La Selva Misteriosa y Poderosa

Lago Agrio. A small city in the north east. We´re sitting on the curb, our backpacks leaning against our legs. We´re waiting for a car that´s going to take us a few hours east, into the Cuyabeno national reserve. The Amazon Jungle.

It´s a five-day weekend for the country. We´re sitting on a main street as a constant stream of cars, trucks, and motorcycles pass by. I´ve never seen such organization in this country before, with two or three white-gloved crossing guards at each intersection.

Wé´re not in the highlands around Quito anymore and the heat and humidity are strong. When the truck picks us up, the windows are down and I close my eyes and enjoy the wind pushing against my face.

We drive further from civilization. The road narrows and the lines begin to fade in and out. For a while we travel through a landscape familiar in all of Ecuador: hilled country with grass and tress, spotted with the occasional family farm, a few cows, once in a while some power lines. But the trees begin to take over. More ferns appear. The trees are slender and wiry, and reach their witch´s finger high above the ground.

We pass briefly through a two-road village. I count as many canoes as cars.

The ferns are growing larger. The difference between tree and bush and weed blurs. Leaves begin to take on prehistoric proportions.

We finally stop at a bridge where we meet up with others in our tour group. From here we take eight-person motorized canoes down the river to the lodge. The water is mud-colored, and the water level is low right now. The banks are lined with twisted and entertiwned dead wood. The guide at the front of the canoe constantly scans for a glimpse of wildlife: monkeys leaping from branches, tucans, river dolphins, aligators. The glimpses are fleeting.

The trees that line the river seem more like vertical ecosystems. Branches creep out in every direction, clothed in fantastic vegetation, and adorned with vines that drop into the river and teardrop birds´ nests that hang like earings.

***

It´s night at the lodge. There is no electricity: we use candles. The jungle outside our room is dark, but not quiet. Forget the gentle chirp of crickets. The night is full of the rattle and hiss of insects I can only imagine being the size of rodents. For a moment I think I hear the patter of rain. But it is the flapping of hundreds of bats, swooping in every direction, feasting on the flies and mosquitoes, and the dozens of what-have-you little bugs that fill the air. There is a bug net to cover the bed, which is essential if you don´t want to wake up covered in a thousand little bug bites. There are also cockroaches, tarantulas, and scorpions to think about. A part of us is glad for the darkness.

***

The roar of downpouring rain washes out all other sounds. Lightning flashes and thunder rolls over us. It´s been raining for hours--all night as far as I can tell. Sometimes a light rain, sometimes, like now, the sky opens and turns the dampness of humidity into a purer sort of wet.

The green of the jungle is dense. It hides the birds and the insects and monkeys that usually fill this world with the wall of sounds that comes always from everywhere and nowhere. Now it stands, not against the rain, but absorbing it, accepting it without fuss because the rain is simply another part of it.

The rain is slowing, but not stopping. The thunder moves slowly away, but it doesn´t move on. In a moment the rain thickens again. It ebbs and flows. The distant runbling gives way to a closer booming. This storm must stretch for miles.

And so it does. It rains nonstop until midafternoon. But this doesn´t matter. There are jungle hikes to take, with exotic animals to see, and giant ferns and trees to marvel at.

Our tour group is a mixed bunch. With so many tourists, I´m surprised I´m the only one from the U.S. England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy. One man from New Zealand looks a decade older than his twenty-two years, but acts sixteen. He talks non stop and seems incapabable of moderating the volume of his voice. He´s one of those who has to be making noise, so he fills up the space with the sort of culturally deaf joking that gives us foreigners the epithet of gringos. He belongs in a pub, and here his irreverance chafes.

But there is no taking the awe out of 15-foot ferns that arch over the trail, and massive sequioas that tower far above the rest of the jungle, with roots that we do not step over, but climb over. I press myself against it just to be able to touch such a being.

***

We swim in Laguna Grande, the largest lagoon in the area. The water is a dark tea color due to the acidity of the vegetation that falls and decomposes there. We don´t know it now, but there are pirhana here. Generally, they stay clear of something as big as a human, unless you have an open cut, in which case you´re in for a bad time. But there are no problems this evening.

