Monday (10-27-2008). Attacked by a pack of dogs (I wish I was making this up)

It started out like any other morning in Loja with the exception of the brightness of the sun. We decided this was the perfect day to hike the mountainside to a castle-like structure that sits at the peak. We walked through town and up a hill, pass a wooden gate to a public park filled with woods and the path that would take us to the castle.

Further up the hillside, we reached a clearing at the edge of the woods. Our journey had hardly begun, but we stopped at a scenic view overlooking Loja.

That´s when it happened.

OUT OF NOWHERE A PACK OF SEVEN VICIOUS DOGS—TEETH CLENCHED AND GNARLING HURLED TOWARDS US. Ryan slowly backs away, hoping they would calm down. I follow. It was one of those moments that in retrospect your mind rambles over all the other possible moves you could have / should have made. But it was in the moment. And it happened fast. Before my heart can skip a beat, we´re surrounded. I feel the sting and deep pressure of a dogs fangs clamp around the back of my thigh. We keep moving, the dogs tearing at us. And in an action straight from the words of a worse-case scenario guide and the advice of our newfound Peacecorps friend, I stop. I turn around. I start yelling. ¨BACK! BACK,¨ My arms flail wildly, throwing imaginary stones.

Suddenly we´re at the edge of the road and the dogs like ghosts have disappeared.

But they weren´t ghosts. They left evidence. A nasty bruise peppered with puncture marks on the back of my thigh and an inch and a half long rip down the back of Ryan´s leg, straight through his jeans and into his flesh. Amazingly, despite the bruising, my Hailey-made hemp pants had protected me from further damage. There was not a tear or a mark on them from the incident. Praise hemp.

We were shaken, probably not in a way unexpected from two people who had just been attacked by a pack of vicious dogs in a developing country. We aborted our mountain hike and headed back, visibly on edge with each bark from the many dogs that fill Loja, from pets to strays. For the next hour, after cleaning our wounds, on Ryan´s iphone we googled the symptoms of rabies and researched as much as we could about its frequency in Ecuador. The good news is that it is uncommon in the Sierra (the mountains where we are situated). We also learned that a year ago most of the dogs in Loja had been vaccinated for free. This gave us hope. We also assume that the dogs that attacked us weren´t wild, but owned by a very paranoid family in a nearby hovel and had been provoked by us entering their territory.

After lunch, Nester, the patriarch of the household that we are staying with drove us back. A stick in hand, and in a very badass move that we questioned the wisdom of, he walked into the woods. But the dogs were entirely gone and we couldn´t locate any of the people who might be their owners. We were told by a man at the bottom of the mountain with his own fair share of barking dogs and free range roosters that they would be returning later that day.

Nester drove us to a clinic where a doctor cleaned our wounds, applied an antibacterial ointment and bandaged us. The environment was sterile enough and the bill only came out to a total of $5, anti-inflammatory pills included. I was spared the possibility of rabies shots because the fangs hadn´t pierced through my pants. Ryan was a lot less fortunate and could only mutter ¨Hay siempre algo¨ (¨There´s always something¨) as he was informed that if the dogs aren´t vaccinated—he will need the shots. No good. Muy mal. The shots in this country are a lot different than in America and if he gets him here, he may need post-treatment from then when he gets back to the states.

With this in mind, he went off to work. That´s when the harddrive crashed on his computer and we thought we lost all our rainforest pictures. Suffice to say, we are both somewhat disenchanted with today. Despite our awesome adventures in this country, at the end of this evening—we were both thinking of home.

UPDATE: Nester talked to the mean-spirited lady with the attack dogs and she says they are vaccinated. This is good news.

UPDATED UPDATE: Ryan and I are not 100% confident the lady was telling the truth. Rabies is always fatal and has no cure once the symptoms begin. He may just get the shots anyway. The good news is that he has a connection to an American version of the treatment and it only entails five or six shots in the arm and not 20 in the stomach.