a Shaman in the Amazon

12-12-09
These past two weeks have been very different from any of my previous travelings. On my first day in Iquitos I found an Ayahuascero – a shaman who cures people with medicinal plants and ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic vine that is so common in these parts – and arranged to spend 2 weeks living with him and learning his practice. Needless to say, it has been a very interesting two weeks.
Jorge, the shaman, works mainly with a mixture of garlic, alcamfor, and sugar cane alcohol, into which he whistles one of over 150 songs of power and healing to give it specific properties, and then rubs or sprays it onto the body to heal his client. He then gives whatever remedy is needed and finally strengthens and protects the healing with tobacco smoke. This is the procedure for minor healings, but for anything major, he turns to the ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca is a vine that grows in the jungle which, combined with the leaves of the chacruna tree, is highly hallucinogenic, and is used for healings all throughout the Western Amazon. Jorge drinks ayahuasca twice a week at midnight, and in that altered state is able to see and cure what ails the people who come to him, anything from lost love to bad luck finding a job to cancer. He’s highly respected in the city, and says he has never been unable to cure his patients, who often come to him in desperation after the hospitals have tried and failed to help them.
He took me to the market on my first day, to get to know the medicinal plants you could buy there (did you know that cinnamon is good for nausea and tobacco is a powerful form of protection?) and later we went into the jungle to collect and learn about the plants you could only find in the forest.
One day he was asked to come to a jungle lodge to do an ayahuasca ceremony for a group of tourists, and, as his “student”, I tagged along. It was great – I got an almost-official jungle tour for free, complete with canoe trips looking for sloths (too quick for us, unfortunately, we didn’t see any), a night walk to see tarantulas, scorpions, snakes, and spiders (I have never been so very aware of the myriad ways to die in the jungle), and an ayahuasca ceremony. I decided to take the ayahuasca to see how the shaman does his work and what he meant by “seeing the illness”, so that night we skipped dinner and all went out to a tiny cabin and one by one drank a shot glass of thick, brown, foul-tasting liquid. I have to say, it was not the most pleasant experience. For someone who has never even been drunk, hallucinating for 4 hours was pretty intense, especially as it was accompanied by vomiting and violent shaking. I was disappointed that I didn’t have any fantastic spiritual revelations, but maybe my expectations were set too high. Anyway, I didn’t do that again, though I continued to study with Jorge for another week.
Now I’m off down the river again, this time towards the coast of Peru. I’m officially traveling to Arequipa to spend Christmas with Joaquin, a good friend from UWC, but I’m making a couple detours to check out pre-Incan ruins and sunny beaches. More on that when I get there.

The Banana Boat

After five days in Pantoja, the cargo boat finally pushed off. We were all very excited to be going at last, but instead of going downriver towards Iquitos, the boat went upriver for most of the afternoon, picking up bananas and chickens from tiny communities on tributaries of the Napo. And that was how the first three days went – we’d move for about 20 minutes and stop for an hour, loading cargo from everyone who could wave at us from the shore. One afternoon we found ourselves passing a house we recognized as where we’d woken up that morning – we’d spent almost the whole day going up and down a tributary and were only just then starting downriver for the day. But none of us had any pressing business to attend to, so we shrugged at the delay and continued our card game.

Cards were indispensable for the trip. We spent a couple hours every day playing cards, as well as creating a backgammon board out of masking tape and seeds for pieces, and playing chess on my little handmade Incas vs. Conquistadores set. And reading. Lots of swinging in hammocks and reading. And watching the river go by or (as was more often the case in the first days) watching them load the boat. PETA would have a fit, watching this boat get loaded. Pigs were dragged to the boat by their hind legs, their noses making tracks in the dirt, and then thrown onto the metal floor to be confined below deck in a dark and increasingly stinky hold. Bulls, too, were manhandled onto the boat (though it took a lot of men – about 10/bull, pulling on ropes attached to his horns and legs) and then tied up in a tiny pen which at least was in the open air. And chickens in woven baskets kept flooding the boat, going everywhere, under peoples’ hammocks, on the roof, next to the bananas…did I mention the bananas? They were everywhere – they filled the hold (except the part that had chickens and pigs) and then the open part at the front of the boat in stacks 8 ft. high, and then finally up on the top deck with the passengers. Robin, the Dutch guy, calculated that there must have been at least 10,000 bunches of bananas on the boat.

