Friday (10-24-2008). Cuenca.

We began our day with a brief river walk and then made our way to Calle Largo, to one of the few bookstores selling books in English to pick up a guidebook to Ecuador that Chris had in Guayzimi. The bookstore is run by an American couple; prior University professors in the states who decided to retire in Cuenca and open a bookstore to serve the travelers of South America. Most of their texts are shipped from the states, but many are exchanged from various travelers. As a result they have a lot of interesting intellectual reads such as the ¨The Story of Language¨ a book on linguistics. I was able to exchange my copy of ¨A Winters Tale¨ that I had just finished for an annotated fire-damaged copy of ¨Heart of Darkness¨ with scholarly notes in the back. It seemed fitting, given our recent jungle experience.

Then we hit up Barranco, a Panama Hat factory and museum.

There we learned the history of Panama Hats, which are actually a notorious misnomer. Panama Hats are not made in Panama. They are made in Cuenca, but were exported by Spanish entrepreneurs to Panama in the 1800s. During the building of the Panama Canal, the workers used them because of their light weight nature, their durability and their ability to keep out the tropical sun. If you buy a genuine panama hat anywhere, it would have been finished in Cuenca. They are made of the woven fronds of the toquilla palm which grows on inland coastal hills, particularly in Montecristi. The fronds are split by hand, boiled and bleached. As they shrink they roll into the strands that are used for weaving. These are brought to Cuenca where they are woven into hats and pressed into their shape.

Inspired by both their rarity, the process of making them and the fact that we were in Cuenca and the sun was really beaming down, we decided to sport Panama hats for the rest of the day. I found one that fit my head instantly that I really liked. Ryan had his pressed and made on the spot. In Cuenca they range in quality from standard (about $15), superior ($25-$50), fino ($50-$100) to superfino ($100-$500). This will apparently cost three times that in North America. We walked away with the standard.

We also had time to check out the Mercado which is like Reading Terminal Market but much much more extensive with racks of meat.

They also sell Panama Hats there but they are actually knock-offs.

We had lunch at Moliendo around the corner: a very inexpensive Colombian restaurant with an incredible variety of food.

I had a cinnamon shake with this very colorful dish:


Like my new hat?

This is Ryan in his new hat and jacket:

Next we went to Banco centro where we learned more about the various cultures of the indigenous tribes, whose ways of life really fascinate us. We were particularly interested to learn more about the Shuar because of our close encounter with them in the rainforest. Apparently hallucinogenic drugs are a huge part of their culture and are given to infants immediately after their birth so that they can encounter their spiritual guide who will lead them through life. They also (before it became illegal) used to create shrunken heads.

It was a part of their justice system mostly involving retribution for murderers, but also involved a ritual process with a specific mythology attached. Now that this practice has been outlawed, they use shrunken otter heads to enact the same ritual. Muy interesante.

Our museum ticket also got us into Pumapungo, an archeological site that contains what is thought to be the foundation of the Inca site of Tomebamba, which supposedly was comparable to Cusco.



They also had some wicked cool shrubberies.

This used to be a terraced garden:

We wandered around and then meandered through their garden: a horticultural wonder inspired by the different medicinal herbs and plants of the Inca, with each plant containing a tag on it explaining its healing properties and origins.




There was also an aviary with tropical birds.


The Inca apparently believed that they were descended from the Macaw.

Also, there were llamas!



Hooray llamas.

Afterwards we explored some pretty brilliant cathedrals:



Evening began to settle in and it started to rain. We found shelter in a Chocolate café and warmed ourselves with hot chocolate with café liquor (coffee liquor), a sandwich and a humita.

The extreme sugar content of a meringue shell that we bought at a panaderia (bakery) had kick-started my appetite and so we went back to Moliendo to sample more of their menu items and to have a few drinks. I don´t really remember what I ate, but I know it involved quail eggs and that sugarcane brandy = an instant smile. The Reina de Cuenca was playing on the TV (Cuenca´s annual beauty pageant) and as we hit our second beer, two guys with a guitar came in and began to play. We were disappointed when they stopped three songs later, but they invited us to Habimis, where they would be playing the pipes.

