Goodbye Ecuador

---

It's been a very intensive couple of weeks. I’ve done 10 days of Spanish classes, interspersed with two weekend trips.

The Spanish has been hard work and very enjoyable. Unfortunately for you, dear reader it doesn't make for interesting travellers tales. I speak quite good French (I lived in France for a year) and this has both helped and hindered my Spanish. Compared with French, Spanish is similar; shares a lot of vocabulary and concepts, but has less complicated rules and fewer exceptions.

Having one-to-one Spanish lessons has been fantastic! I have learned so much in such a short time! We even covered the whole of the Imperfect tense in just 15 minutes at the end of my last lesson. South America is cheap enough to make the one-to-one lessons feasible. Quito is a major centre for Spanish teaching and I know a lot of people who have and are going to go to Antigua in Guatemala (the other major centre) to learn Spanish. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who has an inkling of learning Spanish, even in just a two-week holiday.

As I say, I've been studying quite hard and have missed out on a lot of chances to go exploring. Ecuador is a very interesting country with so many cool things to see and do. It is amazingly diverse and I could easily have spent six weeks just here. Some examples of things I had to turn down were whale-watching on the coast; visiting the Amazon rainforest (there are more species in Ecuador than in the whole of North America), seeing the beautiful colonial town of Cuenca or some large Inca ruins; and riding on the top of a train over some very mountainous rail track.

However I have only six weeks to get to Santiago and have to prioritise. The things and places I most want to do and see are in Bolivia and Peru, so it was with a bit of umming and ahing that I decided to buy an expensive (by South American standards!) plane ticket to get me south.

However, last weekend, I went away to a town called Otovalo. It's in the Northern Hemisphere and is famous for its Crafts market (the largest in South America so the guidebooks say...)

I went with Jurgen, a German who was staying with a friend of my host family. He's my father’s age (but snores less!) and I was extremely glad of some company as it can be quite daunting travelling on your own. Jurgen is a retired English teacher who's spending the next four months in Ecuador volunteering in a remote village in the northern province of Esmareldas, near the coast.

Saturday is the big market day in Otovalo. Not only do they have the big crafts market which caters mainly to tourists (and the town has been very canny in making itself a destination in this respect) but there is also a large animal market. It starts really early so we left Quito at 6am.

I've posted pictures of the market here as they show it better than I can really describe. We checked into a hostel, dumped our bags and then hit the market. I bought a nice Alpaca wool jumper which you can see in the pictures. I like it very much! :-)

In the evening, we went to a folk music club (or peña). We got there really early actually, and there were only a few people there watching videos of Bolivian folk singers on a big screen. We were wondering why we were there but at 10pm a live band came on and lots of locals turned up. There were only a few gringos there and it was really great to see authentic locals on their Satruday night out and not something put on for tourists.

Near to Otovalo is a volcanic crater on the shoulder of a volcano called Cuicocha. The crater has a lake and I'd heard about it from a traveller I met the previous weekend.

The guide books said it was not recommeded to walk around the late without a guide as there are mists that can come in and also reports of robberies. This traveller was pretty seasoned and not normally scared of such things but had still got a guide, so I was determined to do the same.

We had tried on the Saturday to find a guide, but apart from a very expensive one, didn't manage to. Jurgen was keen to just go anyway and I slightly reluctantly agreed.

As we were leaving the hostel, we chummed along with two Scandinavian girls who were also going the same way and caught a bus to the nearest village. There, we chummed up with two other girls (American and Swiss) and hired a pickup truck to take us up to the rim of the crater.

I was concerned that I did not have any food or particularly water with me. It was to be a four hour walk and I knew there was a restaurant near to where we had been dropped. I was keen to go down to stock up, but it was clear the others didn't want to wait for me. The Scandinavian girls said they were only going to go 10 minutes or so along the way then turn back. They had a small amount of water and gave it to me.

Anyway, we got going and it was a bit tougher than we had thought. About halfway round, we had run out of water and had also lost the path. We were heading down to the lake and I reckoned the path had to be on the ridge.

