S.A.P.E.: Ecuador, 2009, chapter three, in which our hero hikes a lot.

Fourth and final Shameless Archive Padding Exercise installment for Ecuador. In case you're wondering it's called Chapter 3 and not Chapter 4 because the first two posts here were originally mass-emailed at the same time; so this was the third missive despite being the fourth installment.

Since we last spoke, I have spent three days in a remote village nestled in the mountains a few hours south and then a few more hours west of Quito. The name of this village is Chugchilan, and aside from a spectacular setting it boasts a population of approximately 100 people and, perched on a hillside in its outskirts, if a village can be said to have outskirts, an eco-lodge of unsurpassed awesomeness.

The village can be reached two ways, as it is at the far end of a big looping road that links a series of villages that are collectively known in the tourist lingo as the "Quilotoa Loop", so named because the chief attraction along the road is Laguna Quilotoa, a breathtaking azure volcanic crater lake sitting way up at the highest point of the mountains at about 4300 meters. One way of getting to Chugchilan involves three hours on paved highway and an hour descending a rather bumpy dirt road, and is, if you were to look at the loop on a map, technically the long way around; for this reason, the other way is the way we took. This way, it turns out, features about 25 minutes on a paved road, and then four hours bumping along precarious mountain roads in the back of a bus traveling at an alarming speed. You can add an additional half hour if, say, your bus stops to change a tire at any point. It was, after the two and a half our ride from Quito to the loop´s beginning in the town of Latagunga, a long, uncomfortable ride, but the scenery along the way made it well worth it until the tire-change decimated our momentum at the 4 hour mark. I suppose I should mention that a  pair of American girls (Teach for America teachers working in south Texas) whom I had met at my hostel in Quito were traveling with me, which is why I'm saying "we" all the time.

You can imagine our relief when we arrived at our destination [the Black Sheep Inn - ed.] and found it to be, simply, awesome: aside from ultra-sustainable design (it was, after all, an eco lodge), it featured beautiful rooms, unbeatable views of the facing canyon/plateau/mountains, three excellent veggie meals a day including a packed lunch for those going on excursions, a sauna, a giant deck, llamas, and plentiful information about and logistical support for the many hikes in the region.

The morning after our arrival, we began with a short hike to the ridge above the property, to acclimatize to the altitude (the village was, I think, at about 3500m). Features of this hike included the apparition of a guardian dog part way along, who scouted our trail for the remainder of our walk; a nice view into the next valley over; and a descent down a road on which at least half the village´s population was parked, watching their cattle graze by the roadside. All in all a good introduction to the region.

That afternoon, sadly, one of the Americans (B., for future reference) fell ill, and so she was in no shape to join the other girl, A., and I on a second short hike, down to the plateau not far from the inn. The plateau was inexplicably flat considering the mountainous surroundings, and was, not surprisingly, entirely farmland. Highlights of this one included a bajillion rows of purple-flowering pea plants; an encounter with a herd of sheep in a gulley on the way there; the view from the far side of the plateau down into an impressive canyon; and the farmer we passed on the way back tending his crops clad only in a zip-up sweatshirt, not zipped.

The next day we decided to do a longer hike to a nearby cloud forest, guided by a cool 18 year old local named R. [names have been excised out of consideration for folks' privacy - ed.]. B., alas, was still down for the count; our little group was rounded out by a somewhat reserved Virginian named B. who had been a figure skater and was now in college studying public relations or something along those lines. R. didn't mess around; he took us up the shortcut to the same ridge we had meandered to the previous day, and from there straight up further to the top of the next (and highest) range, beyond which was a rolling landscape of paramó (sort of high-altitude scrubland) and farmland. Hiking uphill at high altitude is not, of course, all that straightforward: aside from the exertion of walking uphill all the time it takes forever to catch your breath in the thin air. Traversing the plateau, we descended the far side of the mountain straight into cloud forest, which is kind of like jungle except less hot, populated with different flora, and positively dripping with moss. Highlight here was the numerous ridiculously amazing orchids just, you know, growing there in the jungle. It wasn't even orchid season, either (I can only imagine what _that_ must be like). Then we walked all the way back, with a whole lot of downhill this time.