We watch the sky paint itself with the setting sun. It sits atop the silhouette of the jungle. I stop swimming for a few moments to watch. It´s impossible not to enjoy such a sunset.

When the fire has put itself out and the short twilight begins settling into the darkness of a night outside the city, we once again begin boating down the river. The guide stands at the prow, sweeping his flashlight back and forth along the banks. He looks for the tell-tale eye reflection of aligators in the water and boas in the trees.

When he sees something, we head toward it, straining the whole time to see in the dark what the guide spotted a hundred meters before. He points toward black logs in black water which are aligators. He points to grey blotches in the grey mud, which take to flight, seeming to tranform into something alive from nothing at all before our eyes. We come within a few feet of aligators that, all of sudden, seem huge and powerful so close up. Small boas hang in branches a few feet above our heads.

The driver speeds us down the river without light, into the wall of black jungle in front of us. He knows the river in a way that seems almost mystical to me. And that´s the way everything is down here. A world with a sort of magical purity. This is God´s prayer to us, and sometimes all you need to do is listen to feel clean agian.

***

A Note:
This blog is an attempt to capture a tiny piece of the atmoshpere that I experienced. It is not a detailed itenerary of the things that we did and saw, and often leaves out entire activities, like visiting a local community and playing with their pet monkey. Some more detail might be gathered from the pictures I have uploaded to facebook, so please feel free to look through those as well.

Police Coup?

So this is what seems to have happened. The Assembley (legislative body) here passed a law that reduced the benefits and pension of members of the police and military. When President Correa did not veto the bill the police went on strike. The strike originally started in Quito and Guayaquil. It looks as if the police in Guayaquil had second thoughts when they saw how their city was being looted, robbed, and generally torn apart. They went back to work shortly thereafter.

The strike took a different turn early here in Quito when the police captured the president and began holding him in a military hospital. At this point people began calling it a coup. But it ended up being a pretty half-assed coup, which is only to be expected here in Ecuador. Communications were never cut; leading figures were allowed to publicly oppose what was happening; people were allowed to assemble in great masses to chant and hold vigils in support of the president; and even the president himself was allowed to communicate by phone with apparently whomever he wanted including the press and Hugo Chavez. I have to say I was a little disappointed with the execution and professionality of the coup.

What the police did mostly was to set up a barricade of tear gas around the hospital and a bunch of burning-tire roadblocks. They also took control of the airport for a short time.

What exactly they were intending to do without the backing of the military, I'm not sure. For a short time it was unclear to me whose side the military was on. But once the military declared for the president, the president order an "estado de excepcion," or a state of emergency, in which the military sent several units into Quito to restore order and, as it turns out, to battle the police.

A little before 9, with the sun fallen and the streets nearly empty, the military advanced on the hospital in an attempt to get the president out and thus began a 45 minute gun battle between the police and the military. One side was using rubber bullets. It wasn't clear to me which.

In the end the military did rescue the president and brought him to the plaza in front of the Presidential Palace where thousands of citizens had been gathered all day long. There he accused Lucio Gutierrez, the previous president who was removed from office by a popular uprising not long before Correa was elected, of being the mastermind behind the attempted coup. I was dubious at first, thinking that perhaps he was turning Lucio into some sort of Emmanuel Goldstein, but I don't think he is that cunning, and besides, crazy stuff like that happens down here.

The military currently has control of the country as a police force of some kind. It is unclear how they will deal with this situation after the public trust was broken so. I think there is a general feeling here that maybe the majority of the lower-rank police didn't realize what they were doing or why, and perhaps got themselves in over their heads. This seems especially true since they never changed their story of only being on strike, and never seemed to do much to obtain power in the country. From my view it looked like a few higher ups took this law passing as an excuse for a coup, but things petered out for them when other cities did not join their cause, when nearly the entire public opposed them, and when the military did not back them. Nonetheless, this country has some interesting issues to deal with in the coming weeks.

A Little Vignette for All of You

The place is emptier than I expected. But I´ve never been here so early in the morning. Two dozen tables sit empty outside the cafe. From a distance they look srewn about, like the place is closed. I order a mochacino and some nachos for breakfast.