I used to do a lot of hillwalking in Scotland and know that you have to take the mountains seriously and be prepared. Here I was, with no map or guide, no food, no water and we had about half the ridge still to walk. I don't want to overdramatise the situation, we weren't going to die out there, but I could feel the effects of dehydration and was slowing down. The sun was hot and it was very high up (3,350m with the lake at 3,060m). I was concerned we would get into an embarassing situation.

In the distance, on the ridge, we could see a German flag and another flag that I didn't recognise. I was hoping it would be a road, or even better a restaurant, but it looked a long way off and we had to climb up quite a way to get there.

Anyway, we climed back up and found the path again. It was a lot easier going though I have to say I felt the effects of dehydration and was trailing the group.
Lo and behold, when we reached the flags, it turned out it was indeed a restaurant (owned by a German/Ecuadorian couple)! Now that's something you don't find in Scotland! How nice was that. I had a plate of spaghetti bolognaise and several bottles of water and felt great!

It was an easy walk down as there was a road to follow and we then returned to Quito. We had been five hours in all.

In Quito, I was staying with a host family as I felt this would be better for my Spanish and also to let me meet some real Ecuadorians.

Inevitably, there is a strange atmosphere when you are a paying guest in someone's home. However that's just the way it is and you make the best of it. My hosts were Carlos and Blanca and their son (also Carlos) who's in his late twenties and in the Ecuadorian army's anti-narcotics unit. Also in the house, were two Dutch girls and a German guy (so it wasn't quite the total imersion in the language that I had hoped for!).

The family were very welcoming and when I asked if it would be OK to extend my stay for another four days of Spanish lessons they were quite happy to let me.

The family are middle class and live in a fairly nice area of Quito, quite near the centre. Even so, their shower is a bit primative by western standards (an electric heater on the shower head that gives a trickle of hot water and mini electric shocks - I wore my flip flops!).

After I got back from Otovalo, Blanca told me that she'd made a mistake and that there was another language student who was due to arrive on Monday, however I could stay with her friend Marta, with whom Jurgen was staying.

I took this in my stride and spent the next four days with another Ecuadorian family!

One thing about Quito is that it's cold. Dispite being nearly on the Equator, they are now in what they call "winter" Nothing like our winter of course, but people here don't have good heating so it feels cold. I guess the average temperatures would be about the same as when I left London in mid-September, but it gets hotter in the daytime and colder at night. I've been wearing a couple of layers at least in bed every night.

Ecuadorian busses are a strange situation. There is no such thing as a bus stop. Conductors work very hard and shout out where they are going constantly as the bus moves. If anyone wants to get on or off, the bus will stop anywhere, even over a crossing or at a junction. At bus stations you just have to ask lots of people whether you can get to the place you want as there are no timetables or routes displayed. It's a strange situation, but it seems to work.

Ecuador is one of the World's biggest producers of coffee, but every single bean goes out of the country. There is no coffee culture here and people just drink instant coffee (which all comes from Columbia). When you ask people about this they say that Columbian coffee is the best in the World. But surely any kind of real coffee is going to be better than an instant. Quite sad. A coffee culture has sprung up in Britain in only about 15 years. I hope Ecuadorians discover their own produce and do the same.

Quito is just below the Equator. In the 18th Century, a French expedition arrived in Ecuador to try to pinpoint the exact position of the Equator. Today there is a tourist attraction at the point they deduced.

"Mittad del Mundo" (Centre of the World) is a large shopping and leisure complex. They have a massive monument over the equator and have marked the equatorial line through the complex. They have an "authentic colonial town" which looks like a set for a Western where there are loads of souvenir shops and restaurants. At weekends it's popular with locals.

Getting there proved a bit of a mission. I'd been given so much contradictory advice, but in the end went some of the way on Quito's swish new Tram system and some of the way on an ordinary bus.

When I got there I visited the worthy Ethnographic Museum in the monument. It has exhibits of some of the many indigenous and immigrant communities that make up this diverse country. I ended up speaking in French to a French tour group and found myself getting really confused using Spanish and French words together. Best to avoid French for a while I think!

I got pictures taken at the equator line, but it's actually a not very well kept secret that the Ciudad is not actually on the true equator at all. The French expedition was extremely accurate, but was actually 150m off! There is another museum just outside the gates to the Ciudad and along the street if you turn left.

