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Pucará
In the Intag Valley ...I CLOSE the assemblage of barbed wire and rough poles that does duty for a gate and join the neighbours' children at the roadside. While I´m exchanging morning greetings with Doña Consuela, a
camioneta comes along; she shepherds all of us up onto the truck floor. I am among a gaggle of primary school kids and three of the oldest people I´ve ever seen. One has rheumy eyes. On is bent over like an inverted L. The third is so frail he could vanish in front of my eyes. On the way we pass
los orsos waiting for their bus. They´re not bears, just ¨bear volunteers¨ known as
"los gringos de los orsos, the bear volunteers." They pay US$600 a month to live in a house in the village and participate in the Andean Bear Research Project. A local guide takes them out in the cloud forest carrying electronic gismos that make radio contact with receivers on the bears´collars. Thus they collect information about their whereabouts. Actual sitings are rare, but contributing to this project intended to stop the bears becoming extinct is a good way to see the country.
Our convenance stops outside the church, the kids hop out
Pucará
... the clouds are continually passing by. and run off towards the primary school. I try to pay the driver, who refuses to take my
dinero. Trying to negotiate this I miss watching the oldies get down from the truck: a long drop for even me. They are helped up the steps of the Spanish Language School, where they head for the rotunda and sit down. The L shaped old lady still has her wits about her because she finds a cloth to wipe the bench before her husband sits on it. She may not have her sight, tho: the bench ends up dirtier than it was before. It turns out they have come to consult the travelling doctor, and that they are in the wrong place. They totter off and are helped back down the steps.
Steve and Ali are preparing the school to receive some new overseas volunteers, who arrive, quite normally,a couple of hours after they are expected. Steve has prepared a diagram of the working of the solar showers to show them, constant hot water by convection. They arrive, and climb down from their truck bearing gifts for the school, a welcome site to me. Now there are four reading books for
Pucará
Don Delfin is a local farmer. us Spanish students to devour. Ali takes the the donors, who are US high school students, on a tour of the village.
I have my lesson. Carmen, my teacher, is self contained and dignified. She explains the facts of Spanish grammar disspasionately. Two hours later the volunteers return and collect their gear. Ali and Steve take them to meet their host families. I return to a late lunch with Doña Emelia.
DOÑA EMELIA´S food is wonderful. Every morning she hops out of bed with enthusiasm and, as soon as she has finished doing the stretches that her 70 years dictate, starts cooking maize tortillas on the open fire in her room. Breakfast is huge, yoghurt and tortillas, with jam if wanted (especially for guests), and eggs, chicken, rice, fried bananas. Aromatic tea made with herbs fresh from the garden. She doesn't do all her cooking on the open fire; she does have four gas rings. Some things she prefers to cook in the traditional way. There is no chimney over the fire, just a plank missing from the wall behind it. Emelia blends fruit and then strains it into glasses. Fruit juice is important. Every home has a
Pucará
These workmen are renovating the church. blender. They are cheap and all the parts are replacible. "The one essential kitchen appliance," Ali calls it. Emelia also makes a hot drink, colada, with fresh fruit. The first it was plantain and milk,the next tapioca and strawberry flavoured with an orange leaf, last night guava and oats. It is like a hot milkshake and makes a very satisfying desert after the evening soup.
I tell her I am full. She tells me I need lots of energy to do my tai chi and to study Spanish. She gives me a fullsized plate and herself a side plate. I tell her I don´t want rice for breakfast, so she fries chips instead. I leave a piece of chicken in my soup bowl, so she tells me to eat it. This morning I asked her to give me half a plate, but I can hear all sorts of goodies frying in the back room. Last night she asked me if Alison had questioned me about how I find it with her.
I told her I´d said, ¨Todos es beunos.¨
What else did you tell her?¨
¨Dicele todos es beunos. Doña Emelia es amiable y la comida
Pucará
The children often have to play in the clouds ... de Doña Emilia es bueonissima.¨ (I told her everything is great Doña Emelia is lovely and her food is wonderful beyond compare.) She got up and did a little dance around the room. Then she hugged and kissed me. She loves to feed others.
She bounds over her fields like a moutain work. ¨Not to work is not to exist,¨she told me. Emelia slashing through the growth on her farm with a machete is a sure candidate for Wimbledon. Forearem, backstroke, smash and lob, she has all the strokes. Again, amazing views. Under her trees she keeps sticks of just the right length to get the fruit down with. The one for the big beans has a hook on the end, so that she can twist the branch until it snaps. A different stick for the mandarin tree, another one for the guavas.
IT IS a day of working, eating, and chatting for these villagers. The main aim of life is to feed the family. Thirteen kids was the number in the family Ali and Steve first stayed with. The oldest is thirty and the youngest three. Farming involves mixed planting on land which is traditionally deserted when
Pucará
... but on clear days they can see this volcano. all the goodness is gone out of the soil. Anything grows. Huge avocado trees. Cabbages as tall as me. Bananas and strawberries. Guavas and corn. It is a land for abundance. Some families raise guinea pigs, rabbits, chickens and pigs. Coffee treesare scattered around the farm. Coffee beans mature at differential rates, so there is a continuous light picking. The beans go to the cooperative in the next town, Apuela. The best beans are sold as the famous Intag Valley coffee.
