Bussing Around Ecuador

Hello!

So... the past two weeks involved a lot of time on buses (over 40 hours total!), but the travel time was well worth it, and I was able to see some other incredible areas of the country. Two Fridays ago was Good Friday so we all had the day off from training. Everyone in Ecuador makes a dish called Fanesca for Good Friday/Easter so most of the day was spent making this chunky soup. It contains 12 different types of grains/beans (all of which must be peeled individually = super time-consuming), some type of broth, milk, pieces of hard boiled egg, and optionally pieces of salt cod, which my family luckily left out of the mix. The Fanesca is served with an enormous mound of pura de papa (mashed potatoes) and a few cut up vegetables. Arroz con leche (rice with milk) is served for dessert, which is basically like a drinkable, hot, rice pudding with clove and star anise flavoring (and a ton of sugar). It doesn’t sound like much food for a holiday feast, but after ingesting the bowl of fiber followed by the lead weight of potatoes (and the seconds that are usually forced upon you), you’re lucky if you can get out of the chair.

Our first Fanesca meal was lunch on Good Friday. Then, at the last minute, my family decided that we were all going to Quito for dinner with other members of the family, and that we’d be sleeping over. Since all the trainees were leaving for Puerto Quito on Saturday at 2PM, I was a little leery that we’d be back in time on Saturday for me to pack and get to the bus in time. They assured me, however, that it wouldn’t be a problem. When we got there, a ton of family members (like 40 – 50) were playing “Coco” in the street. I think it’s similar to Baci in that everyone has a metal ball and you try to hit other people’s metal balls that are lying in the street. Every time you hit someone’s ball, they’re out of the game. The basic goal is for your ball to be the last ball in the street. It was 5 cents to enter the game, and whoever wins gets all the money in the pot. I lost 4 times in a row. :) The family was really into the game and kept yelling, “Matale, Matale!” (Kill him, kill him!). Once it got dark, we all headed inside to have another meal of Fanesca, mashed potatoes and arroz con leche. It’s very common for extended families to live together here, and all 50 family members had small apartments in the complex. I’m not sure if they all always eat together, but tonight everyone piled in the grandparents place for dinner. Four guys were watching the Passion of Christ on TV, there were three groups of people playing Rummy and the plethora of kids were running around like mad. And this was just my host mother’s side of the family (she has 8 sisters)... crazy! That night I bunked up in the grandparent’s bedroom. I was in one bed, they were in another about 2 feet away from my bed, and the entire perimeter of the room was covered with Virgin Mary and Jesus statues. The sleeping arrangement was a little weird, but the 4 hours of Rummy tired me out so I slept pretty well. In the morning, we had breakfast (twice – once at the grandparent´s apt and again at what I think was one of the brother-in-law’s apts downstairs). I thought it might be a good idea to start heading back to Cayambe, but instead I was handed a pair of really short shorts and an Argentinean soccer jersey – It was time for futbol. The trip back to Cayambe is about 1.5 hours without traffic and it was already 10:00, so I was a bit concerned. We played for about an hour trying to avoid the two pigs that were sifting through a pile of garbage next to the right goal post, and then we finally ended up leaving Quito at 11:00. On the way out, however, my host father asked if we could stop at his mother’s house at the opposite end of Quito just to say hello. Oy! I reluctantly agreed, and long story short we ended up arriving in Cayambe at 1:30PM. I packed in about a minute and a half and then my host father rushed me back to the training center to catch the bus with 5 minutes to spare!