We kept a weather eye out for river dolphins, and on the second day were rewarded by a spectacular show. We were stopped to pick up – you guessed it – bananas, at a junction of two rivers, and looked out to see five or six little grey dolphins and a pink dolphin splashing around in the current. It was a rare sight – normally grey dolphins are solitary, or so I hear, but here were a half dozen obviously playing together. For once we were glad the stop was especially long, because it gave us a long time to watch the dolphins.

After three days, we arrived in Santa Clotilde, a town about halfway to Iquitos. It was quite a shock – after three days of boat and another week before then of a tiny border town, Santa Clotilde was like a metropolis. They had roads – well, sidewalks, I guess – complete with the occasional motorcycle, and shops, and restaurants, and streetlights…it was overwhelming. We disembarked to walk around and restock on crackers and yogurt, and enjoy the fresh air, free of the smell of bananas and chickens.

We were halfway to Iquitos by map, but to our surprise, the trip was almost over. We had filled the boat to the gills, and so could make no more stops and the rest of the trip just flew by. The next thing we knew, we were entering the Amazon (exactly like the Napo except bigger) and the next evening we docked in Iquitos. We decided to spend one last night in our hammocks and save on hostel money – bad decision. At 4:30 the crew tramped up the stairs and began unloading the bananas and chickens from our deck and between the crowing roosters and the shouting men, none of us could get back to sleep. By 6 am we gave up and tramped off the boat for the last time, looking forward to exploring this legendary city.

the Amazon, Part 1

I am now on my way down the Napo River to the Amazon and Iquitos, the largest city in the world that is inaccessible by road, located in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon. Once again, I was pleasantly but truly surprised at the way things turned out. I met Phil (a friend from La Hesperia who’s also traveling South America for a year so we decided to do part of our journey together) in Coca, a small town at the edge of the Amazon and the next morning, at 7:00, we boarded a large motorized canoe, together with some 50 or 60 other people, bags of rice, generators, baskets of fruits and boxes of chicks. Then, for 12 hours, we floated down the river towards Nueva Rocafuerte, the last town before the border with Peru. It was a wonderful ride. Much of it was passed in silence, watching the water and the jungle go by, with only an occasional, “wow! Look at that huge tree!” or “Did you see that butterfly? It just passed us! That must be a blow to the captain’s ego.” I started talking to a nun named Edith, who is twenty years old and grew up in Iquitos. First she entertained me with adventure stories of growing up on the doorstep of the jungle (and the dangers of man-eating wild pigs and electric eels), then we started talking about her religion and where she was going. She’s one of the “children of Israel”, which is a tiny Peruvian-based Christian sect based firmly in the Ten Commandments. She very nicely gave me a little booklet of the Ten Commandments and some psalms, and then invited Phil and me to join her and her sisters (as in, fellow nuns) at their mission about twenty minutes farther down the river from Nueva Rocafuerte for the weekend. We agreed, excited to get a taste of their life, and so the next morning, after a night in Nueva Rocafuerte, we set off.
We docked at a cluster of houses – I can’t really call it a town – and helped the sisters move their baggage into their stilted house. Then we spent most of the morning clearing land for a new church. It was a huge swath – two hectares by the end - because they said that this was going to be a huge town, as everyone who believed in the second coming of Jesus Christ and wanted to be saved would come here to join the community. Don’t worry, it wasn’t rainforest, it was old corn and rice and bushes, so we didn’t feel bad macheteing it.
We were done by lunch time – and good thing too, a month of no work meant huge blisters when I took up the machete again – and so we spent the afternoon talking and chewing on sugarcane. At 6, their Sabbath started, so we were invited to join them in the church. In general, it was a relatively normal church service, hymns, the Lord’s Prayer, a sermon with lots of references to biblical passages, etc. but there were a couple key differences. Firstly, they didn’t have a cross – they believed that it counted as a ‘false idol’ according to the 10 Commandments so instead they had a banner listing the Commandments and their derivations in the Bible – and they segregated men and women on different sides of the church so one side was filled with brightly colored veils and long skirts and the other filled with long unbound hair and beards. I was told the biblical references for those mandates, but I can’t remember them now. What struck me though, was the length – the service was 2.5 hours long, and it was the first of seven on the Sabbath – 6 and 11 pm, then 4, 7 and 11 am, then again at 2 and 5 pm. So we were woken up by a ringing bell at 11 and 4 and 6:30, though we managed to get out of attending all the services and instead spent the day relaxing by the riverside and exploring the jungle.
Phil made friends with one of the local kids and he showed us along a path in the jungle, pointing out orchids and bullet ants (So named for the amount of pain inflicted by one of their bites). It was just as interesting as any jungle tour, and free!
We attended their evening service and I played my violin along with their hymns (which were very repetitive so it was easy to learn). After dinner we sat in the house, listening to the rain fill the water barrels, and talking about religion. Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn Israelita (as they call themselves) but it was definitely interesting to hear their point of view on biblical and cultural and historical issues.

