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Hola again!
Making another attempt at updating this blog, been ages since my last one. Covered a lot of ground and done quite a lot since then, but here goes...
Had just begun Spanish school when I last wrote. Had three weeks in Banos studying 4 hours a day, five days a week. Was pretty full on, but kind of nice in a novel way to be back in a routine of getting up to start school each day, having classes and getting homework to finish in the evenings. Really enjoyed just being in one place for more than a couple of days too and being able to buy and cook food for myself (along with the odd $2 three course lunch). Not living out of a backpack were great after three months of being on the move.
Definitely much more confident with my Spanish now, though my complete lack of natural talent for languages was sadly confirmed. Three weeks and a total of 70 hours of lessons sounds like a lot but when even very simple things need plaining and practice it was amazing and a bit scary how we only covered the basics in that time. Think now I am so more aware of how much I dont know and how much I}ve been getting wrong since being here! Could definitely have stayed for months and still have been learning new stuff. It´s definitely been easier getting around and communicating with people since studying, though conversations are still pretty basic.
After class each day and then with weekends I had plenty of time to get to know Banos. A cool little town, quiet during the week but popular with people escaping Quito on weekends. Living with my teacher Marco and his abuelo (grandfather) the learning never really stopped.
Abuelo liked to walk and I ended as his walking buddy. In the afternoons we´d head off to explore the town or visit one of the multitude of waterfalls nearby, me never quite knowing where we were going until we got there and Abuelo said it was time to turn around and go home. Our conversations definitely progressed over three weeks from the near non-existant to the very basic. On one waterfall visit the gatekeeper at the beginning of the path was nowhere to be found. A retired farmer Abuelo wasn´t about to let this stop him and began up through the scrub and over the barbed wire fence, picking his way throught the sharpened bamboo stakes put there to discourage less persistant sorts from avoiding the one dollar entrance fee. Not wanting to be shown up by a man in his seventies, I followed his lead. We made it home without any serious flesh wounds but sporting some good scraps and scratches. Abuelo´s dress pants and shoes were never quite the same after that.
My entire time in Banos was punctuated by the grumplings of our troublesome neighbour, Mt Tungurahua. Since blowing its top in 1999, the volcano has erupted dozens of times with Banos being evacuated roughly once every year when things look especially bad. I`d managed to time my stay in Banos with a period of activity that at one stage prompted the UK travel advisory to advise against visiting Ecuador and had me walking around town with a backpack of food, water, money and my passport just in case of having to leave in a hurry. With the crater itself only 8kms distant, the road into town is bulldozed over lava flows from the 1999 eruption and the northen end of town is apparently in the likely path of a pyroclastic flow should the mountain decide to send one down.
Doesn`t seem to worry the locals too much. Another teacher from school who lives in the ´red zone` says his favourite thing to do after work is sit on the balcony with a beer watching the mountain spew out lava and ash. I found it a bit unnerving walking down the street and having all the windows rattled by its rumplings and having the town turned a pale shade of grey whenever the the wind blew the ash our way. Interesting to spend a few weeks there but not sure I could live permanently in a place under constant threat of being wiped off the map
Once I`d finished three weeks of classes the plan was to continue north and see more of Ecuador. Guinny had been volunteering with turtles out on the coast and Jess, who was last seen in Lima six weeks earlier, was making her way towards Ecuador. We all me up in Banos, had a couple of days there before getting back on the road. Paid a visit to a monkey rehab center before leaving which had about 80 monkeys of all shapes and sizes that had been rescued, mostly after being mistreated as pets. Set in a patch of lush forest, after paying our $2 it was explained to us how the place ran and that our job as visitors was to provide the monkeys with a bit of fun. They didn`t need much encouragement and pretty quickly we had been turned into human jungle gyms.
From Banos it was north to the town of Latacunga where we headed off the main highways to check out the Quilatoa Circuit. Up on the high Paramo, this was the part of Ecuador dubbed ´Volcano Alley´. We spent three days under Mt Cotapaxi, the perfectly sculpted snow capped cone on on all the postcards. Unfortunately for us, the mountain was shrouded in cloud for the entire time, so a brief glimpse of its lower slopes was all we saw. Can always buy the postcard I guess. Did manage to see some very scenic countryside nonetheless, spectacular crater lakes and rolling green hills reminiscent of New Zealand.
Our final day before heading to Quito coincided with the Saquisili market, the biggest in Ecuador, where rural folk come from all over to buy and sell. The sheer scale was impressive with sellers spread across eight different markets, each with a particular theme. Definitely my favourite was the animal market. The place was packed with pigs, sheep, goats, llamas, horses and cattle. Essentially a big paddock, if you wanted to sell an animal you brought it here, tied it to a stake amoungst the hundreds of others, then haggled over prices with the crowds of buyers. The people were just as impressive. Everyone was dressed in their best clothes for visiting town so it was the ideal place to check out the various traditional costumes.
