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.