On our third day we tackled the Big Hike, the famous one, the one we came for; from Laguna Quilotoa back to Chucgchilan. B. was back in action by this point, and we were accompanied by four others from the lodge. We hired a truck to take us up to the lake, and our guide M., R.'s dad, incidentally, had us going at a serious clip right off the bat. First up, walking to and then half-way around the indescribably beautiful lake. Wow. Holy smokes. That´s about all the describing I'll do, except to add that if you've ever been to Santorini, then think of that curving cliffside but close the whole circle, and take away all the buildings, and add 4300m of altitude, and you´ll have a pretty good picture of the crater. Then down the crater's outer slope, down, down, and more down for several hours, through paramó, near-vertical farms, and sand (inexplicably), on a very scrambly dirt-and-dust trail to the top of the canyon we'd seen the first day, where we had lunch. That's when the real fun began: the trail resumed as a very narrow ditch that quickly deepened into a 15-foot deep trench winding its way down the canyon side. It opened up now and again into sections that were more or less a path midway up a cliff, with nothing really to cling to. This went on for about 45 minutes, with one particularly exposed stretch of cliff-side insanity that really and truly gave me the willies. It was disheartening to be focusing on not succumbing to vertigo and suddenly come across a trio of locals practically skipping along in the other direction, utterly unconcerned. But I persevered, and we all made it to the bottom, and were thrilled right up to the point where it became obvious that we would now have to ascend the other side of the canyon. And so we began the final stretch, an hour of uphill, some of it steep path straight up the hillside, though most on rather more gradual (but possibly more grueling) cart paths and eventually road, emerging exhausted but triumphant back in the middle of the village and heading straight for the beer fridge in the inn upon our return. The two American girls and I, once we had recovered a little, then got into a 4x4 for the very scenic but much smoother trip back the "long" way to Latacunga (the start of the loop), where we had decided to go to avoid the alternative of boarding a bus bound the bumpy way at 3am that night.

That brings us to yesterday, which, aside from a brief visit to a nearby market town and the departure of the girls for the coast, was blessedly uneventful.

And now I'm back in Quito, taking it easy as it rains outside, and coming to terms with the fact that  tomorrow at 6am I´m on a flight home. I´ll refrain from eulogizing, though, or doing any kind of summing up. It´s nap time, anyway.

 Originally published via email, July 3, 2009.

S.A.P.E.: Ecuador 2009, fierce invalids home from hot climates

Third of four S.A.P.E. posts re Ecuador.

Back in Quito! (Don't worry, mom, the only injury I sustained in the  jungle was a sliver under my fingernail from paddling up a river in a dugout canoe. I am not, in fact, an invalid; it's just a catchy title.)

So: five days in the jungle. Cuyabeno Reserve, in the west-northwestern [actually ENE - ed.] part of Ecuador, bordering Colombia. In case you were wondering, we did not encounter any Colombian  paramilitaries hiding in the undergrowth, nor get caught in any crossfire between them and the Ecuadorian military. Though it's worth noting the soldiers at the local airport sported machetes as well as rifles. I should also mention that the two-hour bus ride from the airport to the park entrance was never out of site of the region's main oil pipiline, which of course continued straight on into the park past the point where we stopped to begin our two hour river journey to our lodge.

But enough about depressing geopolitical economic context -- this was a nature excursion, and the jungle delivered in fine style. It was, the reader will please recall, this author's first real foray into a tropical ecosystem. So, yep, as he expected, the jungle is a mass of vegetation, and river, and flooded forest, and vines climbing and drooping from and sometimes strangling anything it can get a hold of. There were not, to my surprise, as many flowers as I'd expected, but then many of them were reportedly up in the canopy. Really, there was mostly a lot of green. In fact there was so much green that the most captivating creatures out of the myriad species I encountered were the palm-sized irridescent blue butterflies [blue morphos, they're called - ed.] that winked in and out of the sun along the shore, the only blue thing (and what a blue!) other than the sky and a definite contrast to the browns, greys, and blacks that served to camouflage most of the other critters we saw. Of course, there were also some gorgeously coloured birds. For the eco-nerds among you, a listing of the bird, monkey, snake, spiders, frogs, dolphin, caiman, etc. species I saw can be found in the appendix following the main body of this email. Suffice to say, we saw six types of monkey, two types of river dolphin (one of which we espied leaping fully out of the water on a few occasions), a 3-meter  anaconda, hawks, falcons, toucans, macaws, woodpeckers, piranha, caiman, poison dart frogs, and various creepy crawlies of considerable size.