Traditional building are of wattle and daub, the mud being worked and worked before it is placed in the frame. Modern houses are breeze block, perhaps with cement floors. The old style floors are just mud, the actual ground. Guinea pigs scuttle around some of the kitchens and chickens run around, even in and out of the bedrooms.
THERE IS a scandal in the village. The village president was on his way to Apuela to collect his child from preschool and he stopped in at Don Delfin´s to enjoy a glass of
aguadiente, the local sugarcane brew. After a few hours of happy drinking they tried to dissuade him from driving on down the valley. But he
Pucará
Locals chat outside one of the two shops in the village. did, and the preschool teacher refused to give him his daughter on the grounds that he was drunk. He punched the teacher, so the police were called. They popped him into jail and charged him with assault and driving under the influence. They don´t have a bail system here, instead a member of the community has to go and vouch for an offender´s good character. No one was in a rush to go and get hin of of jail, even though the wagging tongues blamed the moonshine maker more than the one who´d overconsumed on the way to the preschool. I haven't heard that he's been let out.
RAIN IN Pucará. June and July are supposed to be the dry months. Every day there has been light rain, but the night before last it started. Hard, heavy rain. Drumming on the tin roof. Dragging down the temperature. Churning up the mud on the road.
The road is made of wonderful cobblestones, right through the village, and gives way to dirt only on the very outskirts. The day after I arrived a grader tidied the edges and spread earth right across it. When I said to Ali that this
Apuela
Lower down the valley is the nearby market town of Apuela. was a shame, she said the smooth surface made riding in the bus much more pleasant. I took her point. But after a night of rain it is a quagmire, albeit one with a firm foundation undert the slush. Most people, locals and volunteers alike wear Wellington boots. Ali wears blue gum boots, and Steve has white. He says they are cooler on hot days because they reflect the heat. Carmen walks around in tiny sandals, claiming they are easy to walk in, open and with pointy toes.
Carmen quietly picks her way down this difficult road in the rain, her eleven year old brother picking up the things her baby drops without complaint. The baby is tired and cries. So her mother suggests she might like to sleep, shifts her position from hip to arms, covers iher n her shawl against the rain, and the child is asleep in minutes, a dead weight. When we get to Ali and Steve´s place Ali puts a plate of beans and rice infront of them and we can see Amiable the boy is oh so hungry. He comes every day to class with her, to mind the baby around the village.
Apuela
Adults always have time for a chat. YESTERDAY WE went to the market in Apuela. We stood on the road waiting for a lift. A quadmoto came along, so Ali and I perched on the back. Loads of fun. Through thick mud, at risk of falling filthy, and of cracking our skulls. But we arrived safely in the small town below. It is certainly warmer there. The small market takes place once a week in stall set up infront of the church. I bought a toothbrush for a dollar. Ali bought lots of veggies. We internetted in Apuela, on a dreadfully slow connection. We came back in a
camión, everyone standing and holding onto a tree branch secured at head height along the centre of the truck. Bone crunching fun for 25 cents.
LAST NIGHT we drank in the bar. The volunteers have finished their work. Four US highschool students and their tutor built a garden infront of the church at the centre of the village as well as fitting in a few language lessons. Ali and Steve collected their evaluation forms and their fees and walked around the village paying the families what was due to them.
The bar is a makeshift bamboo
Pucará
The only bar in the village is open on Saturday evening. arrangement with a small kitchen and a few tables. It opens at the weekend. Saturday after noon is spent in preparations. Beside it is a sugarcane press and a large fireplace. They boil the extracted juice to make a natural sugar, panella. They also jug the juice and serve it as a drink, with a shot of the alcoholic variety added at no extra cost. Meals are available, but most people go there to enjoy the alcohol. We are moving on on Monday morning and it is a fitting way to mark our departure.
¡Salud! Travel Notes
Pucará is 2.5 hours by bus from the Otavalu bus station. The village stradles the highway. Don't arrive without first contacting the homestay organiser. (Otavalu is 2 hours from Quito (US$2.00).)
About an hour beyond Pucará, on the same road, are the thermal baths of Nangulví. There are warm and cool swimming pools, and beside them are a restaurant and some tourist cabañas, which charge little for an overnight stay (an upmarket alternative to a village homestay).
Links The CASA project in Pucará The Intag Spanish School and homestay scheme The Andean Bear Reseach Project Guided tour information How I've Been
Ali and Steve spent three months
Pucará
Alison and Carlitos wait for the teachers to arrive at the language school. in Pucará, during which time they helped the Spanish School get established and administered the homestay program. (The overall program also involves sustainable agriculture, and the construction of low-cost housing.)
They met me off the bus in Otavalu. We spent three days there looking around, and got the bus to Pucará, where I spent two weeks staying with Doña Emelia and studying Spanish with Doña Carmen. Then Steve spent two more nights in Otavalu, while Ali and I went halfway to the coast and stayed in the subtropical village which is Carmen's home. I'll be going back there again later. We met up in Quito, slept a night, and flew to Medellin in Columbia, where I'm writing this in a cheap hotel in what was once the centre of the cocaine trade.
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An Erratic Traveller
Gillian Perrett
Hopefully this worked.
I have annotated all the photos, but it´s unclear to me whether the final changes were saved correctly. My apologies if you can´t see them all.