And I don't blame them one bit. I hope they continue to hide from all but those with binoculars, respect, and world enough and time, because on our trip away from the reserve, as we headed back to "civilization," a man flagged down our bus and threw a sack and a box on top--the sack with a huge live turtle, the box with a gaggle of tiny, scared monkeys. Our guide said there was nothing anyone could do unless they were a registered animal-trafficking patroller or something, which no one was of course and so a fat lot of effective that policy is, in my opinion. I couldn't look at them, but Jodi did while we were stopped, and ever since then has been prone to long, troubled silences and even bouts of tears when she thinks about how the monkeys were looking at her and begging her to set them free and let them go home. I was left to my guilt and cowardice, and to pray that in their future travels those animals find kinder, braver souls than I for their guardians.
Still, even without spying an anaconda or singlehandedly trying to stop the endangered species black market, the jungle was an adventure. We tried, in vain, to kill a lime with a dart from a 93-year-old shaman's blowpipe, caught piranhas to look at their teeth, saw more medicinal plants than you can shake a stick at, and laughed quite a bit at the pair of French stepbrothers who provided comic relief throughout. The best parts of the trip were at night, when we took walks to look for nocturnal insects and animals, and spent a few minutes with flashlights off, absorbing the peace and mystery of the forest at night. We were all disappointed not to see a tarantula, but our guide was nonplussed. He "knew a spot" back at the camp for tarantulas. And sure enough, back in the open-walled shelter that housed our mattresses and mosquito nets, the first shine of a flashlight on the underside of the thatched roof revealed a tarantula the size of my hand. Jodi and I thought it was pretty cool, but the Dutch arachnophobic and German control freak had more trouble adjusting. They rose to the occasion, though, and by the last night, after spending sunset in a giant lake surrounded by the Flooded Forest, which is mostly submerged for half the year, we all enthusiastically embraced the return home to our "pet" tarantulas after an exciting night-canoe ride spotting caimans, Amazonian alligators whose eyes glow red under flashlight beams and who literally line the riverbanks after dark.
* * *
The full moon was last night, and when I got up to pee around four AM it was reigning in unnoticed majesty over the silver sea. This meant that the full moon could not have been 3 weeks ago when we were in Quito and everything kept going horribly wrong, such that we grew desperate for something to blame and developed the habit of saying "It must be the full moon." We arrived there, straight from the jungle and wet behind the ears, on the first day of Carnaval. We were wet behind the ears because the water balloons were back again with a vengeance--probably due to the fact that everyone vacates Quito during Carnaval in favor of sunnier or more drunken climes, so those left behind were very resentful of this indeed. Everything was closed, not just on Sunday but for the 3 weekdays following, and after we walked around trying to view the Colonial churches in all their splendor but found them closed--or closing, as was the case when the woman slammed the door of the Basilica in Jodi's face--we decided we needed to get the hell out of Dodge.
Our first try was to Papallacta, purportedly the most beautiful hot springs in Ecuador. Our book described a beautiful hike through the mountains, reminiscent of the loch-country of Scotland, and all you had to do was get off the bus at the statue of the Virgin, head north-northeast toward the antennas on one mountaintop, pass a couple of stunning lakes, hope the farmers didn't mind you cutting through their pastures, and soon you'd end up at the hot springs.
The bus dropped us off at the Virgin, across from a road sign that read, and I quote, "Warning: Dangerous Curve of Death." To help matters along, we were smack dab in the middle of a dense cloud the size of, I'd say, New England, and we couldn't see more than 3 feet ahead of us. It soon became apparent that we weren't going to be able to see any of the required landmarks, that the descriptions in the book were wrong anyway, and that Jodi was wearing shorts at approximately 4,000 meters of altitude. We walked back to the highway, were some policemen were finishing up conducting a roadblock just for the fun of it. They said it was about 30 kms to the springs and of course you couldn't walk there--but they were going that way anyway, could they give us a ride? Jodi said we should wait for the bus. I said, "But they're policemen." She said, "Exactly."
Unfortunately, she turned out to be right, as usual, because no more than 2 minutes of the ride had elapsed before they were asking if we were married (No) or single (Not exactly), and they said that if one wasn't married, one was single, and did we like to go to the discotheque? If it hadn't been so invasive and irritating, it would have sounded like a practice conversation in a Spanish textbook--until they said that they had 8 "women" and we could be their 9th and 10th. Then they said they thought they would come swimming with us, and we laughed and said "But you're working!" and they said it didn't matter.
