Adios, Ecuador...

last dispatch from ecuador...

4 am, hotel internet, less than an hour left...

but fortunate to have friends and family anxiously awaiting me...

mixed emotions, a potluck dinner of relief, stress, felicity, depression, excitement, disappointment...

ecuador, ya regreso...

the end is near...

i have made it out of the rainforest, again... and i am moping around baños my final days, incredibly depressed... i am very very sad right now :(

i hope i am able to leave, because i can almost see myself jumping out of the plane on the quito runway at the last second, because i want to stay that badly...

goshdarn money... if i didnt need to eat, i could stay...

:(

Surprise! Back to the jungle...

please don´t expect to hear from me until saturday... as i will be in the jungle with some random tourists... and, well, it will be interesting... but it´s better than sitting in baños...

i will be in touch on saturday!!!

I am in Baños

After two days of traveling on bus after bus after bus, I arrived in Baños. So I am safe and sound in Ecuador.

My time here is coming to an end... :(

Kuelap Fortress, Revash mummies, the Lord of Sipan, Trujillo, Huaca de la Luna, Chan Chan

So, sorry to leave you hanging... but I have been traveling quite a lot here in Peru over the past week and haven't really stopped to use the Internet all that much. So let me detail the whirldwind tour of Peruvian ruins.

On Saturday, Michael, Rianne, and I went with our guide Jesus from the town of Chachapoyas in the remote Peruvian Amazonas province to the fortress of Kuelap. After our crazy journey across the border over the previous two days, we really did not feel like getting in a tiny car and bouncing over atrocious roads for three hours to the site. But that was the only way there. Kuelap was built by the Chachapoyans, a pre-Incan culture that fought the Incans for decades before being conquered. They had a huge fortress on this cliff. Kuelap is bigger than Machu Pichu, but no one goes to Kuelap because it is so remote. In fact, only 2000 foreigners visited Kuelap in the whole year last year. We were the only people there. Us plus one American guy who was supposedly some kind of shaman. He decided to take a mixture of San Pedro and ayahuasca, very powerful hallucinogens. Then he went to the highest point in the fortress to do this ritual. I can't imagine a tour guide in the United States saying, Oh, we have to hang on while one of the tourists does drugs on the top of that cliff where he could hallucinate and plunge into oblivion. But that's what Jesus's attitude was toward the situation. When our shaman friend returned, we continued to walk through the fortress, and it looked like something out of an Indiana Jones movie. There were bromeliads and orchids growing out of original walls that were a hundred feet tall. There were temples with images of snake eyes and puma eyes. There were crumbling Chachapoyan and Incan houses.

On the drive back, we would sometimes have to get out of the car, because with people in it, it weighed too much to get through the mud. So we would get out, push the car through mud, and get back in. Finally, we arrived at the small town of Leymebamba. Jesus found out that the local people had just found out about karaoke, so it was the "inauguration" of karaoke for the town. We were invited to drink a lot of very cheap liquor (which I declined), while they fiddled helplessly with the computer program. It was a complete fiasco. The people could not figure out how to use the karaoke technology, and a lot of people just ended up singing randomly while getting drunk for free. They didn't seem to understand that they were supposed to be reading the lyrics and singing along to the tune. They would just grab the microphone and start singing whatever. It was hilarious... a complete failure... but hilarious.

In the morning, we went to the museum of Leymebamba, where they are storing 219 mummies that they found in local Chachapoyan tombs. They had to move them from the original sites, because graverobbers would sack the tombs, slice open the mummies, and take out any gold or silver the dead people were wearing. So a lot of mummies have been destroyed. It was insane to be in this room filled with intact pre-Incan mummies, some with the skeletons clearly visible, some wrapped in beautiful fabrics. In this tiny museum in the middle of nowhere. They are all in the fetal position, and then they would be placed in tombs on the sides of cliffs.

After seeing the mummies themselves, we went to one of the original mausoleums where the mummies had been found. The site was called Revash. And I became horribly ill. I had problems with parasites. Again. For the third time. And I almost threw up, and the sun got so hot, we were boiling. We hiked and hiked. And I kept stopping, in so much stomach pain... but long after my companions, I finally arrived. Revash reminded me a lot of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado. They are little houses built into the cliff like that, except they are not houses, they are their cemetary. The mummies would be placed in these structures on the cliffside. And the mausoleums were painted with images of pumas and other animals in bright reds and yellows.

