Unentitled.

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Some have chosen, like me, to stay on. I can´t say that we´ve reached the end, but the departure of Tanya and Jamie is enough to give it some termination. Helen has left as well but she had been working on her own account with her uncle and having left on the same flight as those two, I´ll find out her account later. The traversal of the second month of my involvement with SVA is too rich to pass by in silence, and the week past since my journey back to Quito has been equally full, a full confluence of luck that should help to kidnap some nonsense from the realm of unwritten footless fancies.

I´m writing between the house of my strange benefactor, who I more or less know, and upon whose floor replete with rucksack, luggage and a makeshift bed I return to home, and the journey from there, Las Orquidias, on the City´s south side, through the first city centre, El Centro Historico, to the nascent co-nucleus of Quito - La Mariscal. Here, its high-speed connected coffee shops and an important youth hostel, Hotel de Paso, give me space to start some kind of travel-logue and shake off the travel bug for as long as I add to it.

Memo: En verdad el Hostel se llama “New Bask”, lo llamo ´Hotel de Paso´ según el nombre que le ha dado un colombiano en un cuento escrito durante su estancia alli en el ´New Bask´. Fue puesto a lacanallacondal.com

I re-entered Quito a week ago today. After checking up on e-mails sat between online role playing Japanese businessmen, I ordered a vegetarian pizza (¿tired of rice?) from a joint I knew in my one week solo there, off from the major road Amazonas, stuffed my green dollars into an old sock (fresh; nice after a month void of ATMs) and tried to find someone with whom to kick off pool or foosball - everyone occupied, I started thinking the life back here would be difficult. Still unkempt, I left to find somewhere with a vacancy, ´de Paso was full booked so I went to another. Not sleepy, tired, I came back to the pizzaria-cum-club and met a Canadian who told me he teaches business English and that his friend has a luxery flat I can see in the weekend, $180 pm. “Phone me…commerce and contracts come easy” He plasters his number on a cigarette packet - the next day I lose it without caring. His friends (Escandinavos) I try to convince of my adventure but recite instead my fatigue, dance and leave.

I´d put down $108 for an examination for the 24th and I´d left the project early, one day early, to have the 23rd for revision. The exam is an approval of Español como Lengua Extranjera and so I set off to buy some new clothes rather than wait to have those I wore cleaned and sit in a computer room and find out the structure of Las Pruebas (The Proofs). After hours checking through the example papers, I feel more isolated from the spoken world than ever but confident of all the written sections which seem easy as join the dots, language by numbers, and I comprehend the audio files. A fifteen minute session of oral exposition could go wrong if my pedantry betrays me (…keep the speech running always) but the game´s a fully playable demonstration.

I pass ´del Paso and load my stuff into the seventh quarter, they still have luggage of mine cached in the owner´s holdings. The street corner features a patio, blue inside and a $1.5o lunch menu, I order it without thinking much, and face the window. There are foreigners outside, and I´m alone until the soup comes and two locals enter, I look up and greet them asking to join them at the table, where they pass me a glass of Pilsener. We talk, and my soup is left tepid. When the main course pollo seco con arroz arrives, I realize I ordered because of vagueness not real hunger and order another beer. The girl, Erika, notes her #057… on my libreta, flicks through my diary and a chico joins us from outside, Francisco, who´s happy to take my plate.

I´m talking to Sebastián, and he tells me:- Ven a ver mi casa para que conozcas a mis viejos y a mis hermanos. Si quieras puedes vivir en mi cuarto y pagues sola la comida.

Over the drinks I chat on like I will definitely be staying with his family in the house, as he offers, like it’s a sealed arrangement, but take it in jest. Then, he takes out an apple and injects the backside of a biro-pen into it carving out an airway. Sprinkling some herbs around the stalk, he takes out a lighter and inhales the smoke passing the core. I take the sinning fruit (I could take a bite of it’s smoke infused innards) and light up ¡unconscious minister of celestial pleasures! La Manzana del Caos - manzana de la esperanza - manzana de la nostalgia, neither of the past nor of the future do I have knowledge and so I can only bet on what I have in my hands, immediate.