A guard roams about in a navy blue coat. What exactly he is supposed to do, I´m not sure. Guard the cash register probably. It´s not exactly a rowdy place. Besides, guards here, they never involve themselves in real trouble. Shit hits the fan and they lock themselves inside with the cash--like one time when my friend ended up in a street brawl with some club-weilding hooligans outside a gas station while two guards with shotguns stayed inside and even held the door of the gas station shut. Now the guard is staring at our table, the only full one: a dozen people sitting around, writing in notebooks; all ecuadorian but for one gringo; an obvious gringo. So he can´t help it. He probably doesn´t see people writing very often. And even though there are gringos running all over this city, everyone still stares at us.

The writers at the table laugh and talk to each other more than they actually write. They pass packets of sugar around for their coffees. Four men are working on the open second story of the unfinished cinderblock building next door. They are spreading cement along the blocks.

Two foreigners walk in. They aren´t blond or anything. It´s just little things that give them away. First, they´re women. This is hardly a giveaway in itself. But one wears a baggy grey sweatshirt, a fashion faux pas for the appearance-conscious women of Quito. She also has her unbrushed hair tossed up under a powder pink cap. Add to that the zits not covered by an overzealousness with foundation, and her friend´s laptop and we have two all-american college girls who stand out more than they know.

The plaza, among the most popular in the city at night, seems almost abandoned the way the handful of cars drive through, without hesitation, on their way to work. A few people pass by, mostly alone. A woman walks with a deliberate stride. She carries a shopping bag. She keeps her eyes on the ground. Even at eight in the morning this is a bad idea. I´ve grown eyes in the back of my head.

A young woman with a thick purple top and a full figure passes by in a direct line to a table at the cafe next door. She greets everyone with a kiss on the cheek. When they sit, bushes block my view of them. A man, late twenties, middle class, short hair, carries a plastic bag of cucumbers into the cafe. A man, thirties, with a harsh life etched into his face and a striped polo tucked into his jeans strolls through the plaza. His head swivels back and forth as if he´s looking for something. His steps meander a bit, like he isn´t exactly focused on point B. But he doesn´t seem to see what he is looking for and he continues on through the plaza.

The sun steadily swims higher into the sky. The early morning chill is fading, the cafe´s shadow doesn´t stretch so far down the road, and the table of writers is no longer rubbing their hands together or wrapping scarves around their faces.

They get the check, and spend fifteen minutes doing math on their cellphones. They are confused, like no one has ever had to figure out how to split a bill. Eventually everyone seems satisfied. Then begins the process of everyone kissing everyone else on the cheek, and the group scatters leaving the plaza--once again--empty.

Una Noche con el Shamán

Hola a todos.

So, as I mentioned in my last post, this past weekend I finally did my first ceremony with a shaman. And now I´ll tell you all about it.

We (myself and four friends) went to Tumbaco, a nearby valley of Quito on Saturday evening. We got there sometime between five and six. There was a lot of waiting around, but I´ll skip those parts. Let me introduce the setting and the characters briefly.

The setting was on a small hill, on one side overlooking the city, spread out as lights below; on the other side overlooking some woods. The shaman is, I would guess, in his fifties. He is from Chile but has lived here for a while, and does this for a living. Don´t picture him as some super exotic medicine man with feathers and a loin cloth. He was a pretty normal guy, joking around, being friendly, and dressed in slacks and a turtleneck (he was wearing some sort of animal-tooth necklace). He had a number of young people that helped facilitate the logistics of the ceremonies. Most of them did look a bit on the hippie side. But then again, so did we all. Most of the people there were young, but there were actually some families with young children (although I don´t think they really partook), and middle-aged couples, etc. In all I would estimate fifty to sixty people attended.

First, the shaman and his aids set up a small dome (stick frame wrapped in canvas); at the same time they built a bonfire around some stones to heat them red hot. This took a while but eventually we all stripped to bathing suits, or just boxers, and crawled into the tiny dome where all of us were packed in shoulder to shoulder and practically sitting on others´ laps.

One by one, someone passed the heated stones into the tent. With each one he said the name of a mountain. (I think this has something to do with the spirits of mountains here. The ideas in the ceremonies often centered around Mother Earth, and bordered on nature worship. Unfortuneately, since this was my first time, and since it was all in Spanish, I only grasped the most superficial of cultural significance within the ceremony. So I´m sure I missed a lot.) The stones were placed in a hole in the middle; the flap was closed, making it pitch black inside; then some herbs were tossed on the rocks and some water.