We arrived very late back in Chachapoyas, and it was time to take a ten hour overnight bus from Chachapoyas to Chiclayo, going from the eastern side of the Andes mountains, the edge of the rainforest, over to the wesetern Andes, and descending into the coastal desert. The ride was very scary. I tried to sleep, but at one point, I made the mistake of looking at my window, and I almost panicked. Because by the light of the moon, all I could see below me was rushing water!!! No road!!! Because the bus was literally on the edge of the gorge, with mere centimeters between a rock cliff on the right and a flooded river on the left. The funny thing was, this was supposedly a two-way route! But I have no idea what the bus would have done if another car had come along, because it took up the whole entire road by itself!!!

After a lot of carsickness and hairpin weaving through dark mountains, we arrived in Chiclayo at 6 in the morning. We spent the day going to visit the archeological site at Tucume, a huge pre-Incan city. Unfortunately, we were disappointed because it just looked like mud piles because they have not excavated it yet. Then, we went to a museum that showed a lot of the pre-Incan gold. It was the Bruning Museum in Lambayeque. The museum we wanted to see, the Lord of Sipan, was closed on mondays.

Michael went on to meet his girlfriend in Lima, but Rianne and I spent the night in a bad hotel so we could go see the Museum of Sipan in the morning. Tuesday morning, we went to see the museum, and it was amazing! The nearby tombs of Sipan look like the pyramids of Tucume, mud piles in the desert. However, they have excavated Sipan. But all the stuff they discovered is in the museum to protect it. Before the Incans, the Chimu culture lived in the northern desert. Before the Chimu was the empire of the Moches. The lords of the Moche culture were buried with huge amounts of gold and turquoise and silver. We saw earrings the size of tea plates and nose rings bigger than half a man's face, and granpa complains about my piercings!! The gold and all the ornaments and jewelry were unbelievable, and the items are priceless. I really felt like I was stepping back into a Moche temple 1000 years ago. We also learned about how all of the women, military leaders, and priests, of the lord would be buried with him to accompany him to the next life. They actually considered this an honor!

In the afternoon, it was goodbye to dusty Chiclayo, on a four hour bus south to the coastal city of Trujillo. What I didn't realize before coming here, was that the coastal region of northern Peru is a vast desert! It looks like southern Arizona! I would look out the bus window at sand, sand, and more sand. Then I would go to sleep for two hours, wake up, and see sand, sand, and more sand. It was like a twilight zone. Finally, we arrived in Trujillo. We made our way to the nearby small town of Huanchuco, which is on the ocean and where we found a cheap hostel before spending the evening swimming in the sea and watching the sun set.

Wednesday morning, we went to the Huaca de la Luna (or Moon Temple), another ancient structure of the Moche. Unlike Tucume, however, Huaca de la Luna had been excavated, and brilliantly painted murals appeared as archeologists dug through the pyramids. It was strange to stand in a brightly painted room, thinking about the human sacrifices that were happening in this brilliant temple 800 years ago.

In the afternoon, we went to Chan Chan. Chan Chan was the capital for the Chimu Empire, the culture after the Moche and before the Incas in this region. The city was huge, with 300,000 inhabitants and miles and miles of area. There were at least 8 palaces, but only one has been excavated. The palaces are constructed like a maze so that anyone coming in who wasn't supposed to be there would get hopelessly lost. The walls were made of adobe, and the mud was carved into all sorts of geometric shapes and animal designs. Standing in these pyramids and temples in the desert, I felt like I was in Egypt, not in South America! We also got to see where they buried their lords, again with all of the women, servants, military leaders, and priests, as human sacrifices to accompany their lord. Don't worry, though! They didn't even know what was going on when they were sacrificed, our tour guide explained, because they would take the halucinogeno San Pedro cactus before their throats were slit!!! Ew!!!

