Wandering to the waterfalls, days spent in hammock, threw up all over the side of the bus

I'm in Otavalo right now, (this is the third time now, and the first time I´ll be spending more than a day here) about 2 hours north of Quito.

So I´m now at Day 48, I think overall I'm doing well.

So, going back to last Wednesday, that evening there was a football game on TV, Brazil vs. Ecuador. The importance that Ecuadorians place on football games, especially one with their national teams playing the world's top team, approaches the kind of energy involved in the Carnaval in Rio. We went to a bar in the Mariscal with a large screen TV. Very quickly, the place was absolutely packed. Then the game began. The energy in that little bar, whenever the ball went close to either end of the field, was incredible. When the score got to 3-0 Brazil, some people got up and left. At 4-0 there was an upset roar. At 5-0, the people got the bartender to shut the TV off. It was quiet appalling actually, as the Brazilians pulled off some insanely lucky goals, and the Ecuadorians missed some really easy ones. In summary, football is a religious-scale spectator sport, that is very cool to both watch and participate in.

Saturday, with my classes finished the day before, I packed up everything and went to the bus station for a bus to Mindo, but found out that the next one didn't leave until 3:45 that afternoon. I ended up, instead, going to a BBQ at my friend Ivan's house, and elected to go to Mindo the next day. Ivan, as it developed, lives a long way from the Metro part of Quito, and it took over an hour going around snaking bypasses and freeways to get there. After the whole group of us arrived, we went out on our trip to get things for the BBQ. The meat market was truly disgusting, with all the bits of dead animals hanging everywhere, and the smell is nauseating. The BBQ, in summary, was fabulous, with this rather old coal barbeque, cooking chicken and hot dogs. After the food, out come the guitars, and we listen to the Ecuadorian guys play various classic songs while Ivan's dad built a fire in the middle of the backyard out of bits of construction materials. Almost everyone left at 10, the rest of us went to the local karaoke bar, which basically entailed Ivan and the Ecuadorians, boozed up, singing along to all the songs (in perfect tune and rhythm), and a bartender who obviously thought that white people (there were 3 of us at this point), equated to profit potential, and kept hassling Isaak to buy more beer. The boys were singing at the top of their lungs all the way home too. In all it was a great party to finish my time in Quito, and will leave me with good memories of the otherwise, overcrowded, overpolluted city.

Sunday, got up early, Ivan's mom gave me a cup of hot blueberry juice. Took a bus back to the Metro, stopped for a breakfast of fruit at this really cool restaurant, the Fruteria Montserrate, and sat in the bus station for 3.5 hours waiting for the bus to Mindo. The road to Mindo is really, very beautiful, with the road, rolling through lush, coastal cloud forest. However, I was feeling shitty from a lack of sleep, food and the bus going top speed around crazy, winding corners. I got to Mindo, which is 2.5 hours NW of Quito. It was really beautiful there, very quiet. My time there was to be a relaxation period to start off this new leg in my trip. There were a group of clowns/entertainers in the central parka doing juggling and other tricks for a crowd of little school kids. I found the hostal, recommended by Luis, La Casa de Cecilia. Cecilia, is a very friendly, middle-aged woman, and judging from the setup (outdoor kitchen with tile flooring), has done really well for herself here. Went out to find dinner, when I came back there were 2 girls from Colorado that had moved into the dorm. Sarah, 22, and Betsy, 32, who apparently came here because they didn´t know what they wanted to do with themselves. Woke up the next morning, it was very nice to wake up to the sounds of birds and running water rather than the morning rush hour traffic. Mindo is technically in the coastal region of Ecuador, so the humidity is high here, and there are a decent number of mosquitoes (thank god for antimalarials). The girls and I went out on a hike after breakfast, going out past small farms and hostels. We spotted a large black snake (somewhere around 5 to 6 feet long) in the grass off the road, so there are large serpents around here. We found this fabulous little restaurant for dinner, Caskesu, which opened in May, housing a B&B in small Suessian-like buildings. Good chili. Tuesday, we went back for breakfast, and talked a lot with Susan, the American woman who owns the place with her Ecuadorian husband. She apparently was a Peace Corp. volunteer working in Ecuador, and is a trained nurse, that felt the need to get out of that line of work before she got too old, and so came back to Ecuador and opened the place with her husband, and got the father of her godchildren to build it. As well, with the town with a bank, and her credit card machines, she is the de facto Bank of Mindo. She served the best coffee I´ve had since I arrived in Ecuador. We bought tickets from her to ride a cable tram for a hike to a group of 7 waterfalls near Mindo. So we hiked up to the tram, called a tarabita, and rode it across the valley, and hiked north to the largest of the falls, Cascada Reina. There was a group of students from an environmental club arriving the tram when we got back. We hiked south down to the other 6 waterfalls, but it started to rain, so we decided to head back early. Met a pair of girls from Maine, and a couple from Vancouver, all of whose names escape me, on the way back up. The students were going across the tram first, but with all 7 of us foreigners, and about 2 dozen of the students left, the tram operator decided the cables were getting too hot, and told us we´d have to hike back across the valley, in the rain, to the other side. So off we trudged, one of the boys in the student group, who spoke near-perfect, and rather formal, English, talked with us the way back. Apparently, he learned his english from music, loves Christina Aguilera, and wanted to grow up to be an environmental lawyer. I also had a wasp sting me on the neck, which left me with swelling and an ache for the rest of the day. Because of the tram failure, we got a free truck ride back to Mindo. All in all, this was a great start to this new leg of trip, feeling very relaxed now after 6 weeks in Quito.