The bus ride to Puerto Quito took about 5 hours and we dropped quite a bit in elevation as we headed down the western slope of the Andes. The vegetation changed dramatically, and the scenery was much more lush and tropical. The place we stayed at for the week was really nice. It had a bar, two pools, a bunch of hammocks, soccer, volleyball, a river, etc. We had the weekend off, which was great, and a couple of us headed into the town of Puerto Quito and had some really good shrimp ceviche. The climate here is totally different that in the mountains, and it was about 85 degrees everyday and super humid. The training activities during the week were pretty good and included a conflict resolution workshop, a value-added products workshop (i.e. instead of selling raw fruit, turn it into jelly and sell it for 4 times the price), how to best work with NGO’s, how to build irrigation systems and terraced farming areas, a trip to a cacao processing plant, a visit to a small town where a Peace Corps volunteer had started a jewelry workshop with the women, and a trip to a cloud forest reserve called Macchikapuna. The jewelry workshop was located in a super small town where the school kids collect local seeds and then the women transform the seeds into necklaces, earrings, bracelets, etc. It was a neat little operation. At the cloud forest reserve we got super lucky and spotted a spectacled bear in one of the trees. This is the only type of bear in South America (it has white rings around its eyes, hence the name), and the guides at the park said they only see them once or twice a year. At the end of the week, we had a big party and a talent show which was hysterical. I imitated one of the trainers in a fake dating game skit where we poked fun at all the quirky characteristics of the trainers.

At the end of the week, after a lot of pool/river time, the trainees split up into groups, and I went with the three other IT trainees down to a small 1500 person town in the southeast of the country called San Juan Bosco. Since the total trip is about 20 hours from Puerto Quito, we broke it up into two legs and spent the night in the city of Cuenca, which is really nice and historic. On the Quito to Cuenca leg we hit a big landslide at about 5AM and ended up having to wait 3 hours for some guys with shovels to clear a path. It was pretty crazy and buses were sliding all over the place. A bunch of guys were trying to push the buses in the right direction, and the whole scene was somewhat comical. After a nice night in Cuenca we started on a 6 hour bus journey to San Juan Bosco on a super narrow dirt road with a cliff on one side and no guard rail. The town was really nice, and I think the people there receive quite a bit of money from family members that are living in the States. The climate was perfect here and was much less humid than in Puerto Quito. In this town, we spent the week working with the IT guy from the Peace Corps office and two locals named Angel and Carlos that set the town up with Internet via a radio signal. It was pretty interesting to see how different things are in such a small town. We spent some time checking out problems with a cable drop in the municipio (county offices), checked out the computer lab in the school, attempted to use a Linux box to place bandwidth limits on each computer in the municipio, etc. We also piled in a Toyota 4Runner one day and headed an additional hour into the jungle on an extremely bumpy dirt road with several stream crossings to a 150 person town called Pananza. It took two attempts to get there since in the morning there was a landslide that blocked the whole road. Finally, when we arrived in the afternoon the people there thought we were miners wanting to dig on their land and it took a bit of work to convince them that we were only there to help network four of their computers that Angel had sold to them a month or two prior. On the second to last day, the mayor invited us to have lunch at his house. His wife served rabbit, which we were all a bit leery of but it was actually really good. I lucked out and got what I think was the rabbit ass since it was a lot more tender than the legs that everyone else got! Finally on the last day, after tinkering with some computers, we headed out to the local river to go “fishing” with Angel. Fishing here entailed throwing a piece of dynamite in the water and then harvesting the dead fish that float down stream after the explosion! Unfortunately we only caught two fish that were about 3 inches long, so the fishing experience wasn’t too fruitful. Instead we ended up grilling up some T-bone steaks next to the river along with some plantains, potatoes, yucca, and veggies – all of which were really good. The steaks were huge and were 10 for $18 – not bad!

Finally after an action packed week, we headed back to Cayambe on yet another 20 hour bus ride where we sat through 3 painfully bad Antonio Banderas movies. My host family was excited to see me and said the two-year old was saying my name the whole time I was gone. We had some potted chicken and potatoes for dinner and that was the end of the two week adventure.

I’ll be here in Cayambe for another week, and then I’m in Quito for one week before I finally swear in as a volunteer. By then, I’ll hopefully be ready for another super long bus ride to Loja!

Hope you enjoy the pictures below (click to enlarge - you may have to click a few times).