At this point we were fingering the mace contained in their belts that were slung over the seats, but before we could muster a plan of attack we were at the springs, where a bilingual sign warned that "Admission is restricted to those who have consumed alcohol." It was freezing cold, raining, cost $6, which is about 6x as much as it ought, and they let the policemen in for free.
It took an hour of pointedly ignoring them and changing pools whenever they found us before they gave up and went back to "work." It took a few more hours before the vacationing families all left for siesta and we had the pools almost to ourselves--which was nice, although, in the grand scheme of things, worth neither the money nor the ordeal of door-to-door service.
That night we ran into the Dutchies and the Deutschy from our jungle tour and found out that their days, too, had gone terribly awry, and concluded that there must be some trouble in the heavenly spheres, or that it was the full moon. The full moon followed us to the Galapagos tour agency the next day, where we found a perfect-sounding tour that was sold out for the dates we wanted, and followed us in the form of foul weather to our next destinations--first, Otavalo, with the most famous crafts market in Ecuador, where it rained every one of our 3 days until the day we were leaving, when I maintain that we were granted a karmic reprieve for pumping so much money into the local economy. We kept running into the Dutchies in Otavalo, where they were laying low until their Galapagos tour, having booked the last two spots for the dates we wanted. We could never quite tell iof the Dutchies liked us. Something probably not so much in our favor was that we kept calling them "the Dutchies" even in their presence. They liked us enough to split transportation costs with us, though, for a visit to the local attraction Laguna Cuicocha, "Lake of the Guinea Pig." This was a lovely volcanic crater lake north of Otavalo that we had wanted to visit ever since learning about it in a tour agency, where a young woman with a very cute little boy explained how to get there, intermittently handing her increasingly fussy child highlighter lids and bits of paper from her desk to play with. When this ceased to work, she asked him, exasperated, "What do you want?" and he burst into tears while pawing frantically at her breast. Jodi and I burst out laughing, wishing we were as free to blatantly express such urges in public, and just as quickly stopped when the girl whipped out her breast and started feeding him, which of course people do all the time, but the close proximity was a little discomfiting. "So," she continued, rolling her eyes as though a pesky fly had been taken care of, "you shouldn't have to pay the taxi more than $4...."
From Otavalo, our plan was to head for Mindo, a cloud-forest paradise of birds and butterflies that we had heard about from some English people from Swindon who had also ridden on the Devil's Nose train a few weeks before. And isn't it just like the English to recommend a place where it rains 24/7 as a paradise? They were impressed that I had been to their hometown (albeit just to change trains) and had heard of their famous "Magic Roundabout," Swindon's one claim to fame. There's an Asimov short story that has haunted me since I was young, about a girl on a planet where it rains constantly, except for once every 7 years when the sun comes out for an hour. She's 6 years old, has never seen the sun, and on the day it happens som bullies lock her in the broom closet and she misses it. Mindo was about as close as you could come to that planet on this planet--in the approximately 4 minutes that it wasn't raining while we were there, the birds didn't feel like flying, and we were advised by the locals to skip the butterfly garden because the rain had them all pinned down onto windshields anyway.
About a week before these shenanigans, I found out that I'm a finalist for the teaching program at Wake Forest, but that to proceed they require a videotaped interview. Now, contrary to popular belife, this is not the easiest thing to procure in a third-world country, but I had managed to find a guy with a video camera and get him to tape Jodi interviewing me, at great (relative) expense to myself. The only thing left was to mail it in, which I had to do in Quito, as Mindo, residing in an Asimovian alternate universe as it does, doesn't have a post office. We were only in Quito to change buses, pick up our Galapagos tour contract (we chose different dates, damn the Dutchies), and mail my video, but our faithful friend the full moon followed us every step of the way. Apparently padded envelopes are an advanced technology that hasn't made it here yet, so I had to spend about an hour finding packaging, only to entrust my precious future to an unreliable postal system. Then we couldn't find the Guayasamin museum and had to take a taxi. Then we learned that there was a protest against the government that had ground all public transportation through the city center to a halt, so we had to take a taxi to the bus station to once again get the hell out of Dodge, and, we hoped, away from the watchful eye of the full moon.
* * *
When we discovered that Jodi's camera had been stolen, we bought four beers and made a toast to traveling light. No sooner had we had a couple of days of not only weighing in close to our budget, but also the good fiscal karma of giving beggars our loose change, than someone had to go and sink us $800 in one pop.