We headed over and ended our night sharing a pistachio hookah, while watched them play while two very lovely and talented belly dancers danced around us.

On the way back to the hostal, this store kind of cracked me up:

Thursday (10-23-2008). Loja to Sara Guro. Sara Guro to Cuenca.

Since 9 am on Wednesday I had been incapacitated and primarily unconscious. The turning point happened after whatever had gone rotten inside me was finally purged. By 9 am Thursday, I was up and moving and able to pack for Cuenca. Mathematically, I probably slept roughly 20 of the 24 hours I had been infirm.

I was still very weak, but the worse had clearly passed—so we went on with our travel plans and by 12:30 were on a bus on the way to Sara Guro, a town that carries the name of an indigenous group of people who populate the southern highlands of Ecuador, primarily in the Loja and Azuay provinces.

The women wear black skirts, a colorful blouse and a shawl. The men wear black Capri pants with their hair tied back in a braid. They all wear hats. Their overall attire is coincidentally similar to a stereotypical Austrian, and despite the presence of Austrians and Germans in Cuenca (it´s a primary vacation destination because of its many spas)—there is no actual connection otherwise.

In Sara Guro we wandered around and took a few pictures –






But other than a great view, a really nice park and a shopping strip it wasn´t terribly exciting. We saw more traditionally dressed people on the bus than in the town. Ryan did manage to buy a really nice hand-knit sweater from a local artisan´s shop.

The ride to Cuenca featured many cows milling about the hillsides and towns of wooden homes surrounded by fields. We rode through mountainous deserts and past canyons, all the while watching Raiders of the Lost Ark in Spanish. As we reached a steeper elevation we literally rode above the clouds

until we were roughly 3000 meters above sea-level, extraordinarily close to the stars and the sky was completely clear. You have never seen stars until you have rode through the Andes at night on the way to Cuenca. It is an image that will be burned into my mind for a long time.

When we arrived in Cuenca, we were greeted by a woman in a tan pea-coat who asked us if we needed a place to stay. She directed us to her hostal located in the ritzier part of town very close to the central park. Six bucks a person each night covered us and we were able to walk around and search for dinner much earlier than we thought would be possible. Despite feeling better, I still ate almost nothing the entire day and was only able to stomach a bowl of broth at the restauraunt we stopped at and a cone of limon sherbert ice-cream at Tutto-Freddo.

In this town we did not stick out as gringos, as it is a popular vacation spot. Part of its appeal is the many brilliant cathedrals and the way the buildings are lit at night.


It is a beautiful city, very different from Loja. It´s also filled with much more expensive dining establishments, but if you know how to avoid the tourists’ traps, you can still get a pretty great meal for under three dollars. Cuenca is also known as the ¨Athens of Ecuador¨ because of its huge cultural scene. There are numerous museums ranging from Banco Centro, which is filled with dioramas and information on the diverse indigenous tribes of Ecuador, to an archeological museum with artifacts of the Incans, to a Museum of Modern Art.

We spent our evening wandering around town and then called it a night.

Wednesday (10-22-2008). When stomachs attack.

I am not going to lie—there was some bad stomach fallout today. This isn’t a case of poetic justice. I don’t solely blame the guinea pig: I tend to get sick when I combine ice-cream with too many meat products in a day and I definitely overdid it with a ground beef quesadilla at 9:30 pm last night.

