From Mindo Lindo to Cuenca: In true Tolkien tradition

Somehow, after visiting the Amazon, I thought that nothing would ever be quite as exciting again. I had no idea that the adventure—the REAL adventure—had only just begun.

Facing fears can be very scary and Mary was terrified!

After the Amazon, we spent four days relaxing and recuperating in beautiful Mindo. It felt like coming home: the same people were still there, offering the same things, and there’s a peacefulness to the cloud forest that I haven’t found anywhere else. We reaffirmed that someday (you know, when I become the next J.K. Rowling), we’ll buy a house out there where I can go to write. We didn’t want to leave, because we knew it was the last safe haven, the last place we would go before sallying forth to find adventure in the rest of the country. It’s the Last Homely House, as Tolkien put it, and I wished we could just stay forever.

But you can’t stay comfortable when there’s treasure and dragons and all kinds of adventures to be found, and we’ve found all three:

I faced my own personal dragons while canyoning in Baños. Having a petrifying fear of heights, falling, swimming, water, and losing control made rappelling down a waterfall the perfect opportunity to face every single one of those fears. Tyler made me do it. I’m glad he did, sort of, but I think I’ll pass from now on. We still haven't finished counting all my bruises!

Adventure was at Quilotoa, a lake formed in a volcano crater. Riding the mule on the way back up was DEFINITELY an adventure. And my poor mule had some digestive adventures in the meantime. I think she relieved herself in Tyler’s horse’s face about five times over the course of the 20-minute ride. I wonder if Bilbo’s pony pooped that much.

Our amazing suite in Cuenca at only cost $40 per night.

The treasure was in Cuenca. After a single night in a hostel straight out of a horror movie, (sorry, no pictures, we were in too much of a rush to get out of there!) we decided to splurge and find a nicer place to stay for Tyler’s birthday. We booked a double room online in a hotel on the corner of the main park. We were hoping for a full size bed and hot water. Here’s what we got…

We seriously considered staying here for the next month. Too bad we have more places to visit! The architecture here in the city is amazing. I mean, our room has a skeleton key, the kind you buy at old-fashioned antique stores just because it looks cool. A skeleton key!!! And the Basilica, or cathedral, right next door, is beautiful, and somehow so much more inviting and friendly than the one in Quito. The famous Basilica in Quito was built for show. It’s huge, and impressive, and has the impression of rarely being used. This cathedral, equally big, is much warmer, and gives the impression of not just being used, but loved. When we passed by on Sunday night there was a Mass, and it was FULL.

Tyler's birthday gift was a genuine Homero Ortega Panama Hat.

Treasure was also Tyler’s birthday present:

And the food is so good! We found some delicious Chinese food, amazing Kinder ice cream, and pizza that’s ALMOST as good as Don Matteo’s, which is saying something. At night they have concerts in the park, and we can admire from our balcony (our balcony!!!!) while the lights from the square reflect on the Basilica’s domes.

It’s beautiful. But every time we consider staying longer, we remember that there’s more up ahead. So next up will be the beach, and Guayaquil, and eventually, far too soon for my tastes, we’ll be off to Peru for the last leg. Yikes!!!

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Tyler and Mary’s Increasingly Exotic Adventures (aka THE AMAZON RAINFOREST!!!)

Thanks in advance for making it to the end of the post. It’s a long one, but hey, this is the Amazon. It deserves more than just a few lines on the last page of the newspaper.

Not quite the jungle canopy Mary pictured.

When I was a little girl in elementary school, we learned about the rainforest. The teachers painted a picture in my head of a solid canopy of trees overhead, with toucans soaring over the tops and smaller trees struggling for survival underneath. There would be frogs everywhere, especially those pretty little poisonous dart frogs, and everywhere you go you can hear the birds singing. It would rain often, of course, but because of the thick canopy, the rain would rarely make it all the way to the ground.

Somehow my teachers forgot to mention (or else I’m such a romantic that I stopped listening at this point) the massive spiderwebs from ‘social spiders’, colonies of millions of little spiders making one giant tree-spanning web, the constant hum of insects all around you, and more than anything the constant feeling that the sweat dripping down your neck and back and head and arms and legs is actually an insect that’s about to bite you. The rainforest is HUMID. Remember when we talked about Mindo, and how everything is dripping all the time? That didn’t include us individually. In the rainforest you, too, are constantly dripping, only with icky sticky sweat instead of pure rainwater.