Now, it was very clearly in the destiny of this camera to get stolen, and Jodi's heroic attempt at staving off fate when she punched the Peruvian theif in the face merely bought us some time. But if it was inevitably to be, why couldn't it have been after our trip to Galapagos? I still haven't reconciled that one. Since the camera was stolen about two weeks ago, our luck has improved substantially, by which I mean we have seen some of the most beautiful things of the trip to date, and not been able to take any photos. We think that someone reached into our bag that was under our seat on the bus, adding the final icing to that cake of bad luck and timing that was our last day in Quito. After filling out a police report, there was nothing to do but carry on to Saquisili, our destination because it is the starting point of a lovely loop journey through the mountains to Laguna Quilotoa, and because of their supposedly fascinating Thursday market. We arrived Wednesday night, found the only hotel in town but couldn't find any restaurants or, more importantly after the day we'd had, any cold beer. Jodi asked one guy if there was a supermarket in town and he said, "Tomorrow." Finally, we found both beer and food, the former superb and the latter dismal, and very gratefully welcomed sleep.
Laguna Quilotoa was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, with as many colors swirling as a Yellowstone hot spring, the craggy rim of volcano jutting up around it, and three more volcanoes off in the distance, the twin peaks of Las Illinizas, and Cotopaxi, a Quechua name which means "Neck of the Moon."
Being perpetually cloud-shrouded, we never actually saw the neck of the moon, but it's nice to know it's there. We chose the best day possible to go to the lake--the first warm, sunny day in a long time. From the nearest town of Chugchilan, this involved catching the only bus of the day at 6 AM and then spending the rest of the day hiking back down--partway around the rim, left at the third sandy patch, down the mountain, through the pastures, down a canyon and back up again to our home sweet home at Hostal Cloud Forest, where $5 a night included hammocks and a scrumptious meal cooked up by the innkeeper's wife. It was quite the perfect day, and one of my favorite parts was conversing with the grave 10-year-old named Angel who came up behind us as we were making tuna sandwiches at the lookout over the canyon, where the sign saying "Viewpoint" may as well have said "Gringos, eat your lunch here!" We didn't hear him approach, so Jodi nearly jumped out of her skin when he said hello, asked us where we were going and where we were from, what our names were and how old we were--just about the only thing he didn't ask us was whether he could have a sandwich, but by the ferocity with which he devoured it once it was offered, we divined that perhaps it was his principal motive in befriending us. Still, by the end of lunch, we had learned his mother's name, the names and ages of each of his 7 siblings, from Juanita who is 20 to Franklin who is 2 to Carlos who is dead--to which we awkwardly responded that we were sorry. We learned that he likes math and Dr. Seuss, that his family owns 50 guinea pigs, 5 regular pigs, 20 sheep, 18 burros, 1 dog, 1 cat, and 3 chickens, and that he would like to travel. "What country would you like to visit?" I asked him. Looking at the town across the canyon, he replied, "Chugchilan." At length, there was a lull in the conversation, and I asked him if he saw many tourists along this path. Yes. "Do the gringos always give you lunch?" "Yes," he replied, with a hint of smile, "Always." We left him with half a water bottle and our regards for his family and animals, and he left us with the memory of having offered lunch to an angel in a valley surrounded by volcanoes.
* * *
One characteristic of the people here is that they often give strangers wrong information, not out of maliciousness but because they are desperate to give you the answer you are looking for, even if they don't really know. When asking where things are, we find they are almost invariably "2 blocks down and one to the right" and end up wandering in circles. When you're on a quest for something in the market, they're always sure they have what you're looking for ("Granola...that's like mushrooms, right?"). So it was not surprising that, in asking all 50 of the residents of Chugchilan when exactly the buses left to get out of there, we received 50 different responses, all in the equally unsatisfying hours between 3 and 6 in the morning. We settled on 5:30, because that's what the lady at our hotel said and she was a good cook with a sweet, motherly face who, after clearly wanting to for quite some time, shyly asked Jodi if her lip ring gave her any...problems. "Not that I know of," says Jodi. "And it doesn't hurt? And it doesn't get in the way when you...kiss your boyfriend?" She was truly mystified. "Nope," Jodi said with a smile, "I've never had any problems with that."
