Carnaval

Ecuador has this thing it does.  Ecuador takes your plans and it laughs at them.  Just ask anyone who came here for a time "just to travel" and is..  oops, still here.  Ecuador will take your plans,  chew them up and spit them out, toy with them, alter them..

But sometimes, sometimes, it lets your plans happen.  And not just happen, but takes your plans and  turns them into something you couldn't have planned for if you tried.  Or even have known to hope for.  Ok, maybe I am getting ahead of myself and/or overreacting.  But my point here is, when coming to Ecuador, you have to be ready for this.  Ready to make a plan and ready for it to break, and above all, ready to embrace the change those breaks will bring because sometimes it's all you can really do.  And if there is one thing I have learned, it's that those breaks make the best moments.

Take this weekend for example.  Not just any weekend, but Carnaval weekend.

Night/Day 1:  We head to Banos and indulge in the most relaxing, restorative night of quite a while.  Even walking down the street and just breathing - that warm air (you can smell the green!! and hear the insects!!) - can give you a total mind massage.  Thermal baths at night, by the waterfall at the edge of town, followed up by food on the street.  Dinner entertainment: some questionably entertaining comedians.  Why is it that all comedians here think it is funny to dress as poorly-clad women??

Next morning:  my habitual, never disappointing, breakfast place.  Then we decide to do the bike ride.  Now, this bike ride is perhaps my favorite thing to do in Ecuador.  I have done it more times than I can count.  A few close calls with a couple passenger-buses/semi-trucks as we are riding down the highway, but those gorgeous waterfalls along the river valley make the ride more than worth it.  Finally, we decide it is time to make the trek to Riobamba.  Only to be told on the way out of town that the parade is starting.  Parade?!?!  Needless to say, we find somewhere to park the car (again!) to watch the parade.  And - I am glad I did because never have I seen a parade of oxen (at least 30?? 40??) quite like that.  Or, ever.  And all carrying chamisas, exactly what those are I don't know.  Something to do with a big culminating bonfire in a plaza somewhere...

Oxen in the Banos parade

Chimborazo on the way to Ambato

Day 2:  RioB!  We make it to Riobamba in time to wake up early Saturday morning to head to the Ambato parade of Flowers and Fruits.  Of course, our departure time of 6am becomes 7am, and our arrival time of 7am becomes 8am.  But we are still ok, because the parade doesn't start until 9am.  Or so we thought.  We arrive amongst the throngs of people and quickly learn that an hour of anticipation just isn't enough if you intend to actually watch the parade.  The hour was spent walking, searching, asking, begging people to sell us a seat so we could watch the parade.  Who knew!  Ultimately, we were desperately asking people if we could please sit on the pavement at their feet.  Bet you can guess what those answers were.  Finally, miraculously, we find a spot to wiggle into and settle in to watch the parade.  Which was well worth the 3 separate attempts made over the past 2 years to get to see this parade.  Intricate, ornate floats entirely adorned in organic designs of flowers, carrots, aji peppers, wheat grains, beans, leaves - you name it if it comes from the ground I am sure it made it into at least one float.  Not to mention the gazillion "Queens of Ambato" waving their way down the street in style. And the energetic dance troops, moving to everything from Elvis Pressley to their own accompanying Andean flutes.

One of the floats covered in flowers and fruits in the Ambato parade

Ok, these people won our business.  Notice the lengths they went to to sell the recently illegalized "espuma" foam spray.  Disguised it as a baby!  When they saw cops coming, they pulled the cover down and laid down the blanket.  Clearly, our foam spray came from them this year.

