Went off to a remote village, had the bus break down, it doesn´t stop raining

Day 32

It´s been raining for 13 straight hours now, and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Today is the memorial day for the death of Che Guevara, who rivals Jesus here as a respected figure in society, there are celebrations across the country, including one here in Quito, held on the city´s university campus. The big one apparently though is in Guayaquil.

So going back to Tuesday, I felt better after a good sleep, and my sickness cleared up by Wednesday. I´ve graduated now to reading the newspaper, my periodico of choice is El Comercio, the country´s more left-leaning paper. As of Wednesday, the rainy season has officially begun. This constitutes fairly heavy rain every afternoon here, with the exception of these last 2 days. Also on Wednesday, I managed to lock myself out of my room in the apartment (in typical Andrew-esque fashion), and had Leo spend a good half hour trying to break in, however, because the lock on my door is the only one that was properly assembled, he was unable to do so, and I ended up needing to get the master keys from Cesar. Thursday evening, a group of us went up to my apartment for a tiramisu night. The tiramisu itself was actually really good, after it had been in the freezer for long enough, the process of making it was loads of fun and extraordinarily messy. Good fun though.

Friday, I decided I needed a break from Quito, debated whether to get a ticket, but it started to rain, so I abandoned this idea. So, on Saturday, I got up early went down to the bus terminal, went to Latacunga, about 2 hours south of Quito. A few observations: first, it takes a long time to leave the "suburbs" of Quito, and all there are people living all along the Panamericana, the main highway that runs the length of the continent. About Latacunga, it´s a fairly large, farming town, and due to a HUGE food market selling masses of all kinds of plants and dead animals, it´s pretty smelly too. The land around, however, looks like the Okanagan, very dry and dusty, but with more people and higher mountains. I decided this wasn´t really a good escape and got on a bus for Zumbahua, a small town 2 hours west of Latacunga. A little way up the hills out, the bus picked up a flat and rolled to a mechanic and spent about half an hour replacing the tire. The road up out of the valley is lined with aloe vera the size of Volkswagen´s and small collections of crosses on the switchbacks, where drivers failed to navigate the corners. Soon, we rose out onto the ´paramo´, the high altitude plains. The land is stark grey, very dusty, with patchwork farms all over the hills, which were clouded over as we went along. The conditions that people live under here is also very stark, places that I reckon I would die of hypothermia in if I had to live in them. Some still live in mud and straw huts. The inequality of living conditions here in comparison to the cities is almost surreal, it´s almost hard to believe that people live under these conditions. After about an hour, the llamas began to appear, as did more indigenous people. However, even up there, people had spray painted the rocks along the road with campaign slogans of the recently past election.

When I reached Zumbahua, I didn´t know we had arrived until the driver told me to get off, the whole area was clouded over, and the town is downhill from the main road. Almost immediately after getting off the bus, a boy called Jason, came bouncing out one of the roadside stores and asked if I needed a ride to Laguna Quilotoa, the volcanic crater an hour to the north where most of the tourists head
to. After understanding that I was only here for a night, he took meback to the store and gave me food, then drove me down to a hotel on the town square, called the Condor Matzi. After Jason viciously beat the front door, the owner came out, took one look at me, broke into a huge smile and took me up to a room. The room had no exterior windows, but had a nice warm bed. I sat out on the hotel balcony watching the locals play volleyball in the square, and the local dogs beat each other up. The night there was very cold, due to it´s elevation of about 4000m above sea level.

I slept well that night, despite waking up several times. On Sunday morning, I walked out of the hotel to find that a bunch of woman had set up stalls all along the street, selling breakfast. I sat on the sidewalk and ate my eggs and potato chips, watching the dogs slink around the stalls trying to catch the scraps from the stoves. It was evident that foreigners are very much a rarity here, with almost
everyone looking at me as they walked by. After breakfast, the owner of the hotel told me about the "minga" happening here to put in a new water main along the main road. Minga is a Quechua word, and it´s the word to describe when many people in an area, sometimes as far as 3 days travel away, come together to achieve a communal project. I decided to climb the hill above the town, with a white cross on top, so I asked a man about how to get to the top, and he got his little daughter to be my guide. Her name was Marisa, and she took me up what must have been a llama trail, almost straight up the side of the hill, lined with these sharp cactus plants, that I avoid after catching my pants on one. I am really unacclimatized to 4000m and
had to stop often to catch my breath. We got to thetop after about an hour and half, the view from the top was fabulous. We ate apples and went back down (an easier route).

After packing up, and lunch at Jason´s store, got on the bus back to Latacunga, and then to Quito. Halfway back to Quito though, the bus broke down, some problem with the rear axle. After a long drawn-out fiasco regarding the bus, which involved some people getting on and off the bus 3 or 4 times, we rolled to a gas station where most of the passengers got onto another bus. There were a few of us left, so we had to stand out on the road, in the pouring rain, many of them freezing, as a result, until a pair of police trucks picked us up. We rode in the still pouring rain in the back of the pickups until the next bus terminal, and got on a bus home. Got home, albeit very wet, but generally happy. Yesterday, After classes, tried to do this
email, but the electricity went out, which was extraordinarily frustrating, as I was almost finished.

This brings us to today. With lots of rain, the conditional tense in classes, and playing billiards all afternoon.