The next day we went back to Nueva Rocafuerte to get our exit stamps from Ecuador and provisions for the boat, and then were off back down the river to Peru. We’re now hanging out in Pantoja, the Peruvian border town, and the most idyllic place I have seen in a long while. They have sidewalks instead of streets (who needs cars?) which are lined with fruit trees, and palm frond-thatched houses with little grills out back to cook their food over open fires. They have electricity from 6-11 every evening, which very conveniently forces everyone out into the streets to socialize in the afternoon, since there’s nothing you can do inside and people sit by the river and talk or play games or exchange songs on the guitar.
There are quite a few other tourists here. Joining Phil and me on the boat will be an Argentinean couple, a Dutch couple, and a crazy Chilean graffiti artist. In the 3 days we’ve been here we’ve had great fun hanging out, especially with the “Suiso Loco” – the Swiss guy who is paddling down the Amazon to the Atlantic in his Biciboat – a paddle-house boat powered by his trusty bicycle. He’s been traveling for 5 years now, biking through the Middle East, guiding tours in Africa, and finally biking around the southern half of South America to get to Ecuador and start his Amazon journey. If you want to know more about his trip (vastly longer and more interesting than mine, i'm sure) he's at www.hervepuravida.com

Tomorrow morning we sail for Iquitos, 5 days of swinging in a hammock, talking to my fellow travelers, playing cards, and keeping an eye out for parrots and river dolphins.
But I'll tell more about that after I do it.

The Permaculture Workshop

16-11-09
My time in Pucara didn’t go exactly as planned. I started off teaching in the school, but didn’t like it. First of all, they didn’t need me. They had two teachers (for around 30 kids, aged 6-13) as well as a music, art, and gym teacher who came in once a week for specific classes, and another volunteer who had been there since June teaching English and helping with classes. I was utterly useless. Moreover, the week I started was the week of their exams, so I spent 5 days standing around watching the children cheat on their tests. The next two weeks were vacation, and I was out of a job.

Fortunately, I met Peter, an ex-Vermonter who has been living here for 11 years working with the people of Pucará and other villages on sustainable development projects through his NGO and, as if in answer to my prayers, he invited me to join a permaculture workshop he had organized. It was perfect. The workshop was three days per week for three weeks, taught by a Guatemalan permaculture expert and attended by Ecuadorian organic farmers who wanted to know more about this permaculture thing. (Permaculture, if you don't know yourself, is basically sustainable organic agriculture, working with and from nature, instead of against it). I had so much fun, and learned so much.

For example: the “border effect” is really useful – if, instead of thinking of a border as dividing, you think of it as uniting two different areas, you can take advantage of the diversity created there (i.e. at the foot of a mountain, you find mountain birds, valley birds, and some birds that only live in that niche). So when planning a garden, make as many borders as possible – canals, paths, etc. – and make them as curvy as possible: when have you ever seen a straight line in nature? That also uses space better- you can plant more carrots in a wavy line than a straight one. And the more carrots, the better.

Or: agriculture should work in harmony with the lunar cycle. When the moon is waxing, energy and fluids in plants move upwards, while when it wanes, the energy sinks. So always plant seeds with the waxing moon – so it will create shoots – but transplant with the waning moon – so it develops roots.

Or: many times you can get nature to do your work for you. E.g. if you have chickens (and everyone here does) put them in an empty vegetable bed and they will clean it of seeds and insects while tilling the soil and fertilizing it with their nutrient-filled manure, and - voilá! You can plant in it again without having to do any of that yourself.

I don’t know about you, but I found it fascinating. We generally spent our mornings learning the theory behind permaculture, its principles and methods, and the afternoons putting them into practice: like making a circle of banana trees around a hole filled with branches and leaves to filter and use the “gray water” from the laundry/kitchen areas – every year you get a meter and a half of good compost, 21 bunches of bananas, and someplace to drain your dishwater. We also made ditches in the hill to collect rainwater and direct it into the soil, mandala gardens, and a seeding area. It was great fun.