But let’s go back to the beginning of the adventure.

View of our lodge from the Cuyabeno River.

We signed up for a tour, 4 days, 3 nights in the Cuyabeno Dolphin lodge. The cute pink dolphin on the logo isn’t just to make the sign stand out: they actually do have pink dolphins in the nearby lagoon. To get there, you take an 8-hour bus ride from Quito to Lago Agrio, the starting point for most Amazon adventures in the northern part of Ecuador. From there it’s a 2 hour van ride to the puente, or bridge, where you hop on a motorized canoe to get to the lodge. The last part can take anywhere from 1 to 5 hours depending on whether or not it rains and how often the guide stops to point things out.

We didn’t realize until a few hours into the first 8-hour, overnight bus ride that Tyler gets motion sickness when placed in certain conditions, like no available windows to open, no view of the road, a loud action movie blaring in your face, and lots of windy curves taken by a crazy Ecuadorian driver. He threw up off and on for the rest of the night, and listening to it got so bad that I started vomiting too. Why is it so difficult for us to have a normal bus ride?

Then we arrived in Lago Agrio at around 6:30 AM, and quickly realized that about half of the people who just listened to us puke all night were about to become our tour buddies for the next four days.

I’m sure they were just thrilled about that…

Fortunately, we found a pharmacy to sell us some motion sickness pills, and we took them in preparation for the next stage. We had a nice sleepy van trip, and woke up over lunch at the bridge. We noticed that one of the parked cars was about a foot away from being swamped, and one of the locals told us that the river had risen about two meters in the past few days. (Unreal, right? We thought they must have been exaggerating. By the time that we finished lunch, half of the car’s tires were underwater.)

First rule of the Amazon, always bring a poncho.

Then the real adventure began. They gave us each a life jacket and a heavy-duty poncho, sent our baggage up ahead on a separate canoe, and started off, with our guide Diego pointing things out to us. We didn’t see much before it started to mist lightly. Within moments it was pouring, and we all hurriedly pulled on our ponchos. The driver of our boat kicked the motor into high gear to get us through it as fast as possible.

Think for just a moment about the hardest downpour you’ve ever been in, the kind where you’re instantly soaked and the road turns into puddles and it’s hard to see because the rain is so thick.

Now double the wetness factor, and that’s ALMOST as much as it rained. The river rose a few inches between the time we left the bridge and the time we arrived at the lodge. Nowhere on earth does it rain like it does in the rainforest during the rainy season. The weather goes from sunny to firehose in about two minutes, pours for anywhere from an hour to five hours, and then, as suddenly as someone turning off a faucet, it stops, the birds and insects come out, and everything is like it was before, only about two inches deeper in water.

Anywhere else, two inches of water in an afternoon would be a big deal. Here it’s barely noticeable. The river has no set bank; instead, it simply rises as needed, the trees flood, animals move to higher ground, and then move back in the dry season. That evening, after unpacking, we went to the nearby lagoon for sunset, and our guide Diego told us that around January or February, nearly the entire lagoon is dried up, to the point where they can play soccer on the empty clay beds. Right now it’s a full-on lake, with isolated islands in the middle where birds hang out freely because the bigger land animals can’t get to them, and the caimans and anacondas in the lake can’t climb the half-drowned trees.

Speaking of the animals…

You never know what kind of animals or critters you will find.

We saw monkeys no bigger than our palms, and caimans longer than we are tall. We saw spiders that jump and have enough venom to kill a human. We saw toucans and macaws and swallows and my personal favorite, the oropendolo, th has a call that sounds like the most musical drop of water ever. We saw pink dolphins, and one flapping fin of some giant fish that’s about the size of a dolphin, although I can’t remember what Diego told us it’s name was. We saw a spider making its perfectly circular classic web, and the spiderweb nests that Harry Potter’s spider friends would be jealous of. We made friends with the black bees who make such delicious honey that it’s worth over a hundred dollars per pound. We saw the spores floating off a mushroom that, when eaten, can keep you from getting sick for a year, and wiped off some of the slick white microscopic-mushroom stuff that protects its host tree from bugs. We felt the spikes on the thorny roots of the walking tree, which moves about an inch every five years.