As for activities, these included motorized wildlife-watching excursions; a paddling watching excursion, in which I was stuck in a boat sterned by a complete amateur, making me long for all you and your paddling prowess -- on the bright side, our boats were escorted on the way back by first one, then two, then three, then four pale yellow butterflies, and as they accumulated I imagined they were the beginning of a great gliding rippling procession, an ever-expanding fluttering silent yellow cloud in some fantastical magical realist episode, and in fact that is exactly what happened, except that at the end when we reached our lodge the thousands of butterflies that had joined us did not simply settle into the surrounding vegetation to wait for our next excursion as I hoped, but rather swirled off and up in a vortex that disappeared into the blazing sunlight. Also, a couple of walks through "hilly" (i.e. non-swamp) jungle forest, which was a surprisingly similar experience, I thought, to hiking through boreal forest except with different and many more species, but still, it's a path, and watching your step, and looking around at green stuff; and a brief walk through swamp jungle, with mud sucking at your wellies every step, and having to grab at branches to balance yourself while hoping the branch is not inhabited by fire ants, with giant palm leaves towering over you, and which was decidedly NOT like a typical boreal forest hike (and therefore my favourite walk of the trip); and a couple of short night walks to look for nocturnal critters (mainly snakes, which we didn't encounter, and frogs and spiders, which we did); and a visit to a local indigenous community, which was interesting but touristy, especially the meeting with the shaman; and appreciating the extremely bright equatorial night sky, which affords a view of both the Big Dipper and the Southern Cross -- a fellow Canadian on the trip with an interest in astronomy brought along the biggest goddamn binoculars I've ever seen in my life, and through them I saw a galaxy, which looks like someone shining a spotlight on the roof of the world, a kind of hazy indistinct yellow blur that was, if individual stars were like those crunchy spherical sprinkles you sometimes get on cupcakes, about the size and shape of a Smartie. Oh, and we also fished for piranha. I caught one, though the photo evidence leaves something to be desired -- serves me right for handing my camera to someone else without ensuring all the settings were correct -- though on the whole fishing doesn't excite me much so this was not my favourite activity, although the midwestern woman that took the bad photo displayed an alarming stubbornness in the face of her failure to catch anything, getting tense and frustrated on day one, going back out on day two and getting twice as agitated, and finally waking up early on the last day to fish off the dock at the lodge, where to everyone's considerable relief she finally succeeded.

The lodge itself [Samona Lodge, on the Rio Cuyabeno near Laguna Grande - ed.] was pretty sweet, with basic but comfy cabins that you share with zero or more critters including cockroaches, tarantulas, and/or non-poisonous frogs (there was an apocryphal story of one past guest having found a boa in her shower), decent and plentiful food, and a central lounging area that was pretty much a big room with hammocks radiating all around from a central support, which was great for siestas. My tour mates were all pretty excellent people, a fact for which my gratitude increased immeasurably when on the next-to-last day this German gay couple (we believed) arrived and tagged along with us on our excursion: tall, skinny and shirtless and showing altogether too much boxer, who figured skinny jeans were the most appropriate attire for their walk through the jungle swamp and who lit up smokes whenever the guide paused to explain anything, enveloping the rest of us in a cloud of smoke. Turns out you can't escape douchebags no matter where you go.

And now today I'm back in Quito, taking it very easy before heading off to the Quilotoa loop tomorrow for a few days of sierra hiking, cloudforest exploring, and volcanic crater-lake appreciating. The only things on my agenda are reading, journal-writing, ATM-visiting, and potentially an excursion for ice cream.

Life's a pretty sweet fruit.

Appendix I  - Wildlife Encountered in Cuyabeno Reserve, as recorded by the author in his journal at the time, where names were provided and he remembered to write them down. Apologies in advance for inconsistent punctuation.

squirrel monkeys, capuchin monkey, woolly monkeys, monksaki monkeys, black-mantled tamarinds, yellow-handed tiki monkey, red howler monkeys (heard but not seen). three-toed sloths.

pink river dolphins, grey river dolphins. 3m anaconda, flat-headed snake, tree boa. A 2.5m caiman, and some babies. poison dart frogs of various types (some red, some blue and yellow).