In fairness, the main aim of the French expedition was not to pinpoint the equator but to prove that the earth was not a perfect sphere. This they did and the error in pinpointing the equator is extremely small.

The other museum is called Inti Ñan and tells the story of the indiginous (and pre-Inca) people who lived in Quito before the Spanish came.

The museum also capitialises on the fact that it's right on the equator (as determined by GPS - and maybe one day by Galileo...) and this is its main draw!

Basically, they have two things there: weird experiments and photo opportunities to do with the equator; and assorted aspects of life in the past for the Indiginous people in Quito and in the Amazon.

I'm a scientist by training and I'd heard about some of the weird things that are only possible on the equator and was keen to try them out.

Firstly, there's the "Water" trick. Anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, when you let the water out of a sink, the water will turn clockwise. In the southern hemisphere, it will go anti-clockwise. (OK, I may have got this the wrong way round but the principle is the same!). Anyway, at the equator, it goes straight down without twisting. And what's more, only a metre in either direction and it behaves as it should for the particular hemisphere.

Another neat trick is the "Fingers" trick. If you hold your index finger and thumb together and get someone to pull them apart, it's much easier to do so at the equator than just outside.

And another one is the "Pulling Arms Down" trick. If you hold your arms up, and get someone to pull them down, it's noticably easier to do it on the equator.

Lastly, there's the "Balancing an Egg on the Head of a Pin" trick, where, unsurprisingly you have to stand an egg upright (fat side down) on the head of a pin and it stays there. This is difficult even at the equator, but much more difficult away from it. Anyway, I'm proud to say that I managed it and have got a certificate to prove it! :-)

I find it hard to believe that a matter of two metres should make such a difference, but I've seen it and unless it's an elaborate hoax, it really works. Maybe there's something in this astrology nonsence after all if such a small difference in gravity makes such a difference?

Then there were the indigenous people aspects of the museum which were just as fascinating (even if a bit tourist targeted, but I didn't care).

There was the replica burial chamber where they explained that when a man died, his wife was buried alive to accompany him in the afterlife.

Then, there was a genuine house from the late 1800s.

Then, for some reason we jumped to the Amazon. This gave me the chance to fire a blow dart at a piece of cactus and to see a genuine shrunken head from around 1880. There was a tribe in Ecuador (can't remember their name) which was notorious for head shrinking and they provided a helpful guide to shrinking a head.

Lastly, there is the question of US influence on Ecuador and how sad it seems to be.

The official currency in Ecuador is the US Dollar and has been since a financial crisis in 1991. There does not now look to be any return to the former currency, the "Sucre". Dollarisation seems to have brought some stability to the country, but prices have gone up. Not just for holidaying gringos but for local people too.

Another sad fact is Oil. Ecuador is an oil producer but an American company stiched up a deal to buy ecuadorian oil at rock bottom prices (allegedly by bribing government officials). As Ecuador has virtually no oil refining facilities, they have to import petrol, but at market rates. As a result, the national oil company is the only oil company in the world to make a loss.

Then there are the banana plantations. I didn't get to see any of them as I was on the altiplano, but the prices local farmers get is so low that it is not worth it for many of them.

Anyway, I started writing this in Ecuador and that was a week ago! I'm now in Bolivia and have been having a great time in La Paz, the salt lakes and wild countryside in the South West. I'm now in the famous town of Potosí and went down the mines this morning. I'll update the blog when I can but it will drag even further behind the times until I get a chance to catch up. It takes a long time to write this thing and pictures take even longer! I have and will continue to reply to personal emails though.

---

Photos

Thesis Title
An Investigation of Gender Roles in Modern Ecuador

Getting on a pickup
to take us to the crater lake of Cuicocha

Looking back to last weekend
Not very clear in this picture, but in the background is the snow capped summit of Cotopaxi, where I went moutain biking last weekend.

Comments

[DAD]

What a lot! I will try to save to disc for Mum

[Mike]

At last!
Hi Nick, finally found the blog. Work blocks the site and I lost the email for a while. Will catch up with your adventures over the weekend. Love the gender roles fotos.