Everybody with a foreign stomach I am told, gets sick at least once while traveling to South America. I wasn’t hospitalized like Ryan had to be two weeks ago. Yet at least. I woke up by 8:30 am a little exhausted and felt okay. Then it hit me all at once with a shocking abruptness. Suddenly I couldn’t stand up without falling over. I spent the entire day convalescing, bedridden and delirious, ate virtually nothing and did my best to drink liquids but probably not enough to fully hydrate myself. I swung in and out of consciousness and struggled with extreme chills and sudden overheating. My head was like a lead weight. Only around 5 pm, after an entire bedridden day, was I able to sit up and walk around a little bit. And all along was the panic about the possible illnesses I could have contracted from the rainforest:
Dengue
Malaria
Yellow Fever
Cholera (unlikely because there is an extremely low incidence (possibly zero cases) in this country but still…)
Dysentery
A parasite
An infection from the stick that went through my foot

But it’s most likely a case of gastroenteritis with dehydration. Very uncool though. Hopefully we’ll be able to still make it to Cuenca if I feel better by tomorrow.

At 2:30 pm, when I realized that there was no way that I was going to be able to stand up or walk to Canadian House or stand in front of a room teaching students without fainting—Ryan called Diego and informed him that I couldn’t come in. I feel really really bad about this. I really wanted to finish off what I had started and I was having a pretty good time in some of the classes. Also, I felt even worse abandoning the people at Canadian House who really needed somebody to fill in those classes. Ryan dropped off the books and thus ended my brief stint as an English teacher in Ecuador.

Fingers crossed I feel better and don’t have to go to the hospital tomorrow.

Tuesday (10-21-2008). Cuy! / Teaching English Day 2

Warning: for those with a weak stomach for certain Ecuadorian delicacies, you might want to skip this one. For the morbidly curious: read on!

I went to Canadian House at 10 am to meet about the day’s lesson plans. It was a short meeting, no more than thirty minutes and Ryan and I met at San Sebastian afterwards. We had only one plan for the afternoon: Cuy!

Dear mom,
Do not disown me for this. It’s not like I took a fork to Cocoa or ‘Nilla or whatever they used to be called.










Yes. We did. We ate Guinea pig. Grilled guinea pig, to be more specific. It wasn’t by accident or by coercion. Ryan and I sought out a restaurant to sample this local delicacy. It’s eaten on special occasions here—much like we eat lobster in the United States. Feel free to think we’re weird, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. They’ve really been talking it up here. It also didn’t come cheap either (well, by Ecuador monetary standards at least)—15 bucks a C’uy. But that’s a whole meal for like $7.50 a person. And you know what? It was delicious! A little like Chicken, but saltier, juicier and with firmer meat. We actually really enjoyed the hell out of it.

We followed up our meal with ice cream at Nice Cream and then we were off to our respective English teaching establishments.

Class 1:4-5. Students ages 7 and 8 year olds.
We started with a game of charades which was only successful because the secretary was able to explain the rules to them. Unfortunately after charades she was called out the room and didn’t come back. This is where it all dissolved to mass chaos. With no ability to communicate effectively with the students, they were unable to understand the tasks that I gave them and despite my best efforts began to in sync break into the diarrhea song. There were several moments that I wanted to run clear out the door. Students milled about the room, bopping one another over the heads with their books and I was only able to reel them all back in the end with a game of hang man. This proved to be a short lived game because most of them were smart enough to figure out that with their limited vocabulary words the three letter word I put up could only either be cat or dog, and the five letter word had to be pencil. I almost stumped them with scissors, but then somebody guessed an S. The good news is that class eventually ended and it was my worse one of the day. It wouldn’t have been this painful if there was a translator.

The philosophy behind Canadian House is that students will learn by immersion if their teacher is a native English speaker. The teacher’s knowledge of Spanish is entirely secondary to their ability to speak English almost to the point that it matters nil. But, in my experience—it does matter. A lot. You can only teach so much without using Spanish and if you don’t know the language—you’re kind of screwed. After the class with the seven and eight year olds, I am pretty certain that I don’t agree with Canadians House’s philosophy or policy. They need teachers way more proficient in Spanish than I am—at least for the very little kids. To be fair, my presence in the room was more to fill an immediate pressing need and perhaps this is an unusual case.

