El Ombligo del Mundo

--- Original Message ---

From: sara
Sent: January 27, 2002 3:45 pm
To: ------------
Subject: el ombligo del mundo (i.e., the bellybutton of the world)

Time is strange when traveling for extended periods. We base our days around finding food and coffee, resting when necessary and the occasional caiparina (my favorite Ecuadorian drink) or Pilsener (the locally made beer which usually comes in a large bottle, is served warm as often as cold and which you can get for about $.80 a bottle.) We walk around a lot, seeing the city or town we are in. More often than not we gravitate toward the central plaza where we sit with hundreds of other people who are just sitting and watching life go by. This is city life.

The country traveling life is much different, usually with lots of time spent hiking and seeing the countryside and also finding food and coffee – the real constants anywhere we find ourselves. We finally left Quito after five days, during which time we began the acclimatization process of altitude and attitude adjustment. The next part of the trip took us to Laguna Quilotoa – a volcanic crater lake high in the Andes. This is an achingly beautiful bright blue alkaline lake surrounded by the steep cliffs of an ancient volcano.

We traveled to this spot via a city called Latacunga. The most exciting thing in Latacunga was the huge market in the center of town where you could find any fruit, vegetable, herb, type of bread you could imagine as well as many strange and seemingly useless plastic things that are sold everywhere here.

We traveled to Quilotoa with two German sisters who were training to climb Cotapaxi (one of the highest mountains in Ecuador). The elevation at Quilotoa was about 3900 meters or about 12,000 feet. The family we stayed with was great, 5 young kids running all over the place and llamas, pigs, chickens and dogs everywhere. Their house sat right on the edge of the cliff at the top of the crater. Manuel – the father and our guide – took us on several hikes. Any time he walked with us he played a flute – an amazing accompaniment to hiking these high Andes. As we hiked our lungs felt as full as they could feel, we breathed hard and he played beautiful, off-key tunes on his flute without so much as a hint of breathlessness.

After two days at Quilotoa, Manuel guided us on an amazingly brutal and beautiful hike to another town at a slightly lower elevation called Chugchilan. It was four hours one way – three of those hours straight down (or so it felt) and one hour back up. We carried all our stuff on this hike. I have definitely pushed my body to its outer limits here.

We spent 2 more days in Chugchilan with 2 other German people we met. Beautiful people. Beautiful hostal. We hiked more outside of Chugchilan and then took the milk truck – the only transportation out of town – back to the closest bus stop. This entailed about two hours standing in the back of a small pickup truck that picks up milk in this outer region to take to town for pasteurization (maybe). Dirty milk. Dirty hands in the milk.

We returned to Latacunga and spent one more day with our German friends. Then they went on to Cuenca and we went to Banos, a tourist town at the base of the volcano Tungurahua. Tungurahua means Devil’s Throat. When I was here two years ago with the study abroad program, I saw hot lava flowing down the mountainside and felt the ground rumble as the mountain spoke. The volcano is quiet now, but we heard through the grapevine that there was an eruption right after we left. The earth moves as she pleases here. We are in an area of the world known as Volcano Alley, in the midst of one of the youngest mountain ranges in the world. I guess this freedom of movement is to be expected.

Banos was kind of surreal in its tourism. It’s a beautiful little town but a little numbing. Kind of like Bar Harbor, Maine in July, with more tourists than locals. We spent four days there. We cooked a lot and hiked around in the countryside surrounding the town. We finally came out of the fog of tourist heaven and straight into Riobamba, which was just the opposite. It was beautiful, surrounded by gigantic mountains – the huge cone of the volcano Chimborazo visible from every part of the city -- but closed, provincial, conservative. We left Riobamba for Cuenca after several long days of wandering the city in search of something to do and trying to avoid touching anything in the bathroom at the hostal. We did find a sweet little park on our last day in town with large mosaic statues of animals and people. The park’s brick streetlight poles were built to curve around each other like candy canes.

We arrived in Cuenca, Ecuador one week ago today. This is the town where I lived for 8 weeks almost two years ago. We went out dancing that Saturday and saw some of my old friends who actually remembered me from when I lived here before. We have met lots of foreigners who are living here, teaching English, traveling, studying.

We are leaving for Peru tomorrow, so my next message will find me with yet another stamp on my passport. There is so much to see in Peru. It is a huge country compared to Ecuador, which you can cross by bus in about 24 hours. I hope everyone is doing well out there. I will try to write more frequently so I don’t have to fit a whole country into one message.

Peace

sara d