He said a short sort of prayer, mostly asking that the ceremony would be successful for each, that the sweat lodge part of it would serve its function as a cleansing practice; and also giving thanks to Mother Earth for various things. His prayer emphasized gaining greater understanding of the Great Mystery, and changing. Exactly what he meant by change was vague to me, but I understood it as a serious change of who you are, how you see the world, and act within it. After the prayer, he and a helper played on a moracca and a little animal-skin drum, and began singing a song that could only be described as some sort of hymn, and everyone began singing along. Then it was another´s turn. One by one, each of his helpers (I think: it was pitch black, recall) also added a little prayer of thanks or well-wishes, and began another song that everyone joined in on. The songs were more similar to what you might imagine a stereotypical indian pow-wow song to sound like than I expected them to be. Some of them were in Spanish and others in Quechua.

(After each prayer and song, everyone shouted, Ajó! I´m not sure if this is spelled right; in fact I´m not sure if this is Spanish, or if it comes from one of the indigenous languages here. It is used as an expression of agreement and solidarity, basically in the same way that Amen is used in Christian communities.)

Our sweat lodge got hot and steamy to the point of discomfort. But eventually they opened the flap . . . to pass in more stones. After two or three rounds of this, it had turned into an endurance test. We were all pouring sweat down our bodies; people were leaving because they couldn´t stand it anymore; my back hurt from sitting (I have terrible posture), and my legs were falling asleep; it was so hot that it hurt my throat to breathe; the guy in front of me lay down and put his head in my lap. Including such a trying practice as a cleansing ritual at the beginning of the long ceremony was an interesting and appropriate methodology, as we all left both tired and invigorated, and, in a way, feeling healthier and prepared.

After the sweat lodge, we got dressed, and then did some more waiting around as the place of the ceremony was prepared. The place was a small clearing with a circle in it that held the fire, some designs in the dirt, and some flowers. It was sacred and no one (including the shaman) would walk inside it or walk across the line that bisected it, walking the long way around it instead. Two posts with flags acted as portals to the circle and stood at each of the four cardinal directions. However, only one could be used to enter and exit the circle, and the others were guarded by people at all times. Why, I don´t know.

We all sat in a line along the circumference of the circle. The shaman spoke to us a bit about the ceremony, its purpose, and then said another prayer and sang a song. Then we each took a little pinch of the herb and each of us approached the fire, thought a silent prayer regarding what we wanted to accomplish that night, and then dropped the herbs onto the fire. (He kept calling the herb medicine--not to be confused with the San Pedro to come--but it was more like an insense than anything else; although it did have a ceremonial significance as it was used at many times throughout the night, and it was customary to wave one´s hands in a gesture of covering your face, head and heart with the smoke.)

At this point they passed out la medicina (a brew made from a San Pedro cactus, the active ingredient being mescaline), along with plastic bags to vomit into. It had a gag-inducing bitterness, but nothing too horrible. I didn´t really take enough, though. The trip was mild, and mostly just the sort of tense body high one might experience with LSD, but no visuals. Also, I didn´t vomit (which is an expected part of the process, and often opens the door to a stronger trip) and so I had a mild undersensation of nausea the whole time.

After this, we all sat or laid down while he walked around the circle playing a little drum over each of us, as if annointing us. There was some more singing by individuals, along with playing of various flutes. Eventually, we began a ritual (a series of them, really) in which a group would go kneel by the fire, the shaman would say some words to them in front of the crowd, and then proceed to blow alcohol in their faces and down their backs. He would then walk behind them, grab their heads, and make strange squaking noises in their ears. This was meant as a cleansing ceremony to remove ¨evil spirits.¨ (This is my term and not the shaman´s; and it isn´t the best, since the idea is much more abstract and much less superstitious than the term evil spirits implies; but this is a long blog and I can´t think of the right term right now.)