Many-banded aracarai (a toucan); white-throated toucan (Ecuador's largest); blue and yellow macaws; several parrots and parakeets of some types or other; various swallows; greater ani; "stinky turkey"; several kingfishers, including South america's largest, various vultures, eagles, falcons, and hawks, a juvenile night heron, cardinals (not the kind we see in N.A.), ringed woodpecker, some kind of wood creeper.

tarantulas. wolf spiders. scorpion spiders. scorpion. some kind of social spiders that work together to build webs that blanket entire bushes. bullet ants (so called to describe the pain of getting bitten). lemon ants (tasty and tangy, they're so small they pretty much dissolve on your tongue), fire ants.

Originally published via email, June 27, 2009.

S.A.P.E.: Ecuador 2009, bikes + rain + mountains + waterfalls = awesome

Second of four Ecuador posts in the ongoing Shameless Archive Padding Exercise.

Spent the last two days in Baños, a very touristy town ringed by mountains about 3.5 hours south of Quito. The town itself isn't the main attraction, though (thank god -- I haven't seen such a concentration of Italian restaurants outside of Italy); the pull of this place is the activities you can do. From canyoning to rafting to horseback riding to renting hideous dune buggy things you can drive along the highway, the place has a hell of a lot to do. Plus, at the end of the day, you can chill in one of several volcanically heated  mineral baths, for example the one at the base of the town's most salient waterfall. Also, Baños has bike rental places figuratively every five meters, and it was this activity that I was most keen to do. After spending one day kind of just hanging around town enjoying the pleasant weather (it's remarkably like a beach town, and very easy to do nothing in), yesterday I woke up to discover the mountains barely visible behind shrouds of fog (clouds?) and an intermittent drizzle-to-light-rain falling. Undaunted, after a delicious breakfast on the rooftop terrace (enclosed, so fear not: no muffins were soggy-fied), I rallied my less-than-thrilled-with-the-weather biking companion, a French girl who was coincidentally on my flight from Miami, and we set off on a pair of serviceable but unglamorous mountain bikes down the highway. Our goal was some waterfall in a town called Rio Verde, about 18 klicks down the road. It is also several hundred meters lower, elevation-wise, so it was the easiest ride of my life.

Setting off through shrouded hillsides into the thickening rain, on bikes whose gears complained for fifteen seconds before shifting, past a whole lot of roadwork, with buses and construction vehicles blaring past every so often, was Stage One: Absurdity. It was, frankly, hilarious. This stage finished with a flourish: a couple hundred meter long more or less pitch-black tunnel, into which one does not venture without checking to see that no buses are in sight behind you. This final obstacle cleared, we entered Stage Two: Vistas.

This stage was characterised by an end to the rain, and the opening up below the road of a gorgeous winding valley dotted by waterfalls, and detours for bikes around all the tunnels. It was awesome. One particularly impressive waterfall had a cable-car set up that took you across the valley and over the waterfall. On the other side you can get off the car (which we did) and wander a little to a lookout right by the waterfall. Already here, only forty-five minutes or so from Baños, we'd descended enough that it was humid, and lush, and all in all much more tropical than the highlands.

After this we resumed our bike glide (I'd say ride but really, the pedalling was minimal) beneath the watchful eyes of four or five circling condors, and at last reached Rio Verde. Here, we were invited to park our bikes by a restauranteur, and subesequently refuelled at his establishment (the food, incidentally, was delicious) before wandering on foot to our ultimate destination, el pailon del diablo, aka the Devil's Cauldron, which, as you might be able to guess, is a waterfall, and the subject of Stage Three: Awesomeness.

They set it up very well at this place: you walk down, and further down, through the now-very-tropical forest, from the top of the ridge, where the town is, way down to where the waterfall is, but they've done it so that you can hear the waterfall get louder and louder but you can't see it until the very end (i.e., until after you've payed your $1 entrance fee).

So you pay, and you walk up a little, and the falls are deafening but you still can't see them, and then suddenly you're right there, staring at the water thundering past from right beside it, in a whirl of spray. And you climb down to viewing platforms closer and closer to the base, or a little further out so you can actually see the whole thing from top to bottom. And there is a sort of tunnel-path that you can crawl through along the side of the cliff, and at the end of it you can actually get behind the waterfall [by going through the waterfall's edge, seemingly - ed.], and we crawled some of the way along this but not all the way because we were going to be sitting on a bus for three hours later in the day, and I had only one pair of pants, and didn't want them to be sopping wet.