Yesterday, the Colorado girls left at the crack of dawn to catch the early bus back to Quito. I spent the morning doing sewing and other maintenance on my things. It was around this time that the sickness began to set in, with a headache and upset stomach, but I didn't think it was bad at the time. I tried to do my email in Mindo, but the connection there was painfully slow and I couldn't send anything, so I aimed to get the 2 pm bus out of Mindo. I proceeded to run around packing and washing my clothes. I didn't know you had to hook up the gas to the dryer, all my clothes were slightly damp as I put them in my pack. I made the bus with 5 minutes to spare. On the bus ride back up, it became evident that was I actually quite sick. Because of my time in Mindo, I'd come down with acclimatization sickness that you get from your body adapting to the equatorial coastal climate. Got to Quito, the girls from Maine elected to spend the night in Quito, and the Vancouver couple had a wedding to go to on the Galapagos. I flagged a cab to the bus station, and took the bus here, to Otavalo, as I wasn't entertained with spending a night in Quito. The movie they showed on the bus was The Green Mile, and the old man sitting next to me talked to about how the imprisonment style and treatment of criminals in the movie used to be common in Ecuador until fairly recently. He also told me how buses like the one we were on, at that time of day (around 6:30 pm), when things got quiet, were the most likely times for hold ups and robberies. About an hour from Otavalo, the sickness got to me, and I threw up, mostly over the side of the bus as we hurtled along the highway, as I´d had enough presence of mind to open the window in time. The old man gave me a plastic bag and a few napkins to clean up the mess. Feeling light-headed and exhausted, I got off at Otavalo. I had no idea where in Otavalo I was, so I got a cab to take me to a good, cheap hostel. Went this one, Casa de Corea, not surprisingly run by Koreans. They charged me $5, but I had to unpack half my bag to get the money, and when I gave her a 10, she said she needed my passport and we had to go down the street to another place to get change. I found out that my shampoo ahd leaked in my bag, all over one pair of pants and my alarm clock, which still seems to be ticking, and smells like orange now. It was all getting too much by this point. Managed to get up to my room, which was clean, but run-down, with chips out of the walls and bathroom fixtures. it smelled heavily of cigarettes, and had a very modern Daewoo TV. The bed was the hardest I've ever slept on, but felt good in the state I was in. Tried my best to clean the vomit off everything and hang my other clothes, still damp, to dry. The coffee I had in my bag leaked all over my white T-shirt. Somehow, in the end, I managed to get everything together, and slept like the dead. I guess the lesson from this is trying to find getting from Mindo to Otavalo, with laundry, in one day.

This morning, I took a damage report. aside from wet clothes, and a shampooed clock, everything was more or less fine. Leaving the horrible hostel, I found a place for breakfast, Casa de Frutas. The place gives the air of being a hippie commune, with dozens of potted plants taking up most of the space in the building and courtyard, cages full of small colourful birds, the Beatles and Bob Marley playing in the background, tie dye cloth hangings over all the door frames, collections of masks, and various other bits of artwork, hammocks and dream catchers. Anyway, I had this great breakfast of eggs and fruit, and the owner, a woman called Sheree, asked if I wanted a place to stay, as the one room she has to rent was vacated earlier this morning The room was nice, with bamboo mats and posters of Che Guevara, so I took it. This is fabulous as far as I'm concerned, and makes a lovely change from last night.


Signing off,

Andrew