A couple of hours up the road and we were in Ecuador´s capital, Quito. We´d heard some nasty stories from other travellers about getting mugged in the city and been told to always take taxis at night and not to follow the friendly locals offering to show you a shortcut through darkened alleyways. Thievery in Quito was apparently something of an art with new and exciting ways of relieving tourists of their possesions constantly being employed. The method that stuck in my mind, having met someone unfortunate to have had first hand experience with it, was the flung faeces approach. Apparently the would-be thieves work in pairs, the first throwing something over the victim, sometimes something harmless like mustard, other times something more unpleasant. The second then played the concerned member of the public and proceeds to fuss over unfortunate tourist, removing backpack in the process and dissappearing into the crowd. We luckily didn´t have any run ins with Quito´s criminals apart from one respectable looking older gentleman who I´m pretty sure was attempting to slip his hand into my pocket on the Metro and take my wallet.
Quito is just south of the equator and has turned this into something of a tourist attraction. They have an theme park sitting on equator with various fun equator based activities for the whole family. Thats right, an actual equator-based theme park. No way we were going to miss this so jumped on the bus, paid our entrance fee and were let loose in the Mitad del Mundo (Middle of the World). It was quite an experience. As Jess put it, it would have made a great set for a horror movie.
Near empty with only a handful of other tourists wandering about, the place had a tacky, run down feel to it. The dated horror movie atmosphere was added to by the lone singer on the outdoor stage singing and dancing enthusiastically to an audience of a single bored looking three year old. The park was packed with souvenier shops selling all manner of equator-based novelties including teeshirts, beer mugs and bizarrely, gynocologist monkeys. After getting our snaps with one foot in each hemisphere we were gone before the shop assistants mutated into crazed zombies and starting chasing us from one hemisphere to the next.
After a couple of days in Quito we were keen for some jungle time so took a bus a couple of hours to the little town of Mindo, tucked into the humid cloudforest on the Western slopes of the Andes. Having made vague plans to be up in Colombia by Christmas we now had a little bit of pressure keep moving north so gave ourselves just two nights in Mindo to sample its attractions. A birdwatchers paradise, we had heard that this was a great spot to see hummingbirds. The following morning we took a pickup up the road to a private house where the bloke who lived there kept hummingbird feeders and for next to nothing would welcome people to come and watch the hummingbirds feeding, give you herbal tea and explain about the birds. Incredible little things, constantly busy and fantastically coloured, it was exhausting just watching them. Never staying still for more than a couple of seconds we had great difficulty getting photos that weren´t just a blur despite never being more than a couple of metres away. Apparently he had 28 species that lived on his piece of forest.
For the rest of the day in Mindo we wandered the dirt roads winding through forest. You pretty quickly got a feel for how fast things grew around here with temperatures never dropping much below the mid twenties and rain almost every day. Just looking at plants it was easy to imagine them growing as you stood there. Stopped by a butterfly farm in the afternoon with some of the biggest butterflies I´ve every seen. Some of them almost 30cm across you´d swear they were bats or birds when they flew by. Turrential rain on our second night there had the towns electricity cut, streets flowing like riverbeds and leaks in the bunkroom that on hitting the mosquito netting rained down a refreshing fine mist on us through the night.
Back on the road the next day, it was up to the Colombian border with an overnight slope in Otavalo, a town famous for its weaving and craftwork. Finding the cheapest three beds in town we visited the Otavalo market. Not being much of a market-goer and having no particular urge to buy weavings or craft I wasn´t hugely excited by the prospect of another market but have to admit that the stuff there was actually very good and for a while at least it was really interesting browsing through the stuff on offer.
Next day after a series of buses and taxis we made it to the Colombian border. Immigration was easy and after making our way through the trongs of low lifes offering to rip us off in various ways it was on to a bus bound for the town of Popayan. The driver was a lunatic who insisted on maintaining the same speed regardless of what the road was like even once it started to rain. Much of the route hugged a steep cliff edge. Thankfully, the time he actually managed to slide off the road and into the drain we had a layby seperating us from the drop. When even the locals stood up and started shouting at him we knew it wasn`t just us being over cautious tourists. Whenever people questioned his driving ability and whether he might slow down a tad his answer was to slam on the breaks to prove they worked. Scariest South American bus ride thus far.
Interesting being in a new country despite the loco bus driver. Every bridge along the way was guarded by soldiers with intimidatingly large guns, the larger bridges having sandbagged bunkers at either end. This was a good reminder that things in Southern Colombia were still pretty volatile having been under control of the rebel group FARC until a few years ago and still seeing occasional skirmishes between them and the Colombian army.
Eventually made it to Popayan for our first night in Colombia, exhausted from eighteen hours of travel and nerved ragged from the final bus trip but happy to have made good progress north towards our Christmas on the beach.
Think that will do me blogging for the moment. We did arrive safe and well on the Carribean coast but might put that in my next rant. Right now its time for a beer beside the pool.
A hard life!
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