bad a place. There was, as the ad in our Footprints guide specified, network access, free breakfast, and hot water. We buzzed their door at around 7:30 AM and received a mumble in return as the door opened. The bleary but friendly staff guys, dressed perpetually in pirate, engrish, surfwear, mumbled us through the check-in procedures and we had time to shower before breakfast service began.

From 2010-02-26

After furiously consuming two white rolls, butter, jam and two cups of tea, and making polite conversation with the extremely skinny, middle-aged lady who seemed to be in charge of breakfast every day, sweeping and feeding the roof cat, we left the hostel and, with what must have been by official count our twentieth "second wind" of the bus travel period, went to survey the town, to reschedule our plane tickets, to come up with an alternative to our Nazca outing, to eat food, to check our respective emails and to enjoy life outside a bus.

COMING UP on TrotamundosSA:
1. Video from Lima
2. Our Heroes Match Wits with the Powerful Ladies of LAN
3. God Thwarts More Spectacles
4. Lima is Squeezed for All its Delicious Entertainment Value
5. Miriam and Peter Realize that Since Creating Blog in Cuenca, They Have Neglected to Feed or Clothe it Properly, and Thus They Must Begin to Write In Earnest
6. Indigestion
7. Fuentes Like You Wouldn't Believe!
8. A Blue, Blue Market

Real-time Homecoming and A Hot Day in Piura

Jiggity Jig - April 25, 2010

I'm back in Iowa (likewise, Miriam is back in Pennsylvania). This actually happened about four days ago, but I still haven't quite gotten used to the feeling. The adventure is still warm in my senses and on my limbs. The way to describe this place and its familiar features seems to take the form of only one word, thus far: opulence.
My stomach too seems to be experiencing difficulty understanding what has happened in the last few days. Suddenly the milk is fresh again, not that stuff that will stand forever at room temperature in a box. The cupboards are brimming full with a well-stocked collection of the rare elements that drive tastebuds mad the world over. My guts aren't prepared for this access, and they're letting me know that I must take things slowly.
Anyway, among the opulent features of the life I find myself rejoining is a constant access to the internet, which should be a real boon insofar as the updating of this blog is concerned. So, without dwelling any longer on understanding and telling the concluding portions of this tale, let me continue with our trudge into the depths of Peru.

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We sat, sweating and thumbing through our respective guidebooks (Peru was the only country for which we had afforded this kind of redundancy, hauling both the Footprints 2010 and the Lonely Planet 2008). We had already bought our tickets from Piura to Lima, and were now on an endurance race to kill the many hours that lay between us and our departure time, something like 1800 hrs, in the least unpleasant way. I don't remember exactly what we were looking for in our books, and in fact the search was probably more of a general survey of Peru-bound possibilities, but I do remember at least one thing that we found.

Somewhere in Lonely Planet 2008, I think near the front of the book and perhaps in a section giving some cultural overview of the country to be toured, I ran across a passage warning travelers about a known hazardous time of year for the South America sojourner: Semana Santa. Holy week, the book informed, was a time when all forms of transportation and lodging clogged with use, and also a time when fares were jacked up from sixty to one hundred percent. Unfortunately, for erstwhile Lutherans like myself, holy week is not something that falls on a hard and fast date year after year. Rather, one can find it lurking vaguely in the range of March-April. This, as many of you know, was nearly the entire range of our trip, and a very scary unknown indeed.

We left the bus terminal, each of us carrying all of our possessions once again, and hobbled off through the streets of Piura. We had goals now, and because the sun had not yet reached its zenith we were still confident in our ability to enjoy accomplishing them.

The first problem to be addressed was a lack of food. Our maps of Piura were terrible, and we ended up at a bank first, so Miriam withdrew some Nuevo Soles. As we once again entered the flow of Piura foot traffic, we began to notice that we were still too early in the morning to hope to find food on the street that was not sold in a package. We sat down on some benches in front of a huge church and waited in the shade for half an hour. Now things were beginning to wake up, this must have been around 1000hrs. We located a little place that appeared to do some food and while I ate a jamon y queso, Miriam tried out the first ceviche of Peru, one so memorable for its quality that she would reference it throughout the remainder of our trip. It was a refreshing, albeit not (relatively) cheap desayuno: the ceviche probably cost between three and four dollars.