So, silly me, left the house that morning thinking the parade was our primary, rather the only, event on the day's agenda.  Two hours later, riding in a car, stuck in traffic for an overturned truck, finally pushed me to ask - where are we going?  (Ambato is only an hour away)  So,where were we going?  A mass.  Or, to be more exact, a cookout following a mass.  What I expected to be a somber event, where we eat some food and give our sympathies was actually a full-blown annual-family-tradition carnaval party.  More food than I could eat in a day, an all-out men versus women karaoke contest (yes, the gringa has a certain advantage here... NOT), the elder "patriachs" of the family eventually staggering back in from their whiskey session clinging for all life to the stable and sober support of their wives/children/5-year old grandsons.  And then there was that time that I get summoned innocently into the kitchen and out to the yard only to be unapologetically ambushed with bucket upon bucket of freezing cold water.  In the clothes I had on.  And the only clothes I brought.  Because, like I said, I didn't know it was happening.  But, such is Carnaval.  Don't expect to stay dry.  Or clean.  And play back, always.

We made aji, using this over 80 year old grinding stone passed down from grandmother to mother.

Day 3 takes us to the craziest "salvaje" parade in the small town of Guano.  Dancing, spinning, and singing their way through the quaint city street is a local parade.  Festive costumes, done in shiny gold and ornate decals, fancy hair, impressive choreography.  But wait - they are covered, covered, in flour, eggs, shoe paint - shoe paint!-, foam spray, and of course soaked to the core in water.  In fact, it is even hard to watch the parade because you are in a constant mode of self-defense.  One hand trigger-ready on your own bottle of foam spray and both foot ready to jump away from the man entertaining himself by playing aim-the-water-bucket-at-the-gringa-in-the-crowd (a.k.a. me).  I got soaked.  Sorry neighbors. Walking back to the car later, put me in the direct warpath of a person, who remains unknown and unseen, who sent a solid spray of foam exactly in the hole created between my sunglasses lens and my eyeball.  Skill.  Blurry vision for hours and a red eye for days.

The water fights as witnessed on the way to Guano.  Notice the family all wearing clear garbage bags.  Prepared!

People playing with water along the streets

Guano parade

On Day 4 we thought it would be a nice day to walk the dogs and explore Riobamba a bit, having ventured out of it for each day for these Carnaval events.  One block after leaving the house we are seeing things that put us on high alert.  We return home to load up on our ammo - our foam spray.  Never walk the streets of a town during Carnaval unarmed.  I thought we were doing a great job, cunningly darting into tiendas and dodging down alleyways when we saw those trucks coming at us full of poncho-wearing people sporting buckets, trashcans full of water in tow.  We got real good at hugging walls of buildings, keeping the dogs leashes short so they couldn't give away our whereabouts to this masses of more water-bucket-bearing people scanning the streets from the rooftops.  We even had a few successful retaliations with the foam spray when people threw water balloons at us, or squirted us with their powerful homemade PVC pipe water guns.  So, I was feeling pretty good about ourselves.  Until we rounded the corner to the house and were aggressively attacked with loads of water-bearing cousins and neighbors, all keen on soaking the gringa.  What happened next?   We ate some soup and got our water buckets ready.  And that is about how it goes.

 

Just watch the series of events in this water battle!

Galapagos

I am sure that nearly everyone who goes to the Galapagos these days writes a blog about it.  I guess I'll do it too.  So, here is my Galapagos blog.

My first thought upon seeing the Galapagos (the island of Santa Cruz, to be exact) from the airplane brought to mind images such as barren, desolate, dry, harsh, and any other word surely used to describe the surface of Mars.  The passenger near me, a guy from Atlanta who splurged on a weekend trip for his Ecuadorian girlfriend, summed it up well when he said, " S#*@, I should have spent less money for a trip to Cancun!"  Silly man.  Because I knew better.  And I knew that I was entering into a geologist's paradise.

My second thought came as I got off my first bus from the airplane, and boarded the ferry to my second bus of the trip to town.  It was "whoa! the colors!"  The sight of the aquamarine water we were riding in and the vivid, limey green of the moss on the black rocks protruding from it, combined with the rich greenery sprawling the shoreline, all topped off by an intensely blue sky was sending my brain into shock.  My brain continued trying to process this drastic and ever-changing environment as I rode the last bus of the trip to my final destination.  One minute the passing landscape would be arid, with scraggly tough vegetation, and then tall flowering green trees the next.  Then I arrived in Santa Cruz.