The only problem was that many of the things I learned – like how to make a sustainable coffee forest with bananas and citrus trees to give shade – aren’t really applicable to Vermont. I was suddenly faced with how very unsustainable our life in New England is; everything we eat, even in the summer, is transported from California or farther. And even if we turn the field behind our house into a fully functional, diversified permaculture garden and canned and stored everything, we could still only produce a fraction of what we consume in a year. It almost makes one want to up and move down to the tropics where you can plant a lemon tree outside your kitchen window and never more have to worry about zest. Sure, these people don’t even have a word for “sledding”, but they’re a heck of a lot closer to sustainability than we will ever be. And they have really good fruit.  (Tangent alert!) My two favorite fruits right now are Guavas – like a huge (2 ft long) bean pod filled with shiny black seeds covered in a layer of soft white fuzz, you eat the fuzz and spit the seeds on the ground, hoping to plant a new tree – and Grenedillas – perhaps so named because they look like grenades, they’re a yellow fruit that has a hard shell you crack open to reveal hundreds of small seeds covered in clear, sweet pouches of juice, sort of like a pomegranate but better – I’m going to miss them when I leave here.

Oh, by the way, my plans have changed and I’m now not going to Colombia but straight to the Amazon and on into Peru, so if you never hear from me again, I was probably eaten by an anaconda or a jaguar or a school of piranhas or any of the other amazingly lethal things they have in the jungle. It’s going to be so exciting, hooray! :D

Goodbye La Hesperia, Hello Pucara!

This week I traveled north in Ecuador, past Quito, past the Equator (I’m in the northern hemisphere again! …it doesn’t feel any different.) and now I’m in a tiny town (50 houses or so) in the mountains called Pucara. I actually spent the first half of the week at a farm that’s the base camp of the program I’m doing, which was wonderful. The farm is much more productive than La Hesperia, and the volunteers there eat all their food fresh from the garden – the pre-dinner conversation goes something like, “there are a lot of carrots in the garden, we could get some onions too, and I think I saw some zucchini ready, oh, and we have all those potatoes from last week…ok, let’s go harvest them”. All this is in Spanish, of course, because, although there was only one Spanish-speaker among us (a guy from Spain) it’s the lingua franca, and even when I was talking to the American guy we spoke mostly in Spanish.

Tuesday was Harvest Day, and so we spent the morning picking all sorts of vegetables and washing them and tying them in bunches to sell, then in the afternoon we went out in a truck and sold them all, to specific clients and anyone who happened to see us stopped on the side of the road. Sitting in the back of a truck, the wind blowing my hair, crunching on a sweet, organic carrot from the bin…life couldn’t get better.

On Thursday I left for Pucara, where I’m going to spend the next three weeks. After a morning spent thinning carrots (and munching on the larger ones, straight out of the ground), we hopped on a bus that took us deep into the mountains, far from any sort of civilization. Tiny, twisty roads brought us down from the high Sierras and their rain-starved brown fields (it’s the end of the dry season and everyone’s praying for rain) to the cloud forest, where everything is lush and large-leafed, even though technically it’s the dry season here too. I alighted in a town with one and a half roads (I think the second one disappears after a short distance), one school, and one kiosk-like shop that also, thankfully, has a public telephone.

My host is named Emperatriz, and her house is basic but sweet. My room is cozy and the cinderblock walls are painted a cheery yellow, made more inviting by the bright light bulb hanging from the ceiling by a wire. There’s no electricity apart from the lights in the whole house though, so I have to find someplace else to charge my computer if I want to write anything. The kitchen is separate, with a dirt floor and a roof so low even I have to duck in order to not hit my head, but the food that comes off of the tiny stove more than makes up for it – it’s simple, but very, very good. Emperatriz has a few chickens that have the run of the yard and sleep in a tree nearby (I’ve never seen chickens in a tree before, but I guess they’re birds too…) and a cute 3-month-old pig and a couple guinea pigs. Everyone has chickens here. You can hear them all day, and they strut along the road like it’s their own (and considering the number of cars that come by, it very well could be). The roosters have crowing contests across town, especially at 4:30 -5:00 in the morning when they all get together for a grand chorus, but I’ve learned to sleep through it.