--I´ll come-- after two rounds more.

We hike up past the SuperMax market, and catch a bus to Las Orquidias. On the screen to which I now type, his sister, Carin, shows me weird and wonderful photos of seals, crabs, albatross and a single penguin taken in the Galapagos a year ago. I have dinner and there´s some excitement as a new 4x4 arrives, not humble, given wide girth in its parking space. I ciao his papi y mami… I can´t explain how Seb proposed I stay but we leave back for the centre in agreement saying some of my friends were waiting (though as far as I knew no one I had known was then in Quito).

I change my trousers, which have seen blood of duck and a healthy mixture of mud and riverside grime, a last stigma of travel and meet with Seb´s crowd - a more or less debauched posse of punkrockers. Iain, if you read this, I´m eternally happy we yelled lyrics of the Misfits, die die die my darling and London dungeon. I receive a fingerless glove from Erika and she´s talking about Nazism - a couple of them have No-Swastika badges and I still can´t make sense of this ubiquitous enigmatic symbol in this country: In a remote Chachi community village shop I´ve seen it in pink graffiti, (vertically inverted so that the spokes move to the left: surely through ignorance rather than counter-culture) which the vendor put down to schoolboy prank (unconvincingly: the same graffiti advertises the shop´s karaoke night on Tuesday). There´s no less likely country for their popularity (not huge, but non-zero) as most of the country are mestizo there´s no single racial root, DNA of various indigenous peoples and the peninsular conquistadores are their inheritances. A cursory glance at their website (http://www.libreopinion.com/members/nazi_ec/) shows how gratingly non-cogent they are, “los negros, los asiaticos y los blancos no somos iguales” (blacks Asians and whites are not all equal) but elements of these are all inextricably part of Ecuadorian people. Perhaps their greatest crime is of cliché, sloganeering "AMERICA ES SOLO PARA LOS AMERICANOS". And at least the Germans had the excuse of historic land right.

They hate the pluralistic homosexual-accepting punk, so bin them.

I sleep roughly with guitars and singing sounding from the hostel common room and get up at six thirty.

The exam is irrelevant to my experience of the country; it is a test in Iberian Spanish which would be identical in any other part of the Latin world. The other testees were Japanese (and one Suisse) but I slipped up in the audio section, I felt tired and suspicious and probably imagined more trickery than was involved. It was split to three parts from nine a.m. to four p.m. and they told me to wait two months for results and get some rest, I think I looked shattered and white. In the end, I felt unsure of what I was doing here and made a phone call to my family.

I collapse back in my room and then get up for a wander. I can’t believe that Jamie is there, who apparently made it straight back to Quito from the coastal fishermen village and booked up in the same ´del Paso, whereon Lee pipes in, “So you know this guy, the sod who stole my water”. My roommate is right, I had been a glutton and aloofly stolen some supply (…I´m sure the tourist won’t need it as much as me). I should remember the karmic maxim, it turns out it had been James, my two-month companion of Ecuadorian routes who kept me up the night before. If I’d got up to get my own water from the social room of ´del Paso I’d have chimed in with the party and got more sleep.

We go to SuperMax to find condiments for the mince-garlic-chilli burgers that they all bought on a trip to the GringoCarcel, a prison reserved for foreigners mostly on drug charges. It´s truly frightening, everything must be paid for, up to having a bed to sleep on instead of the hard concrete and so the inmates have certain enterprises with help from those they know on the outside. Packed in without pity like twenty in a room fit for five- the most impressive story is of an Irish journalist, a BBC reporter who came here six years ago. On making to leave the country her co-workers, covertly drug smugglers, fled the airport and she was nicked with so many pounds of cocaine stashed in their back-packs. They charged her when she came to: she had fainted on the spot. Being clued up, she might have known when she saw the drugs that the unashamed castigation would be sixteen years. Whether that’s the whole truth is unimportant, if she was complicit or not the penalty is just as unmeasured.