We tasted lemon ants, and they really do taste like lemons. I had the most giant grasshopper I’ve ever seen climb up my arm. We met the red ants that build things for Ant-Man in the movie. In fact we met a lot of ants, and some of them were way too big to really be called ants. Maybe gi-ants? Well, maybe not, but they were cool as long as they weren’t climbing up US. We saw huge termite nests, and sloths that looked like termite nests, and monkeys that hooted and howled and ooked and eeked and whistled.

We called out “March” to hear the ghosts of ancient Incan soldiers marching in search of a place to live, and then heard them marching near us. (Actually it was a species of wasp that, when startled, starts drumming on the thorax to warn intruders away; but it sounds JUST like a large troop of men marching.)

We almost swam in the lagoon-everyone else in our group did- but I wasn’t confident enough that I wouldn’t freak out at not being able to touch the bottom with my toes. The water is only clear for the first foot, and the rest is a muddy brown, and after Diego told us what was swimming with us in the water, I was glad we stayed out. Although he claimed that piranhas are mostly vegetarian, and the caimans and anacondas mostly stay away from the people during the day, I heard the word ‘mostly’ a few too many times to be comfortable.

Of course, in a world where a spider the size of my finger can kill me faster than a boa constrictor, swimming is probably the safer activity…

Sifting the yuca flour to make pan de yuca.

We spent one of our four days at a local community, where a quiet woman named Maria taught us to make pan de yuca. We helped pull out the yuca roots (it’s similar to a potato), peel them, grate them into tiny pieces (with either a sheet of metal with holes poked through for grating, or a piece of a walking tree root, which was actually much MUCH better), squeeze most of the water out, and then cook it in a clay pan over an open fire into a sort of giant, flat tortilla. With no flavoring other than the plain yuca, it lends itself equally well to a savory or sweet topping, so we had a choice of either jam or canned tuna to put on top. We were hoping to visit with the community shaman as well, but he wasn’t there that day, so we went back and looked for more animals on the way back.

Oddly enough, that was the only day we got any kind of insect bites, and they were from sand flies, not mosquitoes. We came back from the rainforest with zero mosquito bites. So much for needing malaria medicine! One of the girls did get stung by a wasp, but our trusty guide Diego was able to use a sort of reverse syringe to suck out most of the venom. Tyler is deathly allergic to wasps and the lady who took our money before we left Quito told us there are no wasps in the rainforest so we didn’t take his epi-pen. News flash: wasps are EVERYWHERE out there. We had some freak-out moments, but fortunately nothing happened.

Then, about the time we decided we were tired of flinching every time something touched us and tired of waking up feeling like we had fallen asleep in a spiderweb and couldn’t get up, it was time to go. The other eight people in our group all elected to pay an extra $8 each for a private bus back to Quito, and we decided to be merciful and not join them in case we ended up having a bad trip again. Instead we waited around in Lago Agrio until night and took another night bus back.

Beautiful sunset on the lagoon with zero light pollution.

This time we took the motion sickness pills half an hour before the bus left, and made sure to get seats in the middle of the bus, near a window. We fell right asleep, and slept so well that we didn’t wake up when the bus stopped for an army inspection, until suddenly there was a soldier telling us to get up, get our things, and get off the bus. Everyone else was already off and being inspected. They started asking us questions about why we’re in Ecuador and looking at our passports. We were still only about 70% awake when I heard a noise behind us. When I looked around, I realized the bus—OUR bus—was leaving!

We looked at each other, we looked at the soldiers, we looked at the bus… leaving… and here we were, at the only building for miles around. The soldiers, thankfully, realized what was going on, finished up and gave us our passports back. They tried to radio ahead, but the bus was GONE. So instead, we got an express ride in the back of the army truck, lights flashing, siren blaring, barreling down the two-lane road in the middle of the night. They pulled the bus over, and we kept our heads down as we quietly boarded, with the soldier telling the bus driver off behind us, saying something along the lines of, “Always the same with you people!!”

After we ejected the lady who had tried to steal our window seat, we settled in and didn’t wake up again until we pulled into Quito.

Moral of the story: you NEVER know what’s going to happen on a bus in Ecuador.

