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.

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.

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.