From 2010-02-25

From there we walked back out to the main plaza and had a look around. Miriam had noticed a tourist information office that had been closed before, adjacent the bank. That office was now open, air conditioned, and likely to know all about Peru's potential diversions and probably the precise dates of Semana Santa this year. We went in and were given what I found to be a completely hypnotic and exhaustive explication of every archaeological site in Peru by a pleasant young woman with a very methodical, rhythmic and soft tone. At one point, during something like the fifth of seven or so maps of different regions of Peru, my head slipped off of my left hand and lurched quite close to the table. After learning about more than a lifetime's worth of Peruvian attractions, we finally had the good sense to ask about the dates of holy week. Which, as it turned out, was scheduled for precisely the time when we would hurriedly revisit this expansive, international road trip on the way to a date with the Galapagos. We left, freaked out about our newfound scheduling debacle, though now equipped with an extensive collection of maps and pamphlets and two fine complimentary ballpoints.

Our next stop: LAN. We crossed the plaza again to investigate the true malleability of the terms and conditions of our South America Airpass. As I recall, we entertained a few ideas about how best to overcome the problems then coming to light in our itinerary. If we were lucky we could just rearrange things to suit this obstacle: shift each flight outright, cut out one leg, add another. If we were less lucky, we supposed, we might have to do something more drastic altogether, such as lose our second stint in Peru altogether and fly directly from Santiago back to Quito. As it turned out, neither of these options was within the range luck afforded. The details of our itinerary had become final once we made our initial flight, and any additions to the trip would fall under the insane pricing schedule that usually applies to foreigners flying under LAN. The best we could hope for was to shift the dates of one flight for a less insane fee, and hope for available buses when the time came.

As we left LAN, worried and somewhat underwhelmed by the apparent inflexibility of our trip, we soon forgot thoughts of our grandiose logistical problems in favor of thoughts such as "Why are we carrying all of our stuff right now?" or "Are we on the surface of the sun?" and, of course, "I know I'll regret saying this but, I wish we were on the damn bus already!" We dragged our under-rested bodies through the streets, almost as though we were pulling dying pack animals (ourselves) through some hellish desert, while onlookers smiled and chuckled, and made me wonder about just how stupid we looked and whether we weren't really that stupid. At that moment, we seemed to me extremely stupid, though a very nice person could probably get away with simply describing us as ridiculously unfortunate or perhaps retarded.

Not wanting to melt, and seeing few options aside from pushing on, we bought water, checked our email, and then headed for an ice cream shop. One great thing about traveling with Miriam is that ice cream has an almost cinematic ability to save the day.

From 2010-02-25

This ice cream experience was, thankfully, no exception to the physics of Miriam, and the good vibe carried us back to the stifling bus station, and all through the end of the wait and the process of boarding. And that's where the next chapter begins: on the road to Lima.

Addendum: Participant Observers in Ecuadorian Border Controls

While we got off quite easily in our dealings with the on-board customs police, the family behind us had a rather stickier encounter. Peter's previous post analyzed the behavioral gestures of those involved, but the details of what was going on add some dimension to the politics of the situation.

The first hint of trouble came when the family produced their Colombian passports.

The exchange between the police and the family, represented by the father, went, more or less, as follows:

Policeman 1 to Policeman 2 (aside): They're Colombian.

Policeman 2 to Policeman 1: Yes.

P. 1 to P. 2: They're Colombians in Ecuador traveling to Peru!

P. 2 to P. 1: Yes they are.

P. 1 to Father: We need you to get out of the bus, get all your suitcases, and be inspected.

Father to Police: No.

P. 2: What do you mean, no? We have the authority here, and you should respect our authority.

Father: No, we're not getting up. It's the middle of the night.

P. 1 (getting very angry): I am telling you, you have to be inspected!

Father: Listen, we live in Ecuador. We have friends here.

P.1: That doesn't matter right now.

Father: Well, we're not getting up.

This went on even longer, until the police simply gave up and got off the bus, and everyone tried to go back to sleep.

Unfortunately, Colombians in Ecuador are often stigmatized. There are many Colombian refugees who come across the northern border into Ecuador, to escape the violence between the government, FARC and the ELN, and the U.S. government and/or in search of the [relatively] more stable economy and work available in Ecuador (check out Ecuador en Cifras for the official census data). According to the Colombian Organizacion Internacional para las Migraciones, in 2005 there were about 80,000 legal Colombian emigrants to Ecuador. Numbers can only have gone up since then. Of course, for every one Colombian who goes through government channels to legally immigrate, there are a few coming in under the radar. Just like any other country facing an influx of immigrants, Ecuadorian citizens are unhappy about the possibility that Colombians might take their jobs, and, to make matters worse, Colombians have gained (if not necessarily earned) a reputation for being particularly violent. The family behind us got lucky--it's easy enough to imagine a situation in which such bravado in the face of a customs official would not go over so well.
And in Peru, you're guilty until proven innocent...will our heroes escape?