The other woman who’s taken me under her wing is Consuela, and she spent all Saturday morning teaching me to make empanadas – sweet, cheese-filled rolls – and telling me about life in Pucara and all the other volunteers who stayed with her and wrote to tell her how much they missed her empanadas.

On Monday I start teaching in the elementary school in earnest (I went on Friday but it was a bit of a fiasco, and I have higher hopes for Monday when, hopefully, I’ll know what I’m doing) and I’ll be here until the beginning of November, when I go off to Colombia to another organic farm.

Just Another Day in the Jungle

Here I am, about to leave La Hesperia and I feel like I’ve only just settled in. My blisters have just barely turned into calluses, I’ve finally gotten the hang of the machete (and I haven't chopped off a limb yet - yess!), and I’ve figured out how to make breakfast interesting (liven the oatmeal with a dollop of jam, for example, or convince the cooks to let you make butter so you have something for the bread). The huge-leafed plants and tall trees covered in spiky pineapple-like epiphytes feel comfortingly like home, and I know all the landmarks of the mile-long trek up the mountain from the road to the reserve. At the same time, I’m ready to go, ready to do something different, to really get to know Ecuadorians on their own terms. My next stop is Intag, a small town in the north of Ecuador where I’ll be staying with a host family and working with the community on their reforestation project.

But for now, I’m still at La Hesperia, and I’ll enjoy it for all it’s worth. And that’s certainly a lot.

Living on the equator gives me insight into the origins of many things I’ve taken for granted all my life. Like peanuts. I’ve always heard, “peanuts aren’t nuts, they’re legumes” but never really known what that meant. I had a vague picture of them growing on plants like beans or something…nothing of the sort. They’re roots! And the plants look like overgrown clover – I even pulled a few out thinking they were weeds before I learned my mistake.And bananas! Did you know they grow upside-down on the tree? They curve upwards in a big bunch…I guess so they’ll fall easier when they’re ripe. But when they’re ripe the whole tree dies and so to harvest bananas, all you have to do is chop the whole tree down with one swipe of your machete. My favorite plant is what is colloquially called ‘poor man’s hat’, but it could be called ‘poor man’s cape’ because its leaves are literally 3-4 ft long and at least 2 ft wide. It grows all over, and gets quite large. The best thing about it, though, is that it is very soft, and it’s incredibly satisfying to fell a gigantic tree with one backhanded machete stroke. Makes you love the machete.

Last weekend’s hike gave the waterfall hike a run for its money in terms of epic adventure. This one was called the Tiger Trail, after the family of pumas that live up on the mountain and use the trail for their own private highway (the Ecuadorians apparently don’t know the difference between pumas and tigers and lions – they use the words interchangeably). We even saw a puma hairball on the hike, though no tracks or (thank god) the pumas themselves. We hiked up and up and up and up the mountain, past the pastures, past the secondary forest, and into the primary cloud forest, all the while learning about the flora of the area. Like the tree called the Dragon’s Blood, which literally bleeds when you cut it, with a thick, red sap that oozes out of the cut just like blood from a finger-prick, but when you rub it on a cut or a blister it foams pale pink and heals the sore. There’s also a tree called the Suicide Tree, which drops little pellets on you if you try to cut it down, and they itch and sting for weeks with no cure.

The hike was beautiful but steep, and when we got into the primary forest it became overgrown as well, and we had to push vines out of our way to climb up the narrow path. Walter, the leader of our hike, told us that this was a trail made by the indigenous tribes to connect the coast with the mountains and the Amazon, and you could tell from the erosion of the trail – in parts the sides of the trail were above our heads. The way down was one long landslide, accompanied by shrieks as one after another of us felt the loose dirt give way under our rubber boots and we slithered down the path until we hit a root. Neither words nor pictures can do justice to the incline of that trail – it was nearly vertical at times and the soil was very sandy, so it fell apart at the slightest touch. All in all, the trip was fun and interesting but exhausting, especially since we had to walk down to the road as soon as we got back to catch a bus into Quito for the weekend.

