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Published: November 9th 2006
baños ecuador.
i am looking at a sign in this internet cafe;
"volunteer help wanted...!", looking for an english teacher to work in the farming community of runtun (next to baños, below volcano). lodging and meals provided, no fee. kids 6_12...
should we do it?!!
we just got here this morning after 19 hours on a bus through the poorest and scarriest cities and towns we have encountered thus far. lots happened on the bus ride, but i dont want to ruin it with poor writing skills, so i am pasting chloes account of the ride . it gives you a picture of what we are doing;
At two forty five we got to the bus station (by way of a bicycle taxi) and asked for tickets to Ambato. it turned out that the lonely planet guide was wrong, and no bus left Bahia for Ambato, but we worked out that we could take a bus to Portoviejo and get a bus to Ambato from there. The bus for Portoviejo left at three, so we shoved our bags in the bottom of the bus and climbed on. Portoviejo is the sixth largest city in Ecuador, and very poor, although relatively safe. After a somewhat uninteresting 2 hour long bus ride, we got off in a very run down bus station in Portoviejo. The wonderful thing about Ecuadorian bus stations is that all of the bus stewards run around shouting out the name of the town their bus is going to, so if you can't figure out where to go, they find you. A squat man with a potbelly came by, and asked us what we were looking for. When we told him he whisked us away around corners to the desk of a bus company that went to Ambato. We paid seven dollars each for (supposedly) 9.5 hour bus ride, and the bus stweard for our bus told us that it left at 7(two hours later) and he would show us which one it was when it came. We sat in the waiting room of a large cement bus station for two hours reading and talking and observing the fact that the roof of the building did not fit on to the wall by almost a whole foot at one end. One of the boys working there decided to mop, so he got a mop made from a stick and old t-shirt rags, and took the bucket full of water catching the drip in the ceiling, and went out side to mop with that. When he was done, he returned te mop to the closet and the bucket to the drip. At 7 five different men who were doing their best to watch out for us came and told us that our bus was there, and we left our bags in the bottom again and climed up into the bus. This bus only had one side of it´s windshield intact, and the other side was plastic wrap and packaging tape.
When we pulled out we headed for Chone, a town renowned for it's rough cowboy types and beautiful women(supposedly the local lore says that the women are the most beautiful in ecuador, but the men won't ever let you touch them). It was dark by then, and I drifted in and out of sleep as they put on an awful movie dubbed into spanish entitled 7 Seconds. A few hours later we stopped in Chone and suddenly the bus was hot and full to the brim with all sorts of people and all of their children, the whole aisle taken up by standing people. Only a few minutes later, though, the bus stopped by the side of the road infront of a tire shop. Or sort of. It was a little shack with only three walls and a roof, a couple chairs outside and a hammock, and a tire sitting up write with painted words proclaiming it a tire shop. A few men and a boy were sitting around , just sitting, when we stopped. the bus driver and steward and some other people got out, and began to look at the tire directly beneath our window. It was totally flat. Totally. So the cranked up the bus and took off both the tires and stared at them for a while, discussing their options. Most of the passangers got off the bus, and stood around outside, looking on in boredom. We stayed inside, watching from the window, when the mechanic let all the air out of both the tires, and then grabbed a cup full of water which he poured over the tire. it immediately boiled, and he poured some more. then he picked up a pick axe and began attacking the tire so as to disconect it from it's inner metal ring. First one peice of metal came off, then he flipped it over and went at it with a sledge hammer to knock the tire off the metal. As it came off totally, he pulled the inner tube out and tested it for leaks. when it proved to have a leak, he cut it open, got another inner tube, filled it up, and put it inside the cut up innner tube, and then back in the tire. They did all this with the other tire as well, and put them both back on the bus. The bus driver paid the mechanic 2 dollars, and everyone filled back onto the bus, the man with a flat, sweaty face and bulbous body, the father and mother carrying their infant baby, the teenage girl with her four or five year old son who was still wearing diapers. An hour and a half later we were back on the road, but from our point of view the tire still looked pretty bad. They turned on Gone In Sixty Seconds, another simply awful movie about car theft and racing. I went back to sleep.