Further Along The Road to Piura

After getting stamped and having brief conversations at two border crossing stations on opposite sides of Peru and Ecuador in the middle of the night we sat back down and expected a calm ride to Piura, a place I estimated to be between three and four hours down the road. It was around 2:30 AM, I thought, and finally consciousness slipped away, taking all my discomfort and cares with it.

I have had, since arriving on this new continent, a seemingly unending stream of extremely vivid, cinematic, adventurous and random dreams, replete with numerous cameo appearances from grade school classmates, camp friends, family members, pets and pretty much anyone from any group with which I've ever associated, especially my closest friends. Many have been lucid, but just as many have been so convincing, intense and engaging as to remind me of the handful of landmark dreams whose memory lingers from my youth. For example, I've had no less than five flying dreams in the space of less than two months. It's been fantastic, and I hope that this trend doesn't end immediately upon my return to the states. I don't remember exactly what I was dreaming as a drifted liminally on the bus, but I do remember that as I broke through the surface of real-time light and sound of the bus ride, I was deeply engaged with some otherworldly task and extremely reticent to use my tired eyes to see, my dry throat to speak, and my wrecked neck to focus my senses.

Harsh light and the prosody of assholes, something that is suprisingly transcendent of particular languages - at least within the spectrum of latin and germanic tongues - penetrated my sleep. Miriam was the one awake this time: "We need passports again, I think" she said, and prodded me back to life. I grabbed my documents and handed them to the two uniformed "Aduanas" (customs) men now making trouble on our bus. We had stopped again, this time for a seemingly random inspection, and after explaining that we were on the way to Lima, our interrogation terminated. The two men, each with baton and gun protruding garishly from heavy nylon belts and each wearing a thick vest with neon lettering that increased their chest sizes to the proportions of crazed roosters, now moved on to the family behind us.

As regular readers of this blog will recall, this was the family with two babes in arms who had taken to the feel of my hair, and had created something dreadlock-like on the back of my head as I fought to avoid water and create conditions that would support sleep. And now, I looked back at them, and despite the unfettered curiosity of the infants, they were a really cute family, and trying their best to make a good trip out of the worst bus seats available. Something, however, seemed to be not quite up to snuff about this little group of four, as far as the border enforcers were concerned, and as the father handed them his passport, things began to get tense. Miriam, I'm sure, had a better idea of what was actually being said, and will hopefully make her own account of these events known, but from my perspective, the police quickly took a situation in which the man spoke too casually toward them and escalated it into one in which they would instruct the man, and thus everyone else in this confined space on the importance of "respect". Things got testy, necks were strained, poses struck, voices raised, baton-handles grasped, and just when it seemed like it might get ugly, the police decided that all that these precursive gestures and hints of violence were sufficient for the time being, and the encounter wrapped up with an uneasy conviviality. It was truly Cartmanesque, and they overdid it, as if to say "What? You didn't really think we were mad did you? You didn't really think we'd use all these handy implements of destruction?"

The officers sauntered out of the bus and we got on our way. Welcome to Peru.

My dream did not return so easily after this, and the air conditioner had again begun to empty its constantly condensing bowels on we window-seated travelers. I looked out into the dark at the occasional ramshackle assemblages and sometimes more expansive structures of steel and concrete, unfinished modernist projects from bygone eras and derelict initiatives for housing development. The contrast from Quito and Cuenca was stark, and, thus far, I'd still felt little resonance with the memories I carried from my time in Southern-California-like Santiago or the multi-colored hillsides of Valparaiso. In time I drifted away again into the still-dark and dusty countryside.

The fourth or fifth awakening of the day came in Piura, some two or three hours later. This time we found our bus backing through a horde of people into a strange building unlike any bus terminal I had ever experienced before. The bottom floor of an old building had been converted into a very high-ceilinged garage-like enclosure, with a weird network of cages to help keep newly-arrived passengers free from a horde of taxi and moto-taxi (the three-wheeled conversion vehicle, like a rickshaw driven by some kind of engine between a chainsaw and a moped) eager to help with transportation, money changing and probably many other useful services. It was a skillion degrees(centigrade), as we retrieved our bags from under the bus, and we were immediately latched onto by a slender man pressing hard for a chance to be our taxi driver. Multiple attempts to get a moment to think and converse about what our next move ought to be by saying, "Perhaps," "Give us a minute," and a host of other brush-offs could not shake this tenacious fellow, and eventually, after seeing that he seemed quite clean, was asking for a fair but appropriately inflated gringo price, we gave in and followed him through the mass out into the street.