And then we got a lift back to town, and soaked for a bit in the thermal springs, and then hopped on a bus back to Quito, which is where I am now. Incidentally, on the bus ride down, it had been all cloudy, while on the way back it was quite clear and it seemed a totally different landscape, and was quite amazing.

And now Monday I head to the jungle for five days.

Originally published via email, June 19, 2009.

S.A.P.E.: Ecuador 2009, Quito to Baños

First of, um, four, I think, Ecuador entries in the Shameless Archive Padding Exercise.

Well, I've left Quito for the time being and got in by bus to a town called Baños. It's a town in the mountains, next to a rather active volcano, with hot springs and a billion tourists. So far it's not so charming but it's more a base for activities like hiking, horseback riding, biking, and white water rafting so the fact that the town itself appears to be entirely geared towards tourists may not be such a tragedy in the end.

So, about Quito. It was awesome. Perhaps I'm swayed by it being the first latin american city I've ever been to, but I really enjoyed my time there. The hostel I stayed at [Hostal Revolution - ed.] was phenomenal -- everyone there was incredibly friendly (which is not the case in my current digs, thus far), it was clean, and comfy, and the kitchen was amazing (not that I cooked, but it was a communal area that got very animated around dinnertime). And the city itself was great. Reports of it being extremely dangerous are perhaps slightly exaggerated -- as long as you keep your wits about you during the day you should be fine, and at night, you just take taxis everywhere and that works out too. Perhaps I'd be singing a different tune if I had stayed in the 'new" part of town, dubbed Gringolandia by the locals -- the area stocked exclusively with hostels, restaurants, bars, adventure tour companies, and outdoor outfitter stores, and overrun with turistas. My decision not to stay in that part of town, I think, is likely the biggest factor in my enjoyment of the city.

I did spend quite a bit of time wandering through the old part of the city. It was fascinating, and assuming my camera makes it home with me I'll have a ton of pictures to share. It's all spanish colonial architecture, but caked with a few layers of post-colonial flourishes. Tiny stores tucked into the walls of old buildings, and indigenous
folks hawking all sorts of random - and as yet untried - food-like things. And I will also say that the locals are incredibly friendly, particularly cab drivers (once you've negotiated a price). My Spanish, while rudimentary, has let me be talked at by cabbie after cabbie,
inquiring as to my country of origin and plans for traveling in Equador and providing their own advice and commentary. Really, truly delightful. Also saw a museum about Ecuador's biggest artist (now deceased), named Something [Oswaldo - ed.] Guayasamin. AMAZING stuff. Really outstanding.

Anyway, I'm holding up a dinner excursion here with a fellow hostel-resident, so I'll sign off for now. I plan to be back in Quito by the weekend in preparation for my jungle tour on Monday, which is all set to go. I'm super, extra excited about that one, even if I have
no idea what I'm getting myself into.

Originally published via email, June 16, 2009.

For your reading pleasure

In the absence of progress on the next-trip-planning front (patience, I remind myself...), I figure I might as well consolidate my past trip reports in one place. I'm therefore only mildly embarrassed to announce a forthcoming series we'll call the Shameless Archive Padding Exercise. Stay tuned for reports from Ecuador 2009, Japan 2006, and, if I can find 'em, maybe even a couple of European jaunts from way back in the day.

S.A.P.E.: because lazy authoring is better than no authoring.... right?

Here goes

Welcome. I'm starting this blog, here at the very end of the decade of blogs' ascendancy -- about five years (too?) late to the party, in other words, but so it goes -- for two reasons: first, as a hub for me to chart my progress in planning Travel Adventures; and second, as a hub for me to share my reports on said adventures as they unfold. The impetus being, I'm plotting an adventure even now, for next year. For late next year, though. Really I'm hoping this little project will make the wait more tolerable, provide an anchor for otherwise untethered dreaming. I mean, I don't even have dates yet, or flights, or, let's face it, requisite cash reserves. But I do have a destination in mind: South America. Chile and Argentina, in fact. Patagonia especially.

It remains to be seen whether the scope here will expand from there to include non-travel-related things. Fiction, short or creative non-, being the most likely candidates for inclusion. But that will come later, and naturally, surely. For now, let's just see if this post displays the way I want it to.