Class 2: 5-6 pm. Ages 11, 12, 13.
This class went really well. We focused more on plural nouns, went over the assignment I had given them at the end of last class and then played a game where the class was divided into two teams and had a list of nouns. The team that finished with the most correct plural versions of the nouns won. This was pretty successful and it was gratifying to see them fully engaged.

Class 3: 6-7 pm. Teenagers.
We got through half of the speaking portion of the exam where they had to have a brief conversation with me in English. It was not much different than yesterday with the adults—about equally painful for both parties with the rare and very impressive exception.

Class 4: 7-9 pm. Adults.
I put up a large family tree on the board with extensive relations from father, son, husband and wife to nephew and niece, father in law (etc…) to great aunt and great uncle. We focused on the difference between contractions and possessives. It might seem tedious to spend about two hours asking a class of adults “How is Tina related to Tim?” But they were very focused and intent on grasping all the possible connections. In the end, I had them all construct their own family trees and label their family members in relation to themselves. Tomorrow we will go over careers and they will present their family trees to me while explaining what job each family member has.

First class excluded, I had a pretty awesome day as a teacher. The most satisfying part is that most of the students seemed very excited about the next class. I didn’t tell them that it will be my last one. I came here to write and learn Spanish and I would like to focus on that when I return from Cuenca and Machala on Monday.

Afterwards, Ryan and I met up at our favorite café, Sendero—where there was an American band playing. Even though half the songs were Christian rock songs, they did throw in a few Beatles numbers and “Go Johnny Go Go Go.” While there I had a ground beef quesadilla and a cookie with limonade. This former proved to be a sordid sordid mistake.

Interesting fact about limonade. There are no limes or lemons in this country. At least, I haven’t seen any. There are limons which is a mix between the two of them.

Monday (10-20-2008). Teaching English. Day 1.

I met with Diego at Sendero at 10 am and had a quick Canadian House orientation, mostly consisting of some Australian administrative lady arguing with Diego that I should audit a class rather than being thrown right into the classroom. But there simply wasn’t enough time. By the time Diego dropped me off, I was set to teach four classes in a row, all different classes and all different age levels. The students know about as much English as I know Spanish—virtually none.

Ryan and I reconvened and I spent most of the afternoon working over the lesson plans in the different teaching books I had been given. Out of respect for Saula, our host and the head of Fine-Tuned English (the rival school of Canadian House) I did not bring up the fact that I would be doing this. My stomach spent the majority of the afternoon recovering from eating an entire bag of sugar cane I had purchased off a street vendor. At 3:15 I walked to the school, very impressed with my ability to navigate Loja by myself via foot. At 4 pm, I began.

Class 1: 4-5 pm. Ages 7 and 8.

Try explaining Simon Says in English to a class full of Spanish speaking seven and eight year olds. Had the secretary not walked in relatively early in the class, it would have been a disaster. But I got them playing and it went well. Most of the class was focused on teaching them to say “This is a pencil.” “What is this?” “This is an eraser.” The kids are very cute but some of them are clearly way ahead of the others and as a result get bored and walk around the room. It wasn’t too difficult to manage them though with another adult in the room.

Class 2: 5-6 pm. Ages 11-13.

We mostly focused on the names of countries and describing nationalities. The second half of the class was devoted to the plural form of words and the many rules that come along with it including the ever bothersome irregular nouns like cheese, mice and geese. It’s a pretty nice class though and they were mostly focused. The school psychologist was present to translate, but unfortunately didn’t know enough English to adequately fulfill this role. But she was able to explain some of the more confusing rules to them in Spanish, which was helpful.

Class 3: 6-7 pm. Teenagers.