We got into the cab, somewhat nervously, and I watched as our host fastened his seatbelt and made the sign of the cross, both of which seemed terribly prudent and somehow reassured me. He then drove us, maniacally through a series of back streets in which we could have been gutted and robbed twenty times over, to a weird intersection where a man he described as his friend changed 10 dollars into roughly twenty-eight nuevo soles. This was good, our driver noted, don't change too much money, don't flash a big wad around here. We soon arrived at the Cruz del Sur bus terminal, from which we hoped to catch a bus that day onward to Lima, and paid our driver about a little over two dollars with our new soles. We had made it, and he thanked us for our patronage and gave us each a folded piece of paper full of verses about Jesus. Apparently we'd lucked into a real sweetheart of a cabbie, and he wanted us to know it for sure.

Miriam and I sat down in the waiting room of Cruz del Sur. It was all of 7 AM, and our bus would not be leaving until the late afternoon. We each carried two large bags, and were not looking forward to passing this day in the heat with this sort of luggage. For a few minutes, at least, we sat and talked about what was ahead.

Until next time, all the best from Portoviejo.

Buses and Borders: Parts one and two of Infinity

The blog has once again fallen off, and just when we were about to actually go somewhere. Let me pick it back up.

So, we got out of Cuenca, narrowly missing a downpour with all our stuff. Once on the bus, Miriam went to sleep and I tried to distract myself from discomfort. It was already after dark, and this bus was worse than the one previous for several reasons. First, it was the sort of bus with seats that cut off my legs at the shins and also contained a bar that dug painfully into the lower vertebrae. Since this ride I have ridden on seemingly countless buses of this sort and have developed, if not techniques for making such rides more physically bearable, then at least a callous resilience and resignation toward this cheap, essential transportation. But at that point I was still green, still shocked and still not used to the sleeplessness that accompanies multi-day bus trips. Additionally, I was having trouble with the triad of windy road, abrupt accelleration and abrupt braking that seems to characterize the driving techniques of South American busmen. I was quite nauseous, and quickly popped one of the generic dramamine that Miriam's dad had been kind enough to give me on our last night in Philadelphia. I hoped very much to begin experiencing the only listed side effect: drowsiness. Finally, my personal discomfort and mental anguish were further complicated by the fact that our bus was the sort that is constantly stopping to pick up and drop off folks going only a short distance, preventing me from draping my legs over empty seats or sneaking them into the aisle to stretch my knees.
After several hours, our bus stopped, and the six or so bleary-eyed travelers still on board were ushered into a small waiting room. The temperature outdoors had shot up roughly thirty degrees farenheit during our descent from the altitude, the humidity was off the charts, and the waiting room was being kept at around freezing and was filled with processed dry air. We had no idea what was going on. We were still in Ecuador, but were changing buses for some reason. We managed to catch something like the last twenty minutes of a remade version of Flight of the Phoenix dubbed in Spanish. Surely an odd thing to behold. Miriam fell asleep again, and then our next bus, this time a double decker (the first one we had seen up to this point) with the characteristic arrangement of Semi-Cama top floor, and Cama/Super-Cama bottom floor arrived. Miriam and I managed to get seats together in the second to last row of the top floor, by prodding some tired-looking eastern-European looking fellows who were taking up two seats each. This bus, like the room that preceded it, was also kept at a temperature that was colder than any chilled beverage on the continent and as Miriam again became somnambulent I began to contemplate murdering the two children in sitting behind me whose mother seemed to find it cute that they enjoyed playing with my hair.
Eventually, things settled down until I started to feel large quantities of water pouring on me fromt he ceiling above my seat. The air conditioner was taking a very cold piss on my chest and stomach, and I moved my coat to direct as much of the water as possible toward the floor. Looking up the row, I took some comfort in seeing others in window seats on both sides of the aisle rousing, sputtering, failing to stop the flow of water out from their respective vents, and then pursuing similar drainage countermeasures to my own. This went on for what seemed like a long time, and then suddenly the lights came on. People began to stumble out of the bus, and I woke up Miriam.
For those who have not had the pleasure of waking a sleeping Miriam, let me tell you that it can be unpleasant in the best of circumstances, but when she has not slept sufficiently the process is like defrosting a block of ice that one knows to contain an angry giant. Upon being poked and nudged awake she glared up at me and said, greatly exhasperated, "What's going on? Why are you all wet?"