She came here to this country fresh out of journalism undergrad, with employment I´d have my right hand cut off for and ended up in a state-sponsored hell. It lifts the rug right underneath this scale of drug prohibitionism: the penalties metered out under the thinly veiled excuse that normatively neutral substances destroy lives are so much more consistently malignant and callous than the simple greed that fuels a coke pimp. The Latin American Governments have plenty of their own reasons to prefer this approach, namely that they garner their own means of coercion further, but in this case there´s a direct link with the United States drugs czar: they pay $16 000 for every drugs charge followed through to an incarceration.
“We didn´t know it was an all-women prison”, one of them says as they leaf the all-preferences-catered porn rags they brought. But she´s more than happy to take them, by now quite a nymphomaniacal talker she asks who among them has slept with prostitutes - I don´t know who said what. In awkward reverence, a Texan girl insists she´ll write her dissertation about the woman´s life, and “Don´t worry, I´m sure ya´ll do just fine.”

I never saw her, so the place where her story meets mine is in Jamie´s suggestion that the surplus fund money from the SVA go to her project of caring for children who stay within the prison, children of Heroin addicts (I´m not sure they are all gringos in there - I´m not a journalist) some of whom she already cares.

We turn the supermarket aisle and Jamie tells me how they fixed the payment for the trip with Milton, the brains, as they say, behind the expedition. “We double checked that no cost had been left out of accounts and that the money we gave him includes $450 for paying Johnny. Then he takes off $300 of this which he says went on net café time arranging the trip with Svenja aswell as the tent given to him which we´d already covered.” What a cheat! Well, we covered the money and I know at least that at least $300 of our fundraising came from cynics who would expect this kind of pocket-lining, but there´s no need for it, and worst is that faith in ´the project goals´ being carried out is difficult to hold if someone acts like that. They may be superfluous in any case, and our trek from the Andes to the coast is unlikely to be a harbinger of sustainable development, at best it can develop sustainable tourism, but its stupidity. To burn bridges as a business practice for more pocket money is silly and if it took enlightened self-interest to make that clear that would still be reassuring.

On the way back to ´del Paso I mention it´s funny that in all Quito, Jamie should have been staying in ´del Paso like me, and that he was up drinking with my roommate. But that´s just the first of a number of serendipities; the Texan, who came with us, also booked in ´del Paso, arrived the day we left, to Arutam, the Shiir community in which we spent the first month. We hear tales of robbery, that for a week phone cards were missing, most of them found again by the volunteer coordinator, Timmoti. I ask if anyone had a guitar - “An English guy, funny, Matt but it wasn´t his.” When I left Arutam with Jamie we stopped to get lunch in Puyo, and I left my guitar in the CHIFA Chinese Restaurant. We went back and it was shut up - when we got on our bus to Baños, we saw familiar faces on the next bus, other Arutam volunteers who were taking a weekend break there so I asked if they could please try and find the restaurant and recoup my lost instrument.

She tells me that Abbe - a Kansas girl of Arutam - is staying nearby, and soon she drops by telling us that she was robbed in Cuenca while dining: her friend was sitting with her rucksack as she went to the bathroom and didn´t notice the bag-pincher.

Tim, who left the second project two weeks early, had gone travelling down El Camino del Sol, and had met the two Columbians, Catta y Andres, who were with us for the first week of the trek, in Puerto Lopez.

There are lots of people, met and lost, who I won´t hear from, but hearing stories of the same lot with whom I spent the first month and so soon after being just me myself and rucksack is homely, like all the birds coming home to roost in ´del Paso. There is no autumn in this country, there is one other season, which brings more rain but there´s still time for brooding metaphysical speculation on the meaning of things after the dazzle of summer. The cooler ochre hues reveal in thought what was already present when bathed in the unbearable lightness of being, even though the difference is only habitual, with the end of August, not seasonal.

The atmosphere, anyway, has changed: the close humidity of the coast is gone, the night is colder, and I have a cold brought on by the quick elevation to the second highest city in the world. Given the minimal preparation made to stay in touch, it’s astounding that we come together here.