Well, after a long week of trekking around the Northern Peruvian desert exploring ancient ruins, it's time to leave Egypt... er, Peru. Tonight, I am starting a veeeeeeeeerrrry long two day trek from Trujillo, Peru, to Banos, Ecuador. If Ecuador lets me back in and everything goes according to my very very tentative plan, I will let you know that I am alive and well in Ecuador once I reach Banos.

Call me Elizabeth "Indiana Jones" Dumford...

I... am in Peru!!!

So after Vilcabamba, I don´t know what to do with myself. I meet a Dutch girl named Rianne, and she says that two days into the Amazonian region of Peru is a crazy pre-Incan fortress, Kuelap, huge ruins to rival Machu Pichu. But almost no tourists in Kuelap because the way there is incredibly difficult to find. So we set out from Vilcabamba heading toward the frontier of Peru, asking along the way, hoping to find ourselves and our path...

A six hour bus through cloud forest from Vilcabamba to Zumba. On the bus, we meet Michael, a German. We are the only three foreigners. We become a team.

The fog clings to the side of verdant green cliffs overflowing with bromeliads and orchids. Shacks cling like the fog along the deep gorges as the road becomes nearly impassable. Jolting and jolting along the supposed highway. Our first military checkpoint.

The soldiers say that a landslide eleven days ago has shut down the border. But we continue on...

Zumba is a tiny town. In a chiva, a sort of pickup truck with benches and a roof, we head towards the border, supposedly. Another military checkpoint. The soldier says that maybe, maybe, we can cross the river on foot with our packs and find our way to the border on the other side. The locals on the chiva laugh at our ridiculously large backpacks and bewildered English discussions. The chiva drives until the road is blocked by a landslide. A friendly bulldozer driver makes, literally makes, a new road for us to get by. An hour later we are on our way again, until we come to a truck stuck in the mud. An hour later it unsticks itself. Then we go on to the real landslide.

The bridge has disappeared, leaving a naked gorge carved by a wildly rushing river. The landslide has blocked the crossing and destroyed the bridge, the highway, everything. Down a makeshift ladder we climb deep into the gorge, slipping on watery mud, squelching, the weight of our packs destroying our balance. At the bottom, our hearts sink. A thin log across the river. The only way to cross. Covered with slime. And we have our packs. No choice. Arms out, breath held, we inch across.

And we make it!

On the other side, another ladder, panting now... and a pickup truck is waiting for the locals to take them on to the border town of La Balsa.

Night is already falling as we descend unbelievably beautiful forested slopes to another river, clinging desperately to the sides of the truckbed where we are tossed with a few Peruvian migrants, two boxes of chickens (alive and squawking), and a teenage Ecuadorian girl.

At La Balsa, the immigration soldier has gone missing. They tell us to go on to Peru, but we insist on getting our exit stamps! The few families that eke out a living by exchanging dollars and soles there search for the official, find him. He stamps my passport, January 10. Then he realizes he forgot to change the date. It was January 11. No one had crossed the border in that area for at least a day. I have lost my tourist card. He does not care, hands me another.

Then, we walk to Peru, across another river, but now we have a bridge.

In Peru, the immigration official is very young, as young as my youngest sister. He has no idea what to ask us and just smiles and tries to practice his basic English. The police control needs to stamp our documents. They are playing video games in the office when we enter and ignore us for a few minutes, finally stamping us into the country without taking their eyes off of their game.

A car is waiting to take us the two hours to San Ignacio. Seven people cram into this car. We drive into Peru in the dark. No electricity in the houses. We pass tiny villages with ghostly candles shining out of concrete block homes. A CD of salsa tunes on repeat accompanies our arrival into Peru, the driver blasting the volume, the songs etching into our brains until we start absentmindedly singing the lyrics.

San Ignacio is a pit stop. Only a pit stop, but we can make it no further the first night. And the place has electricity. A cold shower then bed...

We wake up at 6 in the morning. Minibuses, tiny minibuses, run "about every hour" or "when they get full" the locals tell us. The minibus is the size of my parent´s van. Nineteen people fit in this minibus. People lying on people. People squished in between seats. Children sprawled over each other like chickens in a box. Your knees in your face. Sardines. No words but sardines can convey our situation. Worse than seven people in a car is nineteen people in a van! Three hours until Jaen.