"It looks like we're going to Peru or something, and the air conditioner has been peeing on me. I think we're going to need our documents, but no one has said anything, and so I really have no clue." As it has since become clear, we were on the Ecuadorian side of the border crossing on the road to Tumbes. We stumbled out into the hot sticky night, passports in hand, looking dumbly around as people got into a couple of lines leading to a little building with men changing money all around it.

Miriam was not impressed. "What are we doing? Are we in line? Why aren't we in line?" A series of questions came from her tired, scrunchy face, without much hope for being answered. I, for my part, was now well into day two of sleeplessness, and had been uncomfortable and listless long enough to have entered a state of trancelike stupor. I was more or less completely lost, but also somehow deeply, serenely, unworried. People did this sort of thing every day, and most of the gringos we had met were much more obtuse and had much less Spanish in their heads than us, I thought to reassure myself. We hobbled along in line, received our stamps and got back on the bus, thinking perhaps that this was the end. Twenty minutes later we did it all again for the Peruvians, and again thought this was the end....

So, here in the real world (Porto Viejo, Ecuador) it's lunchtime. This will have have to continue at a later time.

Food, Food, Food

So, I really like eating. And I spend much of each day dreaming about the food I might presently, or some time in the distant future, be eating. It therefore seems only fair that I attempt to channel some of this enthusiasm into explaining some of the exciting delicious items we get to consume down here.

Obviously, out of all the cuisines floating around South America, I am most familiar with Ecuadorian/Northern Andean. So in Quito, I had some very specific cravings that needed to be fulfilled, and some old haunts to visit to do it.

One of my favorite places to eat in the Mariscal is Kallari, especially for breakfast. It's run by a sustainable indigenous cooperative based in the Ecuadorian Amazon. They make delicious delicious dark chocolate, which is awesome 1) because it can be really hard to find decent chocolate around here sometimes, and 2) because although Ecuador is home to some of the best cacao in the world, most large-scale chocolate production isn't controlled by Ecuadorians. The Ecuadorian beans get sent elsewhere to be processed, packaged, etc., and then the chocolate has to be imported back into Ecuador, and they don't really get much out of the profits. Kallari is really exciting because they grow, harvest, produce, and sell their own stuff. And it's really good.

Anyway, their little cafe in Quito has these great breakfast deals, which always create this horrible dilemma: you can get hot chocolate made with their homegrown stuff kind of melted into hot milk, or you can get juice. And you have to pick.

Juice is maybe the very best part of Ecuadorian food. They have about a zillion fruits to choose from, and all the juice is fresh-squeezed, and it's just amazingly good. And you can get juice made out of strawberries,

which Peter did, and it's in that gigantic glass. Just think about how many strawberries got mushed to make that. Yum. Also we got some standard USA breakfasty items, which is somewhat of a rare thing. Most South Americans eat breakfast of rolls and jam, or sometimes cheese, and instant coffee or tea.

Besides empanadas, which I insisted on eating for pretty much every other meal, what I really couldn't leave Quito without was locro de queso. Soups are another of my favoritist aspects of Ecuadorian cuisine, and locro is my favorite of all the soups. It's kind of a creamy potato soup with chunks of queso fresco (cheese) and potato, and with big ol' slices of avocado on top. I made Peter and Dan go on a locro hunt with me, with excellent results:

Seriously, so good. It's over there on the right. You can also see some empanadas, fried pockets with pretty much whatever you want stuffed inside. The one in front of Dan is an empanada de morocho, which means that the outside is made with morocho, a kind of maize. The red stuff in that little bowl in the center of the table is ají, spicy sauce that's often homemade, and unique to each eatery. Way better than ketchup.

Cuencafied: Or, How to Kill a Day in Southern Ecuador With Luck and Pluck

In our last episode the infant travelers had made it from one city onto a bus. There had been excitement, drama, and loss of sleep, but none to compare with what lay ahead.