Santa Cruz was a nice tourist port.  Can't say much more about it, since at 6am the next morning we were eastward bound on a violently hurtling speedboat toward the island of San Cristobal to meet our cruise ship.  In that two and a half hour journey, it is certainly an understatement to say that 70% of the boat had found the proper use for that little black bag handed out to us by the captain prior to departure.

Upon arriving to San Cristobal, we had found benches and were currently sprawled out in an effort to regain a feeling of health and balance when something caught our attention.  At 9am on a Sunday there appeared to be an active boy band hard at work on their latest reggaeton music video.  On the pier, the lead singer could be seen wildly gesticulating at the camera.  The band was Cocoa Roots and yes we were asked to be in their music video.  Which, for those of you who are familiar with me in front of a camera rather than behind it, was clearly an immensely awkward moment.  (I'll share it if it happens, against my better judgement).

From there we met our great cruise-mates, guides and got settled aboard our ship - The Monserrat.  The next four days were an incredible blur of island-hopping to exotic locales inhabited by animals, to include:  Christmas lizards, lava lizards, land tortoises, sea turtles, blue-foot boobies, red-foot boobies, frigate birds, sea lions, crabs, sharks!, sting rays!, masked boobies.  Not to leave out: olivine sands, calderas galore, parasitic volcano cones, extinct shield volcano forms, highly eroded tuff cones, lava formations..  I was drooling a lot.  I also couldn't have asked for a better group of cruise-ers (but I COULD have asked for the fates to keep my friend healthy!!).

One big thing happened to me during my cruise experience.  I can now proudly say I am a SNORKELER!  As in a capable, comfortable, enjoying snorkeler.  Coming from someone who previously swore off breathing through the tube, and vehemently swore off scuba diving, this is a huge accomplishment. You just cannot go to the Galapagos and not enjoy snorkeling.  Especially if you are on a cruise that goes snorkeling twice a day.  Minimum.  You learn to LOVE it.  And I did.  Good thing too because I experienced the underwater world of gurgling waves hitting rocky shores, playful sea lions, graceful sea turtles, stealthy schools of sharks, sneaky sting rays, practically-phytoplankton-jellyfish, cascades of colorful fish, chocolate chip starfish, and much more.

After the cruise was over, I opted to spend four blissful days on the island of Isabela.  Isabela came recommended to me as a tranquil getaway, where roads are still made only of dirt, and the roads are crossed frequently by roped "iguana crossings."  These days were spent exploring the island by bike, enjoying happy hours on the beach with new friends, and going for lots of walks.  One of these walks consisted of a trail to the local land tortoise reserve.  It was on this walk that I realized that just maybe I have been in Quito too long, when I mistook a friendly (yet intense!) local soccer game for what surely had been an alarming altercation between some men in the woods.  Another of these walks was the incredible path through one of the world's largest calderas, of the volcano Sierra Negra, and the impressive crater of Volcan Chico.  I finally got to take that look down into the crater of a volcano, and see for myself lava tubes and Pele's hair and a landscape spattered in picturesque parasitic cones.

Back on Santa Cruz for my last night (this time around!) I got to share in an amazing spread of seafood, to include cazuela (delciously chunky soup) and pescado encocado (fish cooked in a coconut sauce).

Back in Quito the next day, I was riding the ecovia back to my apartment and helping a disoriented traveler from Greece find his way.  I simultaneously sensed his excitement, and his overwhelming nervous energy, barely concealed by an overall twitchiness, as he fought heart and soul to push himself out of his comfort zone to experience a 5 day "vacation" in this land of Ecuador that other Greeks avoid with great paranoia...   and I remembered how important it is to do just that.  Get out there, do something new, and get inspired!!