Eating a small pet...and other adventures in Ecuador

First things first, I need to apologise to a dear friend. Andrea, I only hope you can forgive me....the evidence in the photos is incontrovertible, I did indeed spend part of yesterday evening eating a small pet. Full culinary critique to follow, but guess what...it tastes just like chicken!

This week my Dad, Gillian and I have been on a whistlestop tour of Ecuador trying to cram in as much as is humanly possible in 7 days. Generally it has been good, but there have been a couple of mishaps along the way:
1) Having all our cameras stolen on the bus from Quito to Latacunga
2) A speeding car crashing headlong into our train. Followed by the train driver doing a runner and leaving us stranded in the middle of nowhere.

We left Quito on Wednesday morning, our bus taking us halfway around what is known as the Quilotoa loop, an extremely bumpy road that circles Laguna Quilotoa and which winds through a series of tiny indigenous villages and some of the most spectacular Andean scenery in the country. Less than 20 minutes out of Quito Dad realised that three of our cameras (his video recorder, digital camera and my sister´s fantastic digital SLR which I had been using instead of my own) had been taken out of his bag. He´d had it between his feet and as the bus swerved it must have slipped further under the seat. The thieves saw their opportunity and got away with over 1000GPB of stuff. They were off the bus before we´d noticed anything, obviously a very slick and professional team. We realised afterwards how busy the bus had seemed to get at one point. Vendors of all types had piled on and had been crowded round where we were sitting at the front. It´s unfortunate, but while I´ve been travelling I´ve been all too aware that as gringos we stand out as very obvious and very rich targets. My dad, as a white middle-aged man, just screams money. All it takes is for you to take your eye off the ball for a second and the people who´ve been watching you, pounce. So it meant that we only had Gillian´s little film camera to take photos with over the next five days. I had left mine in storage in Quito, and as a keen amateur photographer my lack of camera hurt. I know I could have taken some cracking photos with my sister´s SLR this week. Still, it could have been worse, my Dad and sister will get their cameras back on the insurance, the tape in Dad´s recorder only had the last day of our Galapagos trip on it and thankfully I had backed up all my pictures onto a website the day before. If I had lost those I would have been totally gutted.

Moving on from that unpleasant episode, we spent the next two nights in a tiny little village called Chugchilan, in a brilliant and incredibly friendly eco-lodge called the Black Sheep Inn. The name in part comes from the sheep which graze the land but the owners also feel that the travellers who visit them are like the black sheep of the world! It´s a description I find quite amusing. The view from our cabins was amazing and the 5 hour hike around the beautiful sparkling emerald green Laguna Quilotoa really enjoyable (which, coming from me, is saying something!)

After that we went back through Quito and up to Otavalo for the Saturday morning market, where much present shopping was done. Dad´s rucksack is now loaded down with stuff that I´ve bought and generally just accumulated in the last couple of months. That afternoon we got back on the bus to head south again, this time to a town called Riobamba, the starting point for a train journey along a part of the Andes known as the Devil´s Nose.

Ecuador, like many Latin American countries which are situated on the Ring of Fire (an arc of intense seismic activity which runs round the globe from New Zealand, through eastern Asia, Alaska and along the coasts of North and South of America), no longer has much of a working railway system. Over the years it´s been successively destroyed by earthquakes. The sections that still run today do so for the benefit of tourists. This particular journey, from Riobamba to the Devil´s Nose, normally takes about 5 hours. Tourists hire cushions at $1 a go and sit on top of an old and very slow cattle truck enjoying the view (and getting very dusty in the process). It seems as well as being quite an event for us, it´s also an event for Ecuadorians. We kept passing groups of people who had their cameras out, laughing and waving at us - the stupid gringos who will sit on top of a train for five hours only to turn round at the end and come straight back again. Although we realised pretty quickly that the children who run along the tracks waving madly weren´t just being friendly, it´s because the rich white tourists throw sweets to them from the train....