Eventually, the bus stopped, Miriam was poked and prodded awake, and we found ourselves in an alley clutching our worldly posessions. The time was something like 6:30 AM, though it was around this point in the trip that we realized neither of us had thought to bring a proper timepiece, and all speculations on the subject would henceforth have to rely on information gathered from the world, or the triangulation of rough times from our respective cameras and iPods. The weather in our new temporary home was hotter than what we had left, and we gazed, dazed, slowly around the alley for approximately ten or fifteen seconds before three new and urgent conversations presented themselves for immediate response.

Our new friends were taxi drivers, and they weren´t interested in waiting for a whole lot of chit-chat, offering all kinds of helpful information and reasons why taxis were essential to our well-being at that instant. I was content to stand like a mannequin and let the sound of their voices splash off of my greasy bus face, and thankfully Miriam, in her glacial state of consciousness, had the good sense to turn to the nearest non-taxi driving person, a little old lady, and ask what a ride to the center of town ought to cost. The quote we received was a hard-driving old lady bargain (something like $2), and it calmed down our taxi friends, one of whom eventually bit.

We slid into a cab adorned with some prayer beads and a little sombrero/flag hanging from the passenger side sun-visor emblazoned with some kind of clear reference to Mexico. Miriam, waking up, and perhaps wanting to to endear us to the driver we were underpaying, asked him pleasantly "So, are you from Mexico?"

"No, I´m from here", he grunted.

Fortunately for all concerned, it turned out that we were not far from the center of Cuenca, and we soon arrived, paid, and slumped down in a beautiful plaza full of monuments, adjacent a couple of cathedrals and still nearly empty of people.

From 2010-02-24

From 2010-02-24

For a few minutes, we floundered. We were still far from Peru, and this situation had to be addressed. However, Cuenca seemed to be a pretty swell town, with more than its fair share of old and new stuff to look at, and hopefully some decent food to eat. We started to wander, deciding at first to take a look around and then try to get back to some kind of bus location to purchase tickets and continue south. Our wandering did not last long. Clearly, we were going to die of whatever kills donkeys and sherpas if we continued to lug around all the silly trash we´d brought to wear and tinker with. So, we started searching the streets for a kind looking hostel that might let us stow our packs for the day for the low, low price of nothing.

On our first try, we succeeded: not at the hostel we tried, but in a neighbor´s hostel/house attic. We happily threw everything we had into some lady´s upstairs storage space and set off to eat avocados and chips along the town´s river. It was glorious. For the rest of the day, we lived up Cuenca. We took videos of our first real experience with the cheap mid-day phenomenon known as the "Menu" (a series of posts that will arrive at some point, I promise), looked at old buildings,

From 2010-02-24

got the lay of the town,

From 2010-02-24

took buses to buy bus tickets,

From 2010-02-24

killed time planning for Peru,

From 2010-02-24

visited some fine museums,

From 2010-02-24

and even created this blog and uploaded the first post from one of their sluggish but cheap internet cafes.

And then, in accordance with the oft-described cyclicity of time, we died (got on another bus) and began our journey toward a new life in Peru, albeit not without drama in utero (Random bus switch followed by closely BORDER CROSSING @ 2AM). Those, of course, are stories for later posts.

Goodnight from a deeply structurally-cracked balcony overlooking the Plaza de Armas in Santiago. Cross your fingers, and try not to think of aftershocks.

Lameness, then Redemption!

I. Lameness

Okay, so we already have a little preliminary, excuse-making, caveat section here at the very top of the blog, but by my watch (an artifact that I do not own) it has been a ridiculous amount of time since we posted anything here, and it's beginning to look as if we've faked the whole thing and are still somewhere between the hotel and JFK painstakingly photoshopping ourselves into other people's vacation pictures scavenged from google images. Thus, here I am, dear reader, to assure one and all that this is not the case, and to stir things up with a shiny new post.

The problem with posting is not currently a lack of material, as we have been scribbling things more or less ferociously at quite respectable intervals into our respective notebooks. The problem is even conceptualizing the difference between where we are now and where we were when last something was posted, not that that date has any particular correspondence to the space-time coordinates of what was actually posted about.

Also, something must be said regarding our current proximity to the singularity. Remember how in 2007 TIME magazine made "You" the person of the year thanks to the rise of a fancy little service allowing every bit of video anyone ever shot to be uploaded, indexed and compared by everyone? We are dreadfully far away from anything like this video+internet phenomenon, we are practically dialing up, we are tantamount to climbing the highest hill available in our given location (in Buenos Aires this would mean taking an elevator to the top of a large building) and morse coding these entries home via laser pointer. Therefore, much of the really tasty meat of the vacation (forgive me, I've been eating way too much grassfed beef), the video archive, will remain unseen perhaps until we return. Something to look forward to.