And after our trip to the rainforest, we have learned:

1)Never trust what people tell you, especially travel agents. They tell you crazy things like “take these ridiculously expensive pills for malaria” (never mind that there is no malaria in this part of the Amazon, and even if you’re going to a part that has malaria, the pills are dirt cheap here) and “here are no wasps in the rainforest”. Travel agents. Really I ought to know better than to trust anyone with ‘agent’ as part of their title.

2)The bugs you don’t see and don’t know about are far more dangerous than whatever you’re afraid of. So you might as well quit being afraid, right?

3)The world is bigger than you know and crazier than you thought. Trees that walk and defensive mushrooms and plants that make girls infertile for one year are the least of it.

In the jungle everything depends on everything else.

More than anything, though, I think we’ve both come away with a greater understanding that we are all in this together. A species of ant keeps a tree safe from other predators or parasites, and drinks its sap as a reward. Capuchin monkeys clear the way for squirrel monkeys to eat, and the eagles take the squirrel monkeys before the capuchins. Everywhere you look in the jungle you can see symbiotic relationships where two different species only survive by helping one another. There is a balance; nothing is wasted, only given to another who can make better use of it. Sacrifices are made to allow others to continue living. Everyone does their part, and everyone has enough. Kind of like communism, just without all the greedy, power-hungry leaders and the lazy layabouts who just want handouts.

I think the same applies to our society. What is your part in your community? Where do you take, and where do you give? Who do you depend on for survival, and who depends on you? Even the mighty condor, soaring alone above the rest, is not a law unto himself. He depends on other creatures to kill his food, and he breaks apart the carcass so other, smaller birds can feast after him. Everyone has a part to play.

What’s yours?

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Goodbye is the Saddest Word

Winnie the Pooh once said, “How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” As a very wise bear with some very wonderful friends, I think he understood that better than most of us. After all, we’re not bears.

 

Saying goodbye at the markets.

There’s something powerful, I think, in a real goodbye. Not the kind of goodbye that’s more of a ‘see you later this week’ or ‘I’m too polite to say I’m glad to be rid of you’, or even ‘it’s been nice knowing you, but I have a hot date with a cup of cocoa and a good book waiting’. I’m talking about a real goodbye, when someone you have come to love and respect and appreciate is about to leave your life forever. As you share that last hug, and look at them one last time, your mind flashes back to all the good things you have done together, as if your brain knows what would hurt most and is determined to get it all over with now. It’s the kind of goodbye that means, ‘I’m not ready for you to leave me yet, even though I know it’s time’ and ‘I wish I could know for sure that I’ll see you again’. It’s the kind of goodbye that makes funerals so painful, realizing that whether we’re ready or not, there will be no more ‘hello’, only the pain of ‘goodbye’.

 

And yet… the pain is only half of the story. 

 

We forget, as we say those goodbyes, to give thanks for the blessing of having that person in our lives. We forget to celebrate the people we have become as a result of their influence. We forget that once someone has marked our hearts, they stay with us forever, and nothing can change that, not time, not distance, not even death. There is only pain in saying goodbye because there was so much joy in knowing that person. We say goodbye, meaning, I love you. We say goodbye, and we mean, Thank you for being part of my life. We say goodbye, meaning, I know you, and I am glad you took the time to know me too. You matter. You mean something to me, and even if we don’t get to talk for a while, you will always be precious to me.

 

Tyler and Maoro.

You matter.

 

You are special.

 

I wish I didn't have to lose you.

 

But because of the twists and turns of life, our paths are about to separate, and we will each move on, and become different people. But you still matter to me. I still want to wish you a merry Christmas, and New Year, and happy birthday, and when I think of you I’ll smile, because I love you.

 

Here are some of the people we have loved and had to say goodbye to:

 

Maoro, and all the other children whom we have gotten to know in the markets. I think Maoro has been Tyler’s favorite though. Mine is a little girl named Melanie, who snuggles up to me like warm chocolate and is way too hard on herself for someone as little as her. 

 

The UBECI staff. From sudoku to string games to sickness every other week, they’ve taken what we have to give and magnified it to be enough for the kids. They work harder than anyone at getting each child into school and on track for a better life, and it’s obvious that they love what they do. I wish I had half their patience with volunteers and children alike.