In Jaen, we arrive on the wrong side of town. The moto-taxis are like the tuk-tuks of Asia. A motorcycle with a compartment in the back. After much hassling we get a moto-taxi made for two, squeeze three people and our packs into the back, ride to wear minibuses wait like giant white bugs in the dusty heat of the frontier town.

A minibus again. Hours from Jaen to Bagua Grande. In Bagua Grande our luck runs out.

One camioneta goes to Pedro Ruiz per day, usually. And it had already left...

A lot of negotiating with sweaty Peruvian taxi drivers. Futile. We must pay 22 soles each (about 7 dollars), a ridiculous price, to reach Chachapoyas. We pay the taxi driver and begin the drive to Pedro Ruiz, two hours away.

The roads in Amazonas in Peru are wretched, falling away in landslides during this rainy season. We do not drink so that we will not have to pee. We have not eaten. Dehydrated, hungry, tired, carsick.

We pass Pedro Ruiz and the road ends. "No hay paso" (there is no way through) says the polite female road worker. A river has risen and covered the only road out. We beg and plead and finally we are allowed to drive through... through the river. The shallowest point still nearly obscures our car, the water rising fast as we almost float over the rocky riverbed.

Past the flooded river, we drive into an incredible canyon, alone on the dirt highway, jostling along still. The scenery is amazing. Like the formations of Utah with the rocky greenness of Colorado. We drive along the river.

Night is falling on the second day as we climb out of the canyon to Chachapoyas, a small city on a ridge. The city is an anomaly. Who would build a town here? I think. We think. We don´t know. But we are grateful. A hostal to sleep in. Yes. And we even find hamburgers, hamburgers doomed to disappear quickly as we devour them after our long journey and fasting.

A local guide will take us on a two day trek to see the fortress at Kuélap. Tomorrow we leave at 8 in the morning.

And hopefully, next time I write, I will have found this forbidden city in the jungle.

Now I understand why no one comes here. It is an incredible journey...

Saraguro, Loja, Vilcabamba, Podocarpus National Park

So, sorry not to have updated for awhile, but the Internet has been pretty slow and I had some fiascos involving graduate school recommendations not getting sent, and those took priority.

So after Cajas National Park, we spent Saturday night in Cuenca. On Sunday, we took the bus to Loja. Loja is a very boring ugly town. The only exciting part about Sunday was stopping in Saraguro on the way there. Saraguro is a small Quichua town halfway between Cuenca and Loja. The indigenous people there are some of the leaders of the national indigenous movement. They wear very dark colors, long black skirts, and shawls fastened with antique nickel pins. These pins are called tupus. And I was able to buy one that was four hundred years old. Normally, they would never sell them because they are heirlooms, handed down from one generation to the next. But as the woman who sold it to me said, the young girls are no longer interested in dressing in the traditional way and the heirlooms are being discarded. I also had my first, very short, conversation in Quichua with this woman. It went like this:

me: Quichuata yachacuni (I am learning Quichua)
her: Quichuata alli yachacunqui. (You are learning Quichua very well)
me: Quichuata yachacuni. Cuencamanta shamunchi. (I am just learning Quichua. We are coming from Cuenca)
her: Cuencamanta shamunguichi? Lojaman ricunguichi? (You both coming from Cuenca? You both are going to go to Loja?)
me: .... at this point, I am so excited that I am speaking Quichua that I answer "sí" in Spanish instead of the Quichua "Ari" but that´s okay. I spoke Quichua!!

The women also wear these hats that have cowsking underneath so they look like advertisements for Gateway computers! They also wear these huge beaded necklaces that would be more common in Africa, I think. So I bought a tupu and a necklace. Everyone in Saraguro asked Eva and I if we were in the Peace Corps because they didn´t see very many foreigners and figured that is the only reason we would be out that far from any large towns.

Sunday night we stayed in a disgusting place in Loja. The only good thing about Loja is that it is near Saraguro, Vilcabamba, and Podocarpus National Park. Monday we went to a botanical garden in Loja that sounded nice but was a big disappointment if you´ve spent a lot of time in the real rainforest. We decided it was time to get the heck out of Dodge, er, Loja, and we took the bus to Vilcabamba.