Unfortunately, the sweet lady at our hotel was wrong, and we heard the only bus of the day drive away just after 5. We sat in the dark with clouds wetting our clothes, hoping we had been wrong and that another bus would come soon. "If not, we'll just hitchhike," said Jodi, which reassured me until an hour later not a single vehicle had passed. We would either have to spend another night there and have another blasphemously early wake-up-call, or go on one of the later trucks to Latacunga (site of camera-robbery and far out of our way), or hope that somebody drove by. "Hang your washing out," Jodi said, since we both had clean, wet clothes festering in our bags. "Then someone will be sure to drive by." So I did, and no sooner had I placed the last ankle sock on the line than a truck full of English people drove by (because English people can afford to hire trucks) that could take us exactly where we needed to go.
* * *
The next 24 hours were a blur of uncomfortable buses and high-decible "music" piped through blown-out speakers, and we had to keep reminding ourselves that it was what we had to endure if we wanted to get out of the godforsaken rain and see the blessed Pacific again. Now, they only play a few songs here, on repeat: "Angie," "Stairway to Heaven," one whose only lyrics are "sa-sa-sa-sasasasasasa," one about a man in love with a pubescent girl, and one whose only intelligible phrase is "dame mas gasolina" (give me more gasoline), which I've tried to make less annoying by trying to convince myself that it's a clever allegory for US foreign policy--but the comparison only lasts till the next time I hear it. Lately the bus music has been at such a deafening level that we have had to resort to stuffing toilet paper in our ears, just to lower the volume to approximately frat-party-dance-floor level. And though we all have our fears--Jodi her claustrophobia, my fear of falling off rocky cliffs, Americans their culture of fear, I can find very little respect of tolerance within myself for such a unified, cultural fear of silence. I begin to count the number of bus rides with neither music nor TV (0), the number of mornings I've slept peacefully without tamales being hawked or bread being peddled over a loudspeaker or car horns blaring or the inhabitants of the next room immediately cranking the music full blast (5), the number of days in a row I have been able to avoid the "Gasolina" song (3, in the jungle), and the number of times we enjoyed the jungle in silence, without the canoe motor or talking (2). It's a rare moment when you are afforded the chance to enjoy a beautiful landscape, or sip your coffee in silence as you give the morning a chance to unfold. At home, Dad is always turning off our music, citing "just a little peace and quiet" with a pleading, desperate tone. And now I understand, because Daddy, if you have half the loathing for our music as I have for South American pop-salsa-crap at this point, I have known not what I did, and I heartily repent. Also, I think Johnny Cash wouold turn over in his grave if he were to hear "Solitary Man" translated into Spanish, sung by a moaning woman, and pumped up with a computerized salsa beat.
As for the former part of "peace and quiet"--it's rather fitting that the Spanish phrase for "leave me alone" is "dejeme en paz"--leave me in peace. Unfortunately, this is a very useful phrase for us, particularly when you step off the bus in a strange place and are immediately accosted by about 112 people, demanding that you get in their taxi or transfer to their bus company or buy their stale bread or overpriced fruit or give them your money just because. It doesn't help matters that when you do try to glean information about their product, they immediately cut you off and answer the question they think it is likely you might ask, which is usually how much it costs. Example:
Me: When does the bus-
Bus Ticket Lady: $5! $5!! $5!!
Me: No, when does the bus leave?
BTL: $5!
Me: How long does it take?
BTL: $5!
Me: How much do I have to pay you to actually listen to what I'm saying?
You get the idea.
Another example, just after getting off the bus in Quevedo, which is not a nice place to visit, nor to live I would imagine:
Random Bus Guy: Where are you going? Manta! Guayaquil! Latacunga! Esmer-
Jodi: El baño (the bathroom).
RBG (grabbing her by the arm and pulling her): Well, to get to Baños, take my bus to Ambato, then change-
Me: Not BAÑOS. El BAÑO. Vamos al BAÑO.
RBG, a bit deflated: Inside and to the left.
And guess who was waiting for us when we emerged from the bathroom, starting afresh: Now gringas, where are you going? Guayaquil! Manta!...
* * *
So we've spent the last several days at the beach, first in Puerto Lopez and now in Montañita, where the water is Caribbean in its crystallinity and the surf is swell. Needless to say, Jodi has been happy and I have so far managed to not be bored by Paradise. It helps that we can stay in a cheap hotel but spend all day in the hammocks and shade at the expensive cabañas down by the Point, which is where the magic happens. I keep a tab at the bar, which makes me feel important, but which really just means not having to think about how overpriced the heavenly chocolate and banana pancakes are until after the fact.