Lee, Tom (a New Zealander) and Jamie plan to go to Otavalo on Saturday, one of the largest and most colourful artesania markets on the continent (I stole that from Rough Guide to Ecuador). I want to go, but decide after getting up at the same early hour they arise to catch the best of it to boost through to the Orquidias house and see it it’s for real. After some time-out in LibriMundi reading with familiar socialite-aspiring jazz in the background, like in Starbucks, I walk over to la avinida de la Patria and catch the bus. When I get there a neighbourhood girl seems surprised that I´m getting off there and offers to help, the district is made of folds of houses along a valley and the house number is 1556. There´s an old number system but a new one has come in, so the locals don´t know whether the only number I have means higher up or lower down the valley.

We reach a corner shop and I ask to use the phone, the girl leaves and a chocolate biscuit convenience store supplier walks me down to the right house. I lie down till the food is ready, it´s a traditional dish of the sierra. Aunt and niece are there and it’s a nice family lunch.

The day passes easily and I have coffee with Roci, la mami, who tells me to take care, though casting aspersions on some pals of Sebas´, who left for the weekend down south. I leave with Pancho, the brother, and his girlfriend in their car for the centre. Francisco, or Pancho, tells me, or Pepe, that he manages the promotion for the bars of the Mariscal, the New Town, home of ´del Paso. Most of the popular ones anyhow. He cruises down the adjacent street to ´del Paso and I leave off.

I can admit now that I appropriate ´del Paso as the name of ´New Bask´ because of the story of Andres which I read in my afternoon in Orquidias. On arriving back there it seems like the events he documents took place more or less, though with apparent difference.

Era el lugar preferido de gente sin hogar, de solitarios viajeros de paso, de seres que no van a ningún lugar especifico, de aventureros y de amantes. El hotel era un sitio discreto y si el pago era cumplido no se les prestaba mayor atención a los huéspedes.

--It was the preferred place for all those without a place to call their own, of solitary travellers and beings who went nowhere in particular, of adventurers and lovers. The hotel was a discrete place and if the money was fronted, no questions were asked.

In ´New Bask´ there has never been the fugitive Jacobo´ nor the libertine nameless Korean, endlessly associating with vice girls, and less still has it been possible to “walk in the cold night seeing the parks frosted over by winter.” Still, the orgy of Chileans and North Americans, to which Jamie intruded (they turned out to be sisters) and the story of what happened while I had left for Orquidias, that a resident of New Bask had run in pleading for some money, proffering his camera and luggage as collateral that he have $250 to front to some undercover police who had caught him outside in a marijuana deal threatening two years (If you don´t get me it back tomorrow I´ll smash your knee caps, warns Jamie—“Why.. why would you do that”, pallid, he responds) convince me that ´del Paso anticipates our return to ´New Bask´. It was written there and posted just before we left for the trek but for me it can only be so full of this idea of so many crossed paths and stories spun out over los extraños, the extraneous fabric of action epitomizing absurdity, during the few days back again in the hub of Quito.

The story closes when the spouse of the philandering Asdrúbal passes the porter and meets the Korean, who out of jealousy takes her up to the room where she catches her husband red-handed. In the ensuing commotion she pulls a gun which falls to the floor and fires, shooting dead the Korean. The fugitive has to leave at once and the protagonist bids adieu to his hotel romance and disappears.

I´d like to mention that this is worlds apart from my time in ´del Paso, but the similarity is in the closure. After the final nights there with the people I´d been with, it will never be the same. The life of the protagonist with his romance is fantastic and wildly divergent from mine, if I had a romance it was with the renewed friendship of my companions now all returned to the Hotel. Hanna and Tim had gone to dinner but would soon be back and Tanya was in room 10 when I came in - we met Johnny (Pinto) coming up the stairs and Jamie was in his room, like me without realizing that we all had arrived.