Life at La Hesperia

After a week volunteering at the La Hesperia Biological Reserve, I’m ready for a relaxing weekend in the hammock.
The schedule is fairly simple – breakfast at 7:30, work from 8:30-12, lunch at 12:30, work from 2-5, dinner at 6, sleep sometime between 8 and 9:30. At first I was worried about getting up by 7:30, and laughed at going to bed at 8, but after only a day here it seemed natural: how could I stay up late when the crickets chirp so sleepily outside my window and it’s so very dark? (There are no stars here. The weather is consistently sunny and beautiful in the morning, cool and cloudy – but rarely rainy – in the afternoon, and overcast all night.) And how could I stay sleeping when the birds sing so brightly to accompany the morning sun? Normally I wake well before my 7:00 alarm.
Our tasks reflect the dual nature as organic farm and biological reserve. So far this week I’ve tied up tomato plants, spread manure, cleared weeds with a machete, filled soil bags for planting native trees, milked cows, walked the mule down the road to bring the day’s milk to the milk truck, and sat in the jungle looking for orchid bees. The bees here are amazing – they don’t sting, and they’re iridescent blue and green and gold with little yellow pompoms for antennae.
Tuesdays we stop work early to listen to a lecture about anything from the politics of Latin America to the variety in butterflies in the cloud forest. Wednesdays are the weekly soccer match between the volunteers and the staff. Fridays alternate – free, so we can travel on a 3-day weekend, or a hike. Today was a hike, and what an epic hike it was!

Just beyond the cow barn the cloud forest begins, and we began our hike by descending down a steep trail over, under and around jungle vines and huge-leafed trees. The trail was so steep half the time we were sliding through loose dirt rather than walking, trying not to land in the river far below. We finally got to the river in one piece (or rather 10 pieces, we were a fairly small group today) and started wading through the water in our big rubber boots –easier than making a trail of our own.
At one point we had to jump from a boulder into a calf-deep pool and everyone squealed as water sloshed into our boots. But that was the easy part. The river turned into a series of waterfalls, and one by one we strapped ourselves into harnesses and rappelled down the cliff next to the waterfall.

Or at least, that’s what we did for the first 2 waterfalls. At the third, our guide said something about ‘mas facil’(easier) and we found ourselves rappelling down through the waterfall into a deep pool and then wading out to the banks to wait for the rest of the group.

It was cold and wet and fantastically fun.
Over one of the waterfalls, we saw a pair of black eagles watching us – apparently we were right below their nest and they had eggs. In the last waterfall, our guide lost the machete underneath the torrent and tried diving to find it but didn’t succeed, so we’re down 1 machete (I’m not too sad about that. Machete clearing is hard work).
The way back was equally steep and no easy work for the lungs and legs, but we ended up just beyond the peanut field in time for a hearty, though late, lunch.

And now – the weekend! You’ll be able to find me in the hammock outside the volunteer house, reading and keeping an eye out for toucans and monkeys.

Day 2 of Porta Lopez

Today we went on an expedition to Isla de la Plata (Isle of Silver, so named because all the bird poop on the cliffs shines like silver in bright sunlight or full moonlight). It’s also called “poor man’s Galapagos” because it has similar wildlife (though not nearly as diverse) and is a heck of a lot cheaper. We took an hour boat ride there, bouncing and rocking over high waves that almost made me sick. When we got there, I met two interesting people – one named Anika (or rather, Anneka) and one alumna of Middlebury College! She was in our tour group, so we spent the day getting to know each other, reminiscing about our school, talking about life after college, and admiring the island. It was so cool to find a Midd grad in such a remote place! Small world. This tour was also in Spanish (though they promised an English-speaking tour guide) so once again I translated everything for my new friends. Fortunately or unfortunately, this time there were a lot of other people who spoke Spanish and English better than me, so I had people to help me with the words I didn’t know (like a baby bird’s downy feathers and tree sap) but also had people to correct me if I got anything wrong, so this translation project was a bit more stressful.

The tour was great though – we met dozens of Blue-Footed Boobies, and I say ‘met’ because they’ve been protected for so long that they don’t mind human presence at all and build their nests in the paths and walk right up to you on their bright blue feet.

I learned lots of interesting things about them, like that they take a different mate every year, but the females return to the same nest their whole lives: one home, many boyfriends. And that their feet get brighter blue with age, starting out white as babies and ending up a bright cerulean blue, like the Caribbean Sea in sunlight. I’ve fallen in love with their blue feet and wide, yellow, quizzical eyes. There were lots of other birds there, but none as cool as the Blue-Footed Boobies.

