A Tale of Two Shitties

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/mapshells/south_america/peru/peru.htm

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/mapshells/south_america/ecuador_and_the_galapagos_islands/ecuador_and_the_galapagos_islands.htm


It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. There was an abundance of poo, there was a dearth of poo. And though I am sworn to utmost secrecy regarding bowel-movement particulars as such, suffice it to say that the toilet adventures continue, and it was really fun to approach the pharmacy counter with our dictionary open to 'constipation-estreñimiento' and point at it ruefully to the amused pharmacist.

Before we lay this subject to rest, I feel I should mention as well the cardinal rules du toilette as understood by the Peruvians and Ecuadorians:

1. Throw your used toilet paper in the trash can, not in the toilet (assuming you use toilet paper).
2. Assuming you use toilet paper, always carry some with you, as it is not considered the responsibility of the toilet proprietor to provide it, even if it's a bathroom you have to pay for.
3. Tampons make you lose your virginity. Don't use them.
4. However, it is perfectly acceptable for those of the masculine persuasion to drop trou anytime, anywhere, and water the sidewalk, including in front of your pleasant seat on the patio of a restaurant.
5. Learn to complete your bidness without the aid of a toilet seat, because maybe toilets with seats are ridiculously more expensive than those without, but regardless they are few and far between.

And so we leave the ever-appealing subject of baños and turn to the equally fascinating topic of Baños, the colorful town in the Ecuadorian Andes in which we have established ourselves in the last few days. I say colorful because it's not actually that pretty, but when you look down at it from one of the many mountain overlooks above the town, you see spots of garish turquoise, blistery pink, pustule-ish yellow, and more where people have painted the fronts (and only the fronts) of stores and houses, I suppose, to distinguish themselves from their less chromatically vibrant neighbors. And I say "established" because it's a bit like Brigadoon--I'm writing this at an admittedly funky vegetarian gringo hangout spot run by an American who came here 12 years ago and never left, and the travelers we've met seem to set up shop and stay weeks or months instead of days. It's understandable--there is not just one but many edibly-inclined restaurants that comprehend the use of the vegetable in everyday cooking, there are rivers and mountains and canyons and volcanoes and waterfalls in close proximity, for easy exploration by foot, bike, motorbike, horse, or guided tour, depending on the size of your purse and whether you are traveling on Pounds Sterling or dollars--needless to say the Brits we've met have been living the high life. And after you've torn your hamstrings hiking up a mountain ("Just a little further now" to the next-highest viewpoint) and bruised your sitbones biking past 30 kms of waterfalls (of course, walking up and down the ravines to see each from the best possible vantage point), you can go soak in the hot springs that give the town its name and somehow feel like it was all worthwhile.

Any wonder, then, that the town's patron saint is the Virgen de la Agua Santa, or Virgin of the Holy Water, to whom the immense cathedral is dedicated. This lifestyle of self-punishment so you can reward yourself finds a bit of a twisted metaphor in the activities of the Virgin. The cathedral is covered in paintings of her various miracles, almost all of which involve sparing from certain death someone who had an auto/burro/bridge-building/etc. accident over the town's ravine. A few involved sparing homes, businesses, and families from fires or volcanic eruptions when they tacked a poster of the Virgin to their door or had a vision of her during the catastrophe. The Virgin never seems to prevent the disasters (she seems to actually delight in them, because otherwise she'd be out of work), but rather to rescue the Elect from the claws of death once they're in the epicenter of the disaster. For good measure, a 6m high statue of the Virgin sits above town on one of the mountain lookouts, and on the other side of town a gigantic cross decorates another. Both are illuminated at night, lest we ever forget.

It has been nice to relax and Rip-Van-Winkle away almost a week here after the hectic adventures in various forms of transportation and yes, even in crime, that we were "enjoying" previously. To whit: in the several weeks preceding this, we covered a lot of ground in a lot of buses that were varying degrees of scary, not to mention the colectivos, taxis, and (once) train. The first bus we rode, a city bus in Lima, was (to my inexperienced gaze anyway) crammed full of people, and we were on the bench seat against the back wall. In front of us, a man standing up spent the entire 45-minute ride pressing and rubbing his manhood against the arm of a woman sitting down. It was sleazy and disgusting and the woman pretended to ignore it the whole time, while I spent the ride imagining braver, more fluent in Spanish versions of myself interceding and telling him exactly what I thought he was an offering him my seat so he wouldn't have to stand anymore. It was one of those what-would-Sarah-Leeper-do moments and unfortunately she was on the wrong Dark Continent at the time and I failed miserably.

That night was our first long-distance bus, overnight and the worst we've had so far. We had seats but our windows were controlled by the people in front of and behind us, who exercised their right to keep it stifling hot and lay their seats back as far as they could go. On top of this there were people crammed in the aisles, they never stopped for the bathroom (for 9 hours) and we were dropped off at 5 am on the deserted streets of Huaraz, prey to cannibalistic taxi drivers hungry for commission to take us to the hotels they had deals with.

Since then, transportation has mostly improved--but not the mountain driving, which is uniformly reckless and hair-raising. One equally beautiful and harrowing ride was through the Cañon del Pato (Canyon of the Duck) between Caraz and Chimbote, Peru, where the bus hugs the canyon wall the whole time and goes through tunnels that, to put it mildly, aggravated Jodi's claustrophobia. After the Canyon there was still about 4 hours left of the ride, and people would get on and off the bus in the middle of nowhere (Where had they come from? How did they know the bus was coming? These will always remain mysteries). The girl who began the ride sitting in front of us, wearing makeup, heels, and a tight zebra-print top with plenty of decolletage got off in the middle of the desert with no signs of life in a radius of probably 20 miles. People strapped boxes of chickens to the roof and even put a gaggle of goats underneath in one of the baggage compartments.