Vilcabamba is a beautiful tiny village in southern Ecuador. Even though it is the last town before the Peruvian border, it is a very rough 9 hour trek to Peru. The valley of Vilcabamba is famous for its old people. Legend says that residents regularly live to be in the 100s and are quite spritely for their age. I don´t know about the magical water or climate, but we sure had a relaxing time in Vilcabamba. We splurged on a hillside resort with spectacular views of the mountain, a German restaurant, a pool, wonderful showers, and included breakfast. It came to 8 dollars a night to stay at the Hosteria Izhcayluma, the most I have paid in my travels for a room. On Tuesday, I went with a local guide to the Podocarpus National Park. We went trekking through the cloud forest south of Vilcabamba, and I even spotted a quetzal bird! Then we found fresh puma tracks in the path. They were very fresh because it had been raining! You know that I have had quite enough with big cats, so I was happy that we did not run across that puma!

On Wednesday, I trekked with some new friends to an overlook of the Vilcabamba valley. We were the first people to test out this new trail, and it was amazing! I mean it was amazing that the route counts as a trail! We were walking along the ridges of high mountains with sheer drops into the cliffs below! And the ground was very crumbly. We were shocked to find cows and horses up there. We have no idea how they do not plummet into the abyss as we almost did. After that adventure, the cool pool and hot showers were wonderful!

Vilcabamba is a wonderful peaceful place to be, but the Internet was horrible when it worked at all, so it was hard to update. We were also staying a thirty minute walk from town.

After Vilcabamba I had no idea what to do with myself next... you´ll never guess what I decided... to be continued...

Ingapirca, Cajas National Park

So yesterday, Eva Maria and I headed up to the Inca ruins two hours north of Cuenca. The ruins are called Ingapirca (Incan wall, yay my mad Quichua skills). The original walls were built by the Cañari culture in 900 AD. Then the Incas invaded in 1470 and brought with them astrology, technology, all kinds of fun stuff. They built a temple in the shape of an oval, because they knew that the orbits of the planets in space was ellipitical, not circular. And they were the only Amerindian culture that knew about this. In the temple, the niches are perfectly aligned so that during the soltices only the two middle niches are illuminated by the sun. During the equinoxes, only the far niches are illuminated. They also had this amazing rock calendar. They would drill holes in the rocks, fill the holes with water, and use the little puddles like mirrors to watch the night sky. But the moon and the stars, obviously, would move from puddle to puddle throughout the night and throughout the year. In this way, they were incredibly advanced in astrology. We also saw these crazy doors that had more space at top and less around the legs. The guide told us this was because of the huge headdresses that the Incans wore into the ceremonies. The whole little town was built in the shape of a puma. From above, like from an airplane, it still looks like a giant rock puma, even though most of the walls are gone, because the stupid Spaniards stole a lot of the rocks to build houses and roads. Only 2 percent of the original rocks remain.

We also learned about how the llama was sacred to the Incas. Even though they ate llama, they never used them for transport. They never rode them. That is hardcore considering the alternative was carrying all of their cargo on their backs, which they did. The Incas also did not value gold that much. When they came across the Cañari, who traded with coastal people, they were obsessed with seashells because they had never seen them before and had never been to the ocean. Therefore, a lot of Incan gold ended up on the coast, traded for seashells! When the Spaniards came, they destroyed most of the Sun Temple looking for gold... to bad they didn´t want seashells!

Today, we headed out to Cajas National Park. The trails there, like everywhere in Ecuador, were horrible and poorly marked. We ran into an Austrian guy and his Hungarian mother, and the four of us got horribly lost in this crazy forest that looked like it came from China. The trees are the highest elevation trees in the world, all knarled and crazy looking. It looked like we were in that Fire Swamp forest from The Princess Bride. We were also at a very high elevation, and Eva and I both got altitude sickness very badly. After most of the day, we found the original trail to an overlook that we wanted. We almost made it to the top, but the fog was rolling in, and we did not want to get stranded. They say not to even go to that park without a guide, but after my time in Baños, I knew a guide would cost 35 bucks, and we couldn´t pay that! So we got almost to the summit. The view was amazing. This part of Ecuador has over 232 lakes, and it is this unreal paramo landscape in the middle of nowhere. The quiet is amazing. It is freezing cold. And the altitude was 4200 meters!! That´s really really high.