About 2 and a half hours into the journey and we were crossing the main road from Guayaquil to Quito when a car came hurtling down the road and smashed straight into the engine of the train. The car was a total write-off, but amazingly the four passengers were able to walk away from the accident. Hyundais, it seems, are very sturdy cars - the bonnet and engine of the car were smashed to bits, but that was it. A few seconds earlier and the car would have been under the front of the train and we could have been looking at four dead people. If the train had been going faster and the car had hit one of the carriages the consequences don´t really bear thinking about. But, as it is, the train escaped with just a few paint scratches on the engine and left lots of bemused and startled tourists sitting on the train roof looking at the smashed up bit of metal below them that had previously been a car. The police arrived about half an hour later. By which time it had become clear that the train driver was nowhere to be seen. According to the rumours he didn´t want to lose his job and be arrested (slightly short-sighted one thinks, the company must after all keep records of their driver´s shifts). But things work differently here and it´s apparently normal for both parties to be taken into custody after an accident until it´s decided who is culpable. Rumours rippled up from the crash scene that a similar thing had happened three months ago and the driver had had a hard time at the hands of the police. Even more rumours abounded that it was in fact the same driver. Whatever the truth of the matter the fact was he´d scarpered, leaving a couple of hundred tourists stranded in the process. The various tour groups who had been on the train (and whose buses had followed them) upped and left. The rest of us just sat there, unsure what to do. After about an hour the police said they were requesting another driver, he´d be an hour. After an hour he was only going to be half an hour, half an hour passed and there was no driver ("hey, it´s South America", we said, "whaddya expect?"). Eventually a driver did turn up and nearly three hours after the crash we resumed our journey. We finally did make it to the Devil´s Nose and back. It´s a part of the line which runs along a section of the Andes, which at the time the track was built, was considered impassable. It was laid in a zig zag in order for the train to beat the mountain and reach the lowlands. My Dad was impressed by what is apparently a masterpiece of engineering. I thought the view was nice, but that I´d spent far too much time sitting on my backside to really appreciate it.


The following day we headed back to Quito, all three of us done in by the amount of public transport we´d been on in the previous days. On Tuesday though we did make it to the middle of the world - otherwise known as the equator line. Now, did you know that on the equator you are 1kg lighter? Or that you are also significantly weaker? Or that it´s easier to balance an egg on a nail?! (see photo for that major achievement). Well, you do now. See, my blogs are both entertaining and educational....(I hope anyway!).

"Mitad del Mundo" (see obligatory cheesy tourist photo) is the name of the official equator-line monument. Unfortunately, it isn´t actually on the equator. French scientists, searching for the middle of the world in the 1700s, were just a little bit out - 270 metres out. They placed the line too far south. Out of the main complex there is now a little (and not very well advertised) museum which does sit on the site of the real equator (GPS making finding it nowadays that much easier). The little place is a goldmine of fascinating scientific demonstrations. For example, those of you who have travelled (or now live) in the southern hemisphere may have noticed that water goes down the plug hole in the opposite direction to at home. Place a tub of water 1 meter north of the equator and the water drains in an anti-clockwise direction, move the bowl 1 meter to the south, and it moves in a clockwise direction. But put a tub of water directly on the equator line, take out the plug and the water wooshes straight down the hole - no circular movement whatsoever. Fascinating stuff (I think anyway). Another example - walking in a straight line with your eyes closed in normal circumstances is difficult but do-able. On the equator it ¡s almost impossible. You can actually feel yourself being propelled by some unseen force either to the left or right. It´s really bizarre. Now for the science bit: Apparently it´s because the rotational forces (the result of the earth being tilted on it's axis) which move in different directions in the northern and southern hemispheres clash on the equator line and cancel each other out. Hence, no circular movement in the water. These same forces mean that it is easier to balance an egg on a nail (never having done so on either side of the equator before I can only trust what they were telling me). The nail is exactly on the equator, position the egg just right and the opposing forces help give it more balance....or something like that. I´m not a scientist so don´t rip holes in my dodgy scientific analysis. Whatever, I now have the certificate to prove I did it and it wasn´t an easy task. We all eventually managed it, though it took Dad two attempts - he wasn´t going to be beaten by the women!

As Tuesday was our last evening in Ecuador we decided to " treat" ourselves to cuy. Dad is the biggest and most adventurous carnivore I know (the man´s even eaten spider), so I figured that if anyone was going to eat guinea pig with me it would be Dad. Actually, he ordered it and Gillian and I just picked at it (for some reason I wasn´t that fussed about having a whole one to myself). So, as I said, it tastes a lot like chicken, the brown meat on chicken that is, and it was actually nicer than I expected. Dad´s assessment, as the man who devoured most of it: It´s a bit like eating lobster, a lot of effort for not much meat - but nowhere near as nice. Given that without it´s fluff it just looks like a large rodent (I'm assured it is actually a member of the rabbit family), that the skin is tough and there´s not much meat, we all failed to see why it´s such a delicacy. I think they make much better pets.

So that´s it, my final days in Ecuador. Unbelievably I´ve been here nearly two months, a sizeable chunk of my adventure in Latin America. I´ve met some great people, both young and old, seen some amazing animals and been to some fascinating and beautiful places. And there´s still a huge amount I didn´t get to see. I know getting on the plane, I´ll be quite sad to leave.

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