Then we went snorkeling in the coral at the foot of the island and I saw two blue polka-dotted fish, one bright blue flat fish with a yellow tail, a puffer fish, and lots of little yellow and purple striped fish. (like my official scientific names?) We went hunting for whales after that, to see them for the last time here before they migrated south to Antarctica for the…summer. They were amazing, (as whales always are) huge and majestic and playful…we first saw a pod of about six, then later, on our way back, we saw a mother and her baby. The mother was placidly swimming along while the baby did jumps and flips out of the water, playing in the air. It was so much fun to watch him.

That night we went out for smoothies on the beach and the waiter asked if we could dance. Only I said yes, so the next salsa song, we went up to the wooden platform and started dancing. He soon handed me off to his friend, who was a great dancer, and we danced for at least an hour, him giving me tips on how to show more “sexualidad” in my dancing every once in a while between spins. It was perfect, everything I had dreamed of, coming to Latin America and finding a random guy who would teach me salsa while showing off on the dance floor. I was so happy.

Impromptu trip to the Pacific

My first day at La Hesperia didn’t really count.

I got up super early in order to take the first bus out of Quito and then spent the next two hours staring out the window at the changing landscape. First I saw Quito, which felt strange to me, because it smelled like Mexico but looked like India. I had trouble wrapping my mind around that, how every brightly painted garage door and every box-like, multi-storeyed, and equally colorful house brought back visions of remote towns in the Himalayas. I don’t know if the architecture is characteristic of the altitude, the climate, or the socio-economic level, but there are strange similarities.

Once I left the city, I saw the farmland, which looked like a picturesque Vermont landscape stretched out onto steep mountains. Even the cows were the same, except here, they ate grass on 45^o slopes instead of the flat farmland I’m used to. Then, as we descended partway down the mountains, the vegetation grew denser and we hurtled along winding roads overlooking cliffs and jungle.

The bus dropped me off on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, and I began my mile-long climb up the mountain to the reserve. The walk was interesting and exciting, but it went on…and on…and on…

I finally found the volunteer house and lots of nice, helpful volunteers who showed me around, gave me lunch, and told me that this was actually one of their Long Weekends, when everyone leaves the reserve to travel Ecuador. I was invited on a trip to see the whales on the southern coast of Ecuador, so only a few hours after arriving, I was off down the mountain again, back to up Quito, and then on a 12-hour night bus that dropped us off in a small, sleepy port town at 6:30 am.

Fortunately our hostel was ready for us, and we had a lovely breakfast of fresh fruit and rolls before starting our explorations. Today we went to the dry forest national park and the beaches and a town built on an archeological site. The dry forest was strange – it looked like winter but felt like summer, because here the deciduous trees lose their leaves in summer when it’s dry, rather than the winter when it’s cold. It was still beautiful, though grey, and the beaches and the water were especially marvelous. We watched pelicans diving for fish and sand crabs scuttle across the beach and splashed in the water ourselves for a bit before hiking back and making our way to the village. They had a small museum there, and a guided tour of the museum and the town, which was great, except it was in Spanish. I understood it fine, but my three companions (two from Germany and one from the UK) didn’t understand any Spanish, so I became unofficial interpreter for the group, with the guide kindly stopping every few sentences for me to translate. The tour was very interesting, about the civilization that lived here around the time of the Incas and what they knew about it, which wasn’t much because the funding for the research had run out a few years ago and all they can do now is maintain the site as best they can.

South of the Equator

Wow. It's been a long time since I've seen this blog. But I figured that since I was voyaging again, I should resurrect it to let people know how/what I'm doing this year (writing individual emails just takes too much time when you're timing yourself at an internet café).

My first day south of the equator went better than I had worried it would on the flight from Burlington. I watched the Green Mountains disappear beneath the clouds and imagined scenarios of my Spanish completely failing me and not being able to communicate, or being kidnapped by a taxi driver, or not being able to find the office I was supposed to go to...
No such luck.
I arrived without mishap and with multiple short but successful conversations in Spanish along the way. I checked into the office of La Hesperia, the biological station where I'll be spending the next month, arranged everything that needed arranging and spent the rest of the day exploring Quito. I didn't actually see any particularly touristy spots in the city, but I figure I'll have plenty of chances later.
The US's imperialism towards its southern neighbors has never been so apparent to me before. It's eerie. I can understand the outlets being the same, but the currency? It's so weird to see the US dollar everywhere. I've never been in a foreign country and not had to deal with exchange rates before. On the one hand it's really convenient, but on the other hand, there's no automatic discount, which is disappointing.
 
I'll sign off here, this was just to prove that the blog and I still exist.