They had a written test which took the entire class. Even though I spaced out the desks, I could tell several were cheating—particularly three students who had some funny business going on with the passing of an eraser. This was later confirmed when they handed in their tests and they had all the same wrong answers in a pattern that matched no other tests but the clearly cheating trio.

Class 4: 7-9. Adults.

They had two hours for the same test and the second half was devoted to an oral portion, where they are supposed to carry on a conversation with me, with me guiding it with questions. I felt like I was interrogating them: “What is in your neighborhood? Describe your neighborhood.” “Do you like living there? Why?” “What did you have for breakfast, lunch and dinner?” “What is your favorite food?” Some of them actually broke a sweat trying to come up with some sort of response or understand the question. It was kind of hard to watch.

There it was. My first day really teaching in a structured classroom environment. Five hours, four straight classes in a row. What a whirlwind.

I met up with Ryan in San Sebastian square. He was chatting with two fellows, one from Guayaquil who was pretty cool and had lived in Montanita for three years. He is currently studying in Loja to be a chef. The other guy was very very drunk and continued downing a bottle of liquor. Apparently the two guys didn’t know one another. Drunk guy came up to Ryan and started talking to him about America being the current cause of the violence in the world and had somehow pulled in the third guy. Apparently he had hawked his cell phone to buy another bottle of liquor. I didn’t much like drunk guy. He kept invading my space to the point that I put my arm around Ryan and hoped drunk guy would take the hint. He kind of didn’t but eventually he passed out in some bushes and we said goodbye to cool culinary Loja student and left.

Sunday (10-19-2008). Bonus rainforest adventure. Yankuam to Zamora. Back to Loja.

Instead of heading out early, we got bonus rainforest time because a group of Chinese students (some guests who had arrived later in the night) were taking a tour until 2 pm. So after another hearty breakfast complete with rainforest grown fruits, yogurt, granola, coffee and an omelet-- Carlos guided us to Cascada del Vino a waterfall with red waters.

He stopped along the way to show us some medicinal plants and let us sample sour sugar, very much like a bitter sugar cane that is apparently good for the intestines.

He left us alone with the machete and headed back. We spent our afternoon hanging out at the waterfall and then machete in hand headed back during a partial downpour.


We stopped to take another swim at a Black Lagoon—with very dark waters as a result of decomposing plants at the bottom. It’s also apparently rich in minerals and amazing for the skin.

I was a lot more timid about climbing into the cold murky waters than Ryan. By the time I had a toe in, he was already scaling a small waterfall.

And seconds after stepping in, I felt something pierce my skin. When I lifted my foot out of the water to investigate, a very sharp stick was jutting straight out of it. At first I was amazed that there was no blood, until I discovered that this was only because a large chunk of wood, splintered deeply in was damming it. This didn’t stop me from joining Ryan on the waterfall.

Later, I ended up performing minor surgery on myself when we returned. It didn’t hurt half as much then as it does now (might temporarily deter our mountain hiking plans). So, I didn’t escape the Amazons completely unscathed, but in a Malaria, yellow fever and dengue zone—if this is the least of my worries than I am not in bad shape. They didn’t even have us fill out a waiver before we entered the jungles. Very surprising given the hazards.

Carlos drove us to a bus stop in Zamora in his pickup truck and on the shaky road back we passed numerous indigenous and campo communities. Several times, Carlos stopped to let Shuar women with their babies bundled across their chests and their small children into the back of his pickup truck. He also, stopped by several of their homes to pick up supplies for the restaurant at Cabinas Yankuam . On one of the stops, I took this picture:

We dropped off a Shuar woman and her children just in time to see and touch a live Anaconda that several Shuar men had captured. Ryan and I gathered around with the villagers to watch it. Apparently they plan on transporting it in a wooden box via bus to Zamora where they plan on selling it for $200 to the local tourists board. You never know what’s aboard the busses in Ecuador.


From Zamora, we rode home and were exhausted enough to crash almost immediately. Thus concluded our rainforest adventure.