I believe when last you were spoken to, our story took place somewhere in Ecuador, and our physical presence was already two countries past that in Argentina. We are still in Argentina, and have a couple more days before we head off toward what I can only think to describe as an uncomfortable disaster tour of Chile, providing it does not simply slough off into the Pacific in the next few hours. I'm sure we'll have a good six days.

II. Redemption

Directly following the events described in previous installations of TrotamundosSA.blogspot.com, we spent another day in Quito. Miriam and I rose, somewhat groggy from a late-in-the-evening conversation fueled by not small amounts of cheap beer, packed and waited for friendly co-traveler Dan to return from some mildly dehumanizing bit of national, paper-gathering, bureaucratic nonsense. Apparently the Ecuador model for these sorts of goings-on is designed to function something like a scavenger-hunt with extremely vague goals and extremely rigid and unpredictable windows of opportunity, and after something like four hours, we paid Dan's share and checked out, hoping that he would eventually make it back to the neighborhood. Which he did, having completely failed to obtain the particular bits of paper necessary to appease the great mechanistic god of international relations.

To compensate for this upset, we got some delicious foods

From 2010-02-23

including the first corn that I have really enjoyed in years (choclo), the weirdest and most erratically filled tamale I've ever tasted, and some downright panaceic mate de coca. Bolstered by our meal, we shared a little internet time and then parted ways. Dan headed out to try to find a peanut butter sandwich or something and Miriam and I began our quest to find buses to Peru.

And that's pretty much how the day went, looking for tickets, deciding that said tickets were far too expensive, searching for different tickets, more direct routes, better border crossings, etc. Eventually, roughly two things happened. We discovered that all the buses were pretty much the same, all the routes were pretty much comparable and all the prices were pretty much what we were going to have to pay, so we opted for a bus that would get us out of town at 10 PM and take us as far as Cuenca.

We still had one social activity left in fair Quito, and that was a late lunchish gathering involving the SIT professors from Miriam and Dan's program: Fabian and Siena. This was held at a little middle-eastern joint near the Mariscal, and was thoroughly pleasant, though not as tasty as our brunch.

After this late almuerzo we headed to the bus station to wait, people watch, and catch snippets of overdubbed Big Daddy. Adam Sandler's overdubbed voice is a goofy thing to behold, and they really can't manage to adequately translate his nasaly humor into the big booming voice of the Spanish-speaking, leading actor. Here's a picture of a lady wearing some really creepy jeans in the bus terminal:

From 2010-02-23

After strolling out to eat a most anemic hotdog, largely a pretext for using a bathroom for free, we sat some more, and then tried with increasing exasperation to figure out which bus we were supposed to board for Cuenca. Somehow, magic, luck, and determination swirled together, and poof we were aboard. Miriam snored gently by my side as I watched dubbed Anaconda (a film which is really better this way), contemplated just how low I'd have to amputate my legs in order to continue to travel by bus for the rest of the trip, and read the guidebook entry on deep vein thrombosis....

More to follow!

And for those of you interested in reading a blog that is updated regularly and with nauseating enthusiasm and hilarity, check out: potpied.blogspot.com

Getting There

I started reading Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express, which opens with a rant about how annoying it is that all travel narrative only begins once the destination has already been reached, when often the journey there is equally as good a story. Inspired by this, I though I'd share a bit of our dilapidated first steps toward overseas adventuring.

My parents drove us up to NYC so we could easily catch our flight out of JFK the next day, since it left early in the morning and we needed to be there two hours earlier. They told us they'd wake us up about half an hour before the shuttle to the airport left, so we could say our goodbyes and all that. Peter set an alarm in our room just in case, and in the morning we were woken up by scratchy music playing out of the hotel's clock radio. We lay around for a while waiting for my parents to come knock on the door, but since we only had a few minutes to get ready we decided to pack up our stuff. No knock. With five minutes to go before the shuttle left, we went across the hall and knocked on their door, but there was no answer. I started banging on the door, and finally there were sounds of smashing around and bumping things over inside their room. A minute later, two very disheveled and sleepy parents opened the door (pretty sheepishly), having forgotten to wake up at all. Luckily, we had time to say goodbye before sprinting off to catch our shuttle.