The Spanish word for "surfer" is "surfista," which I think is perfect because it is much more connotative of ideology, of way-of-life, than the English. It puts me in mind of fashionistas, of Futurists, Buddhists, chauvinists, pacifists and nudists. Surfistas have a greater capacity than normal people for being satisfied with doing nothing--they can stare at the ocean all day (while they're not surfing) like it's their job, and genuinely believe that you have trespassed on something holy by asking them for directions, or the time. In surfing towns, the only jobs are giving surf lessons, working in a bar or hotel, or selling hemp-and-shell jewelry you made yourself. So while you are hemp jewelry shopping, you'll see a flyer posted outside the nearest bar for surf lessons, and it will proclaim the surfista manifesto: "The best surfista out there is the one who's having the most fun!" It's an every-man-for-himself sport, solitary and take-no-prisoners. Only one person can surf any given wave, and if you "drop in" on someone else's wave, you have committed a grave transgression, because you have shunted them off, thereby preventing their having the most fun and preventing them from being the best surfista.
I think there may be a correlation between the inability to balance on a surfboard and the inability to fully identify with this profession that chooses its winners based on fun. Apply the mantra to other things and see where you get: the best bricklayer is the one who lays the most bricks (although if he has the most fun while doing it, kudos to him). The writers having the most fun are almost certainly the worst, since the best writers all come up with witty quips about the torture and arduousness of applying yourself to the craft. They are the ones who chain themselves to their desks wearing hair shirts until they have produced the requisite x pages per day, while the writers having the most fun may have glibly jotted down some heart-seepage as they sipped their Frappuccino and then went out to have fun.
So which is better? Surfers, especially in groups, are an inane and sorry herd with one-track minds and boring conversation. But are writers much of an improvement? I recall gatherings of underage English majors shoveling down wine and cheese outside the Rare Book Room, making grandiose statements about how this visiting author was absolutely Dickensian in scope and that Chaucer was SO overrated, and we should be sure to pick up the next issue of the Archive, because their most recent opus, a culmination of a year's sleepless and lovelorn nights, and really an homage to the lyricism of Wordsworth, would occupy pages 44-62.
So I've reached two conclusions. One, that I have little patience for anyone who can't see past whatever it is that occupies most of their time and acknowledge the rest of the world. Your fun, or your thesis, may be all that's keeping you going, but that doesn't make you impressive--it makes you less able to find fun, enlightenment, or new ideas elsewhere.
Second, that I must acknowledge my jealousy. If you look past the herds of posers and the fact that the only music they seem to have heard of is Jack Johnson (what did they do before?), you find independent, passionate people who love something so much they would rather do it than anything else, and they will get sunburned, bruised, waterlogged, and exhausted in order to catch that wave, and experience "that feeling which only a surfer understands." They respect the power of the ocean and will wake up at dawn if it means getting out before the sea breeze comes in. I can't think of anything completely voluntary that I would get up early to do. Not only do they have great tans, butts, highlights, and strong arms, but they get to look cool while doing what they love. And they have an ability which I've never mastered (besides the obvious): the ability to have fun, and shitpiles of it, while doing something they may not be perfect at. As a professional perfectionista, with a specialty in self-criticism, I've never quite been able to enjoy anything I wasn't good at. Hence, I give up easily--playing the guitar, learning French, doing Calculus, lifting weights, reading Joyce, all litter the gutters of my past like misguided bowling balls, and after my trip to Australia, surfing seemed destined to become one of them--that turquoise ball that didn't quite fit, but that I tried to throw anyway. I would see other learners topple head-over-fins and come up laughing, maybe at their clumsiness or maybe in ecstasy at having almost stood up on the board for a fraction of a second. When I would take a nosedive, it was hard to hold back the tears--so much effort, so many bruises, and I had screwed it up again. It's hard to do the grunt work that results in a thrill if you never get to the thrill part.
In Montañita, Jodi's midafternoon break from surfing has been my daily lesson. The first day, I lasted an hour before I let my guard down and the Perfectionista took over, driving me from the water with achy arms and eyes salty from frustration. Yesterday started out much the same, but I forced myself to laugh at my foibles even when I didn't feel like it, and keep going back for more even though it hurt (great lessons for life, all). By the end, I had stood on the board three times, and only left the water because the tide was so high it was close to swallowing me up. And though each stint at boardriding ended it its own grand and graceless fall, there may have been times when, for a few seconds of stolen balance shooting forth between green sea and blazing sky, I was the best surfista out there.