 

The volunteers we’ve worked with. We’ve loved some more than others, of course, but it’s been an amazing experience working with so many people from so many different cultures, and seeing so many different perspectives on life. 

 

Mary, Javier, Dani, Jessica, Katy, and Tyler. The UBECI staff.

Matteo and Vanessa, who are the living proof to us that good friends can be made as easily in an hour as a year. When we had to go to the doctor for a stomach infection, we noticed a little pizzeria while walking back home from the doctor’s office. The next day we went for lunch, and met Vanessa and Matteo. He is Italian, via Germany, and she is from Ecuador. They met in Barcelona, and he came back with her to live his dream of opening an Italian restaurant. It’s a beautiful location in front of a little round park, the Parque de los Enamorados or Lover’s Park, very picturesque and very out of the way for tourists on city buses. They don’t get nearly the business that they deserve. The pizza is AMAZING, the spaghetti is better, and the lasagna…. Well. Let’s just say I converted to being a lasagna fan on the spot. And it’s all made with love. 

 

We told them about our volunteer work, and we ended up with an invitation to bring whomever wanted to come and have a party, with beer, red wine, everything Italians consider necessary to have a ‘beautiful night’, as Matteo told us. And it was! They closed down the restaurant for the seventeen of us, and everybody walked away happy and full. Then we stayed talking with them for a few more hours until we had barely enough time to make it home before curfew. I’ve never had such a fun time!  Since then we’ve stopped by whenever we could, and there is always a smile and a healthy helping of food (meaning there’s always more than we can eat!) waiting for us. You know that saying that Olive Garden has, that when you’re here, you’re family? That’s what it feels like. They’re our other family, who happens to make very good food.

 

Vanessa and Matteo, our adoptive Ecuatalian family.

Veronica, our house cook. I started out talking to her because I felt bad that she has to work every day to make sure we get fed so we can go have all these adventures. Then I started to love her. Every day she makes breakfast for us, cleans all the dishes from the night before, and prepares a delicious dish for our dinner. She never gets to see us devour it, though, because she leaves for the day before dinner, and our house abuelo, Enrique, heats it up for us. It still tastes amazing.

 

And our host family, Monica, Byron, and their three daughters, Naira, Milena, and Ariana, with Byron’s father, Enrique. We’ve had something happen almost every single week of the eight weeks we’ve been volunteering, and every time they’ve been there with loving concern and suggestions on getting better. When Tyler fell and broke his arm, our abuelo doctor Enrique made sure he was alright, and when the doctor wanted to cast up his whole arm without really looking at the X-ray, Monica took us to a different doctor nearby who discovered a crack in the scaphoid bone and took much better care of us. Monica will also pop in to hear stories of what it’s like in the US, what our family traditions are, and is always ready to share stories of life in Ecuador. With her we’ve learned to make chocolate empanadas and guaguas de pan, or bread babies, and learned the stories of Cantuña and the statue of the Virgin Mary atop the Panecillo.

 

Veronica the amazing cook for the volunteer house.

The traditional English word for goodbye is ‘farewell’, meaning, ‘may all your affairs prosper until we meet again’. In Spanish, they say ‘adios’, which I like much better. ‘A Dios’, I leave you in God’s hands, until we meet again, whether in this life or the next. A Dios les dejo, mis amigos, mis hermanos, mis queridos, hasta que nos veamos, sea en este mundo o el próximo. May God be with you, till we meet again.

 

So next time you say goodbye to someone, think about what you mean. Are you simply closing the door on a chapter in your life, along with all the characters in that chapter? Are you feeling the pain of losing a dear friend, a confidante, someone you love? Or are you hoping they’ll be ok until you see them again, telling them to take care?

 

I hope, along with the inevitable pain of saying goodbye, you take the time to remember and cherish the reason for that pain. It’s a lesson I’ve learned a lot this past week, and I wouldn’t trade these past weeks with my dear ones for anything. 

 

To each and every one of them, and to each and every one of you, my wonderful readers, I say: A Dios. May God be with you till we meet again. Que Dios les cuide siempre, que les bendiga con todo lo que necesiten y más, por el amor que ustedes nos han dado. And whether we meet again soon or late, in this world or the next, know that we WILL meet again. After all, a wise man once said: “Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.” 

 

And you know what? He was right. 

 

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