We arrived at JFK, and already in the LAN check-in line we stuck out. Most of the people on the two a.m. flights to were South Americans going home or to visit family. One man in line in front of us leaned over to ask us about where we were going, and when we said we were headed to Quito, told us it was really cold there this time of year. This was pretty odd to hear coming from anyone who had been in snow-covered New York. We also had about 1/8 the amount of luggage as everyone else, and Peter had to help the family in front of us push a couple of their bags forward every time as we moved through the line.

The actual flight was quite comfortable. The woman at the check-in counter had obviously noted Peter's rather unusual size and given us seats in the central exit row, so we had all the leg room and none of the responsibility. We also got reasonably edible food, and it felt like flying about 10 years ago. We got to Guayaquil, which was hot and sticky even inside the airport, where we had to wait about 4 hours until our "connecting" flight to Quito. We wandered around outside a little bit, but it was too much of a shock, coming from the snow, to really want to be outside too long. Instead we entertained ourselves by playing games inside, while goofy covers of U2 and the Backstreet Boys serenaded us.

We finally made it to Quito and to the Mariscal, the neighborhood our hostel was in, without a hitch (didn't even have to argue with the taxi driver!). About a block away from the hostel our taxi driver tried to turn the wrong way down a one way street, and on the corner some guy was peeing in the street while his friend pulled on his arm trying to make him stop and a cop looked at him somewhat disapprovingly. Getting to our hostel after that was easy, and after getting settled, we did what any good Americans would do after a long day--went out for burgers, with aji on top.

Catching up with Quito

The first morning in Quito, we were awakened by the once-familiar sound of voices of adults from "Peanuts" comics ("WAHwahwahwahWAHwahwah")--actually vendors mumblingly announcing their wares, which seems like a questionable sales technique but a rather effective alarm clock.

I decided to take Peter to the Parque Carolina, a gigantic park in the middle of the city. We hopped on the Ecovia, one of the many easy and cheap ways to make your way around Quito. We passed by a couple of smaller parks, the Museo del Banco Central, and were making our way into the Centro Historico, the old part of the city, when I realized we had gone the wrong way, and we had to go all the way back past our hostel. At least I got a quick refresher course on the city's layout.

Finally, we made it to Parque Carolina, which was as awesome as I remember, full of colors and tons of people of all ages playing--little kids on snail shaped play structures, older ones on gyroscopes, old men engaged in serious rounds of baci, and, of course, soccer field upon soccer field, for all ages, made of various materials, different sizes, and so on. People sell all kinds of street food (juices and fritada, hunks of pork served with potato pancakes, are some big ones) and delicious smelling carts line the avenues that traverse the park.

After wandering from one end of the park to the other, we reached our intended destination, the botanical garden, which has displays of plants and trees from all the major Ecuadorian climate zones--the Sierra, bosque nublado or cloud forest, paramo, coast, and jungle. At this time of year, many of the plants weren't in full bloom, so the garden wasn't quite as spectacular as I remember. The orchid section, though, was still really impressive, with many of the flowers in tiny, not-yet-full-grown size.

Plaza San Francisco, Quito, Ecuador

This is Miriam, Dan and Peter sauntering around the old city in Quito, Ecuador on the second or third day of the trip. Shortly after this video was shot, we stopped to reapply sunscreen, which we found to be startlingly expensive despite the presence of my surname not once, but twice, on the bottle. After putting a generous layer on her face, arms and upper back, Miriam decided to drop the remainder of the bottle onto the head of an unsuspecting woman nearby. Perhaps for good luck.

One thing to notice in this video is the presence of the Basilica towers from the photos in the previous post. I zoom in on them during the sweep around the plaza.

Quito, Basilica

During my last stay in Ecuador, the Basilica was one of my favorite parts of Quito's Centro Historico. My friend Dan (who just so happened to be with us again) and I went up to the top of the old church then, and I couldn't resist bringing Peter there so he could experience the rather terrifying climb (also beautiful building).

One of the first levels we reached was the huge stained glass window that looks over the main hall of the church. The window is extremely colorful, and so the overall effect is wonderful, but I was especially amazed to discover that each panel is decorated with orchids (of which there are thousands of species in Ecuador).

After a few flights of big stone stairs, we were confronted with a narrow wooden bridge that, as you can see, passes over the top of the arches that look so impressive from the inside. Walking over them is pretty nervewracking.


But, even after a series of outdoor almost-vertical stairs, we made it to the top! The view is amazing--a 360-degree shot of the whole city spread out in front of you and the mountains lining it on both sides.