|
Fifteen years ago, when David got his job as a press operator at the local junior college, I was looking through his contract and saw that he could take a year off without losing his job. "I want to take a trip around the world for a year," I said, "when our child is about 11 or 12. Before we\'re eighty and we\'re on the cruise with the lap blankets." He agreed. It was a long way off. We didn\'t even have that child yet. My husband, 13-year-old son and I are in our 5th month of 14, traveling |
In Quito our first day we excitedly found our way to the South American Explorers Club. Every web page, every travel forum, every link to Ecuador and Peru that we had looked at reported that the SAEC was the place to go to find out everything you could want to know about these countries, where you could have a place to relax with other travelers, swap information, read trip reports that would put you on a more intimate footing with the people and places you really wanted to see, where you could store luggage, get mail, organize group hikes, sip tea, find volunteer positions, and generally feel at home.
We had hopes of visiting five or six places but a week or so in Latin America led to a revision of our expectations, and in the end we visited three. To say Latin Americans are organizationally challenged is to say that the blind have difficulty seeing. With this in mind, it is easier to bear the changes, miscommunications, planned events that don\'t occur, unplanned events that go awry, delays and diversions, extra costs, and the tendency of these sweet people to say anything rather than disappoint (more than once I have been assured that "the senora," for example, was about to return right now, and after over an hour of impatient fuming, I have finally left, only to find out later, that the senora never came back at all that day, and that no one had any idea anyway of where she was, or probably who she was, for that matter).
It\'s a wonderful small reptile house, and they are looking for volunteers who want to feed and care for the animals.
Our other city projects were taking too long to arrange and it was time to start Spanish school at Ecotrackers Ecuador.. SAEC didn\'t know much about them, so it seemed an ideal project to report on.
I discovered Ecotrackers Ecuador in a magazine for young independent budget travelers (we are three out of those four) called Transitions Abroad. Ecotrackers had an enticing web page, promising a week or more volunteer work in one of a diverse cross-section of villages -- sparsely populated coastal areas, tribal communities of the jungle, remote indigenous villages of the Andes -- teaching English, promoting tourism, working on whatever project is happening, getting an inside look at rural village life . . . a small fee and some time in their Spanish school and a commitment to take photos and write a report . . . but when I wrote to Max Moreno, their director, to ask, well just how much Spanish school do we need to promise to attend at $3/hr? I got wavy answers, the kind I have learned to expect when you ask a direct question down here. I had some misgivings.
When we arrived at Ecotrackers - an office, internet caf? Spanish school and comfortable gathering place, Max, a former doctor of tropical diseases, and a charismatic figure with flashing eyes and ideas to match, sat us down. He was engaging, charming, funny, disarmingly attractive. I was glad I hadn\'t trusted my first impressions after emailing him.
Several days after we have begun our Spanish lessons, Max tells me, eyes afire with enthusiasm, that we must change our plans and go to volunteer in Guamote, a Quechua village, 97% indigenous, and that we must leave on the bus that very night, because the next day was the day we must take the famous train ride down the Nariz del Diablo (Nose of the Devil) - a ride down a narrow canyon where passengers, if they\'re crazy enough, can ride on top of the train; and the day after that was the beginning of the town\'s once a year fiesta and bullfight.
Max and I drive down to the bus station to find out when the buses leave. The bus station is a hot, dirty, piss-smelling marketplace of bus companies, with venders screeching their departures, each louder than the next, (the operatic ladies belting out RIOBAMBA! RIOBAMBA! RIOBAMBA!) pulling you in as if by your collar, if you don\'t know any better, as if the one that has you is the only one there is. We find only one bus, leaving at three a.m. that might or might not arrive in time for the train to Nariz de Diablo, since everyone has a differing opinion of when the train leaves. Its already eight and we haven\'t eaten or started to pack yet.
On the bus a variety of vendors hop on and off, selling snacks, socks, jewelry, and god. Every bus ride there is one earnest young man with the exact same rap, which I fantasize they must learn from a correspondence course on bus-vending, and which all include the same immortal words of Che Guevara -- my Spanish is not good enough to get the whole quote but it has something to do with the man who works hard. The rap always concludes with the assertion that the seller is a