So we just barely caught a random bus on the mountain highway and made it back to Cuenca. Both Eva and I had plopped our hands down in a poisonous-ish plant that made us break out all over our hands and made our hands swell and sting. We were all horribly dirty. Eva twisted her ankle. I fell and landed on a spiny plant that managed to squish a huge splinter under my nail, which began to bleed everywhere. And everyone was getting altitude sickness. So it was a very very long day, even though the experience was worth it. Now I am going back to take a hot shower and to rest before we head to Loja tomorrow. Eva and I are both still suffering horrible altitude headaches and this computer screen doesn´t help.

I´ll be in touch when I am cleaner and healthier!!! Love from Incan ruins and ridiculously high altitude Andean lakes.

Nariz del Diablo, Cuenca, Poisonous Amarucuna

So Tuesday, I left Quito and made my way down to Riobamba...

So I crashed in a hotel next to the train station and woke up bright and early to get down to Alausí to catch the tourist train through the Nariz del Diablo. Back in olden times, the steam locomotive chugged its way over the steep slopes between Riobamba and Guayaquil using a number of switchbacks, in which the train would kind of pull off to the side, switch the tracks and keep ascending BACKWARDS. And so on, over this mountain. Now the tracks to Guayaquil are broken, the locomotive engine is broken, and locals have no use for the track. But the engineering was so famous that they can plop a few train cars on the track and charge foreigners a ridiculous seven dollars to jaunt over the old Nariz del Diablo (Devil´s Nose) segment.

On the train, I met a German girl named Eva Maria who was traveling in my direction so we have joined forces and our now traveling together.

After the Devil´s Nose train adventure, we headed through thick fog and rain to Cuenca, the beautiful colonial city in the south. We found an amazing hotel with orthopedic mattresses and, once again with my mad bargaining skills, I was able to get us the room for 6 bucks each per night. Sweet!

Cuenca is an amazing city. Unlike most of Ecuador, it is very clean! It looks like an old European city. We walked around and looked at all the old churches, some of them built with stones from the nearby old Incan palace that had been the birthplace of one of the last emperors of the Incas. Those Spanish conquistadors just had no respect! We went in the huge Cathedral of Immaculate Conception, the Museum of Modern Art. We went to the Turi overlook to see the city from a high hill. Then it was off to the Central Bank Museum to walk through exhibits on all the indigenous cultures of Ecuador. I was stopped by an American woman and her daughter who wanted the inside info on Shuar culture after they overheard me talking to Eva about my time in the rainforest. They couldn´t believe that the shrunken heads in front of us really were people (well, used to be, before they were decapitated and their heads shrunk to tiny proportions through tsantsa)! Although the Shuar mostly shrunk the heads of their enemies the Achuar, rarely of white people, because white people were considered inferior, and it was not worth the effort of shrinking their heads.

After the fun with the shrunken heads, we headed outside to the ruins of Tomebamba, the old Incan palace. The site was called Pumapungu... I was very excited because I could translate the Quichuan... It means Gateway of the Lion. Yay, my mad Quichua skills!

Then, we went to the Amaru Zoo, a place full of poisonous snakes and frogs (I thought of Jessica!)... And, guess what??? I translated again. I knew Amaru means Snake in Quichua... Look at me go... I am a Quichua freak! We saw lots of snakes at the Snake Zoo, obviously... anacondas, a few X snakes, like I had seen in the Shuar village, and even a rainbow boa constrictor like the huge one I saw at the Hola Vida Reserve. The X can kill you in ten minutes! Now, THAT is venom! The Shuar have an antidote.

After that, I finally found flashcards! Yay! I had looked all over Ecuador. They don´t have a word for flashcards, so I tried to explain, and they kept trying to give me sticky Post-it notes. Finally, at an English bookstore, of course, they had something kind of like flashcards so now I can start practicing my Quichua vocabulary without reading the dictionary.

So it was an extremely busy day today!! Tomorrow we will be heading to Ingapirca, the ancient ruins... and I have to have to have to finish my applications... so I will update soon!