I might only be a solitary yearning that inclines me to make the comparison,
Tal vez solo estoy dispuesto a dibujar esta comparación a causa de mi soledad

Tanya, Pinto and I go to find some dinner and decide on a Shawarma accompanied with fruit beer and a sheesha pipe with mango tobacco. It´s been three years since Pinto´s lived here and he talks about working in a hotel, we explain how to play ring of fire… the cards have rules and if you break them you drink.

The whole rest of the night is incidental, we start off with mojitos and tap-beer and dance through Reggaeton mixed with dance. It´s enough to say that Jamie lost the tooth strung to his necklace which came from a pig in a Chachi village on the trek, grasped during aggressive dancing on the bar in seventh heaven.

We wake up to full ensalada de frutas con yogur; in ´del Paso I´ve woken up after two hours sleep having chosen cig over hotdog on the way back very groggy. Pinto prepared it all, no rest. We all lounge for a while and go back to bed so everyone´s gone in ´del Paso when I wake, so I exit. I wander up la calle Amazonas for a while and see that all of the passerby are on bicycles - the road´s closed off for cars on Sunday. El Parque Ejido is full loud I hear and see there´s a group playing Quechua music in the Plaza, so a walk up and down the side looking at paintings. I hope the event is magnetic and as it happens I find Jamie walking up having been split off from the rest: likewise on the second day June 7th here Hanna, Tanya Elaine and I ended up making a U-turn in that park without realizing and walked a full ten blocks the wrong way.

We decide to go to dine on a BigMac (after so many years it’s a treat, and after so much real food and one fastidious stocking of a fire from 6pm to midnight to prepare pasta with peanut sauce, I relish the quick trash with fries) and visit La Capilla del Hombre, the magnum opus of Guayasamín, a project he didn´t complete before his death.

The paintings live in the faces they depict, on the top floor is a set of the American emotions, and light is let in through an opening in the top, a sun-funnel, painted over the show the bodies of Bolivian mine workers, who had mostly made a one way entry into the profitable underworld. It might be nice to think of it as a catharsis, a release from their “Dungeon horrible, on all sides round.” The author taking a subtle knife to the harsh reality of human exploitation, but there´s a blue-print of the design of that installation in the foyer, and we remember its just a comment. On the ground floor there´s a homage to Allende Neruda and another who were condemned to death in the takeover of Chile, “Lagrimas de Sangre” or tears of blood, a secularised version of a14thC French work, Jesus dead, but less morbid are the sculptures which celebrate the beliefs of indigenous cultures, from Mayans, Quechua to Incans, and a great funny painting of a bull tied to a condor which follows Peruvian tradition: a good harvest comes if the condor kills the bull.

In the centre of the ground floor lies ´an eternal flame´ which is dedicated to UNESCO. We ask if it represents anything and are told, “No, es tan solo un homenaje a la UNESCO”. But I´ve visited before and I overheard that it portrays the tradition of some of the fifty plus races, of which there are now fourteen, within Ecuador, which we were related on the first night starting the trek, up on the roadside clearing where we pitched our tents.

--Que frío hacia el Julio 23. Todos estuvimos temblando esa primera noche, y una vez llegado al rincón de la montaña, saliendo del San Juan en el sur de la gran Ciudad que apenas íbamos a ver durante el mes siguiente, habíamos de armar las carpas de inmediato y hacer una fogata. Cuando bajó el sol todo el mundo humano fue cubierto con neblina pura blanca y la cordillera ya era una isla entre las nubes. Pues desde luego no estábamos en total soledad ya que andábamos tras la carretera y al amanecer un coche nos paso dirigiéndose a una finca mas abajo y el líder de nuestro grupo le explico nuestro motivo, lo que yo no estaba dispuesto a oír. En vez de eso, escuchaba a los pájaros que suelen silbar durante la luz ligera de las siete y me senté por una banca enfrentándome al fuego que freía los patacones.

That night, we all sat round the fire drinking an aniseed flavoured Columbian spirit and Milton told us, as David, an Austrian, translated to English, the myth of these old people of la cordillera, or ridge. They kept a single fire going forever except for during the winter solstice around which they spent two weeks without any, relying on spices and preservatives to keep good food they prepared previously.

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…we should have some photos soon

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