Around two in the monring we stopped at another town, and let lots of people off, but got even more people back on. At the stop one man got out of the bus, walked to the wall of the bus station, pissed on the wall leaving a stain, and got back on the bus. Old begging indian women walked by, and a couple men with boxes and bags and baskets of food an produce piled on their bodies loaded them into the bus. We pulled away from the bus station over roads paved with all sorts of trash, and stopped at another tire shop--the bus still was looking pretty bad. The bus driver knocked on the door over and over again, trying to wake the mechanic up at 2 am, but no one came to the door, so we drove along, until the bus passed a tire shop that had "Las 24 Horas" written on it (open twenty four hours). Next to the shop was an old beat up green car parked on the sidewalk, and as the bus steward and driver started knocking and shouting, someone moved inside the car. The window rolled down and a groggy man stuck his head out. He had a quick and totally un-understandable conversation with the bus driver, and it turned out that this was the mechanic himself. He got out of the car and opened the shop, and the whole process started over again. They took off the tires, opened them up, looked for leaks, and so on. They ddid a lot of the same stuff, but this time they switched the tire to a new metal inner ring. more sledge hammering and pickaxing, and testing inner tubes. The only problem was, the new metal ring was too wide for the tire, so they tried to stuff the extra space with wet newspaper, but air still leaked. So the mechanic went back to his car, lifted the hood and shuffled around for a while. when he reemirged, he had a glass cocacola bottle full of gas in his hand. he walked over to the tire, pulled the newspaper out, and spilled the gas around the edge that was leaking, and one of the men lit a match and drpped it on the tire. After a few tries and a lot more gas, a fire sprung up on the tire and they quickly put it out. they did this to the other spots that needed it, and then stopped. After a few other indeciferable actions, they put the tire back on, seemingly pleased with how it turned out. This took another hour and a half, and so the people ran backt ot the bus and we sped off into the night. I went back to sleep. Eventually it started getting light, and we stopped in another town. right after we picked people up, again the bus stpped nd they checked the tires. Luckily, though, it was still in good shape (that fire must have done the trick) and we kept going. Here the land was lusher, and the people richer,a nd everything became a little more beautiful. We were driving through the mountains and passing one beautiful little farming village with thick black rich soil after another. We got into Ambato finally at around 7:30 in the morning. We grabbed our bags and looked around the dismal place. A cement building infront of us promised Desayuno(breakfast) and so we stumbled forward straight into one of the strangest men we've encountered yet. He stared straight into our eyes but didn´t seem to see us at all, and was completely perplexed as to why we would want to come to his restaurant. Finally he understood, and ushered us into the empty room at sat us down at a table with plastic chairs and asked us rush of hurried question about what we wanted. We said yes and no randomly, not understanding most, if any, of what he was saying. He hurried into the back, brought us rolls, hot milk(so we could add either cocoa mix or instant coffee), and a plate of rice, chicken with a sort of curry sauce, and fried platanos. A little later a bowl of mushed up soft boild egg came out for each of us. we ate as much as we could(antone managing a bit more than me) but neither of us could finish. The whole time both the man serving us and another just as strange(if not stranger--he reminded me of Lenny from Of Mice and Men)man stood there both staring straight at us. They seemed to have no sense of when to look away, or even that they should have. It was creepy. we got out of there as soon as possible, and wandered around until we found the front of the bus station (thanks to the help of a man with only 3 teeth in the top row) and a bus to Banos
yes, besides bus rides, we have been living the high life for the past couple night, staying in expensive (10-15 dollars per person) hostels, eating all our meals, even considering doing an excursion on horseback or something. i just saw a family walk by, and they all were wearing dust masks becuase of the volcano. most houses dont have windows, just holes in the walls, there are tons of men in camo with huge shotguns everywhere. my thumb piano brings me the most happiness. playing cards takes up lots of our private time, but only in private, because we figured out, after being stared and laughed and scowled at by every person who could see us playing, that cards are strictly for betting here. hope all is well elsewhere in the world!
Antone
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mom
non-member comment
face mask
WEAR A FACE MASK. You'll look like a mystery person, very alluring. Much as those kids need to learn english, it's nice to come home able to breathe. Are the military people there because of looting in the city after the eruption? Be nice to them......Love mom