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.