Quichua lesson of the day:
Amaru snake
Misi cat
Allcu dog
(-cuna is plural, so misicuna means cats, for example)

Go impress your friends!!

Otavalo gifts, Fiery new year, Ishcayhuaranga canchis

So I lied... even though it´s two comments, they say the family reads it, so the blog is redeemed...Three topics today...

Otavalo

Saturday I went to the world famous Otavalo market two hours north of Quito (en route to Colombia). I heard it was incredibly touristy and a bit overpriced... but I was pleasantly surprised. The Quichua indigenous market was incredibly diverse and despite my best intentions, I spent a whole ton of money... But you will be happy to know that grandparents can expect a big gift, parents a big gift, mark two gifts, and jessica and ashley each make off with three! I just couldn´t help it... and everyone is absolutely going to LOVE their souvenirs. Especially jessica and ashley... you girls got something really cool coming to you! I can´t say anymore about the market because I´d have to tell you what I got... But I used my mad bargaining skills and with my fluent spanish with a few little quichua-isms thrown in they realized I knew what I was doing :)

The New Year

The New Year in Ecuador is CRAZY!!! I met this family while I was visiting Quito´s Teleferiqo, a cable car that takes you up the Pichincha mountain to overlook the whole city and surrounding mountains. They were American, but the parents lived in Phillipines, the one son and his girlfriend in Santa Fe, and the other son, Ben, in Maui. They were incredibly nice, and we spent the whole day together. They made off with a few crafts from the local market that I bargained for them, since they didn´t speak Spanish. And I made off with an official invitation to Maui!!! Fair trade, I´d say.

In Ecuador, everyone makes these effigies, or life size dolls, of figures of the past year. They are called Old Years. At midnight, they set the Old Years on fire and set off rockets. There are also the Widows of the Old Year. They are men who crossdress as old ladies, who are supposed to be mourning for the death of their husband, the Old Year. The Widows stop cars, dance like women, and won´t let traffic pass until someone pays them a tip. Then they use their collected change to get drunk all night. The Widows are part of the spectacle, so no one minds stopping their car and paying the hilarious revelers. Ecuadorians also think you should be wearing yellow underwear by midnight if you want good luck in the coming year. They eat 12 huge grapes. They crack an egg and leave it in a glass of water. In the morning, supposedly, it has the shape of something that foresees how your year will be.

So at midnight, we were surrounded by burning dolls. It´s illegal to put fireworks inside the dolls, but people do anyway, and they explode and fly wherever as the effigies burn. A guy I was with got hit in the back with a wayward firework that shot out of the belly of an Old Year. Luckily, it didn´t really explode so he was just covered in ash and pretty spooked! The night turned dangerous quickly. We saw a fight break out as two small kids tried to steal a guy´s cell phone. The police started closing the streets. And it took me an hour to find a taxi! But finally I went safely home. Most people stayed out until daybreak salsaing the night away, but I had a huge blister on my toe and the night was getting pretty dangerous.

¡Feliz Año Nuevo! Abrazos. And they hug everyone instead of kiss like we do in the States.

Quichua --- the Latin of South America

In other news, I am teaching myself Quichua. And it´s freaking complicated! They decline their nouns! Like in Latin. And one verb can be made about forty verbs by adding syllables. And they can´t have prefixes or suffixes like normal people... they have what I would call intra-fixes! where they plop a surprise syllable in the MIDDLE of the word. And they just keep adding syllables to one word instead of splitting them up. For example ¨of the boys¨ would be churicunacapag, churi is boy, cuna makes it plural, ca is ¨the¨, and pag is ¨of¨... but one word. Very complex language. They have words to mean red, redder, even more red, even more than more red, and reddest... not just red, redder, reddest, for example. They have the subjunctive. They have ways of forming verbs I can´t even explain...

For those of you who want to impress your friends, though, here is the most basic Quichua lesson I can give you... how to count to ten!

one shug
two ishcay
three quimsa
four chuscu
five pichca
six sogta
seven canchis
eight pusag
nine iscun
ten chunga

hundred pasag
thousand huaranga

So, I wish you all a very happy ishcayhuaranga canchis (2007)