For shorter trips, vans operate that are apparently endless in their capacity to fit more people on--probably twice as many as were on that bus in Lima the first day when I thought it was full. And before coming to Baños, we had one of our most interesting travel experiences to date--riding on the roof of the train from Riobamba, Ecuador to Alausí, and then down a mountain dubbed the Nariz del Diablo (Devil's Nose) for the difficult and steep switchbacks. Although that's the famous part of the ride, the beginning was much better--climbing on the roof at 6am, buying empanadas from the girls who walk over the slippery roof blessed with enviable feline balance, and watching the world come awake through the morning, waving to kids who run after the train hoping you'll throw down some candy. 7 hours was a tad too long to be sitting on the corrugated-iron roof crammed next to an annoying threesome of German and American tourists who spent a lot of the ride loudly discussing how awesome it was when they were so fucked up for a week in Máncora (a beach town in Peru where we spent a few days surfing. By "we" I mean Jodi). Still, it was an experience not to be missed.

We have been happy to be in Ecuador for the last week or so--the differences from Peru are subtle but important. For example, there is toilet paper in the bathrooms a greater percentage of the time, the men are not quite so persistently macho (although when they do want your attention they tend to use a degrading hissing sound that I won't miss), it rains less, there are more travelers to get advice from, and the food is often better--they seem to "get" the idea that tomatoes and avocadoes are yummy. They sell Magnum ice creams for $1. The list goes on, but you get the idea. Most importantly, our life of crime seems to have been put on hold for awhile since we left Peru (touch wood).

Our last week in Peru we were passed a counterfeit 20-sol note ($6, but still 1/2 our daily budget), which we tried to use several times until one of the shopkeepers told us to pull it from both ends quickly and it ripped, which real bills don't do. I thought of writing to the Ethicist about this--if you, through no fault of your own but ignorance, acquire a bill which you later learn is false, is it wrong/bad karma to pass it to someone else, or, because the damage has already been done to the economy, is it okay? Later, we wished it had been in one piece to pay the crooked asshole taxi driver who tried to charge us $40 to drive us to the Peru/Ecuador border (he quoted us about 50c. which he later claimed was to a different place in town). When we figured it out, we got in a screaming match where he threatened to drive off with our bags if we didn't pay him $20--he said "gasolina, entiendes, gasolina" and Jodi shot back "asshole, entiendes, asshole"--we ended up being dropped in the middle of nowhere, but at least with our bags, our purse $3 lighter (why we even paid him that much I'm not sure; I'll chalk it up to flusteredness and fear). We made it over the border eventually, fighting off entrepreneurial (to put it nicely) souls all vying for our dollar for one thing or another, and the next day made it to the lovely town of Cuenca, where we got to wander the cobblestoned streets and bask in colonial splendor.

One day we came upon a festival and parade full of elaborately-dressed tiny children riding horses covered in coats of candy, flowers, and even bottles of rum. We followed the parade and the float with the Baby Jesus on it to the outskirts of town, taking photos, waving at kids, and drinking a beverage of sketchy origin that they kept giving us for free. It was a good day.

I'm sure few of you are still reading, but only one more event is really necessary to relate, and it's a shame it comes as an appendage because it was one of Jodi's crowning moments of heroism in this sojourn, and maybe in life: we were in Chiclayo, a busy coastal city that claims to be Peru's "Capital of Friendship" and has a strange sign as you drive in that says "Chiclayo--Ciudad Evocativa (Invoking City)." Walking down a busy street, a guy tried to snatch Jodi's camera out of her hand. She managed to keep hold of it, and a vigorous tug-of-war ensued in which she reigned victorious, due largely to the beauty of a punch in the face with which she served the culprit. We were both a bit unsettled afterwards, and I have seldom been happier to drink a beer in my life.

Now we are about to leave Baños for Lago Agrio, a town far in the northern jungle, from where we're taking a 5-day tour into Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve, and will, if God is having a good day, hopefully see sloths and pink river dolphins. I miss you all very much and am so happy to have heard from those of you who have written back to me, and I'm sorry if I haven't gotten back to you yet.

I wish you love and firm, regular stools,

Katherine

PS. Since composing this this afternoon we have done a wonderful thing. The clouds lifted a bit around 5, and we decided to rent a 4-wheeled motorbike for 2 hours (this is more numbers than I've dealt with since calculus!) to try to get up the mountain across the river said to be the best vantage point for viewing Volcán Tungurahua, which had been obscured by clouds during our whole stay in Baños. We picked the perfect time, saw the volcano in all its glory (spewing lots of smoke!) an amazing sunset, and the beautiful valley, everything we have been exploring for the last 5 days in its best light. As it quietened and darkened around us, clouds from the east rushed toward us, covered us, and rushed away again--at times, it seemed they were clawing forward like ghosts hungry for the landscape they once walked.

When we left, it was almost dark and we discovered that our trusty steed was not equipped with headlights! At first it was okay, but then I started to get a bit worried, and then scared. I had visions of Jodi misjudging the width of the dirt road and plunging us into the ravine to our deaths. Then I looked up, and across the valley beheld a vision of the Virgin of the Holy Water, illuminated in all her plaster glory, and I have no doubt that it was she who provided a car in front of us whose headlights we could follow, and after that a string of streetlights to guide us all the way home.