This ceremony went on for a number of hours as different groups went up to be cleansed. I didn´t go. The last ceremony happened around dawn. At that point the ceremonies stopped and a new ritual was undertaken. In this one all of the women left the circle to prepare food, while the men remained in the circle, waiting. Now, this sort of machismo double standard is something I still haven´t become comfortable with here. However, this time things fell on me differently. You see, while I don´t know that I grasp the full significance of the ritual, or the distinction in gender roles, I realized that there was much more than sexism at work here. It was clear that the preparation of the food was not a servile task for inferiors, but was in fact a sacred ritual with grave ceremonial importance. After preparing the food (mostly fruit and some varieties of corn; yes, there are varieties) the women processed with hymn back to the circle where they didn´t immediately begin serving. Instead we waited in silence as each of the women took her turn saying a little prayer of thanks, or simply speaking her mind, or even just kneeling down and sending up a quiet thought with the smoke from the herbs she threw into the fire. With each one we cried out, Ajó, and moved our hands, wafting the smoke in our direction and symbolically partaking of the woman´s offering of herself. For some reason this was very moving to me. I felt like I had recieved a new perspective on communal social dynamics and seen an aspect of culture down here that I hadn´t expected to see.

Then the women processed around the circle offering us water, and the food. I noted that the shaman wasn´t served at all. After serving us, the women sat down together and ate. When that was all done, the shaman closed the whole ceremony with a few words, opened the circle for us to leave, and then, laughing, ran over to get some of the leftovers.

All in all it was a very interesting and educational experience. It opened my eyes to looking at ritualistic religious ceremony from a new perspective. Next time I feel like I will get more out of it, since I plan to participate more instead of just sitting back and trying to figure out what is going on. This was something I´ve been wanting to do since before I even came down here, and I´m not at all sorry I did.

Mitad del Mundo

So this is a quick update to tell you about a short trip I took to Mitad del Mundo, or the equator. It was pretty cool, with a few demonstrations of how things work slightly differently on the equator. For example, it´s supposedly easier to balance and egg on its end, although I wasn´t able to do it. Water really does drain in opposite directions in the different hemispheres, but falls straight down right on the equator. It´s also harder to walk a straight line if that line is the equator itself.

There´s not much more to tell, but it was cool to have straddled the equator, and I suppose that it was one of the things I had to do while I was here.

Tonight I finally have my first ayahuasca ceremony with a shaman. I´ve been looking forward to this for a while. I´m sure I´ll write about here in a couple of days.

Cotopaxi

So we left for Cotopaxi in a camioneta on Saturday. We walked a short way to the refuge at the base of the mountain. We spent the rest of the day chilling out, playing cards, eating noodles, and then trying to get a few hours of rest before the climb.

We woke up around midnight, got ourselves and our gear ready, and left at 1 am. The moon was full and lit up the red soil around us to the point where we could turn off our headlamps. Off in the distance a lightning storm raged around the head of another mountain, giving us a spectacular show of sheet lightning effects.

After about an hour and a half we reached the beginning of the glacier. We strapped on our crampons and roped ourselves together and then began the the three-and-a-half to four-hour trudge through the snow and ice. We walked along narrow paths edged by sharp inclines leading down to precipitous drops. We leapt small crevasses that seemed not to have a bottom. When the trek started getting long and our energy waned, we trudged--left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot--up steep inclines of soft, loose snow. As we climbed the last of the narrow and steep path that led to the top we muttered encouragement to each other.

And then we crested the summit and my eyes filled with tears.

I dropped to my knees in front of the massive volcanic crater, a few hundred meters deep. Steam rose from within bringing with it the smell of sulfur. In every direction the mountains of the Andes loomed in the distance. The valleys below were flooded with a thick ocean of cloud, ever so slowly rolling up over the crests of the little hills and washing down the other side. The sun was newly risen and the multicolored fire of its birth was just disapating into the clouds and clear blue of the horizon. The snowy peaks of the tallest mountains in Ecuador jutted up through the clouds to stare back at me.

The weeks of preparing to climb this volcano; the large amounts of money I spent renting gear and making the trip; the cold, rainy ride in the back of the pickup truck; the pain that shot up my leg every time I slammed my foot to the ground to make sure I had good footing on the ice; the six hours of climbing uphill in the middle of the night: the ten minutes I spent at the peak was worth every bit of it.

Outdated Update

Hola a todos,

Ok, so here is another long-overdue post.

The break over the holidays was fun, but pretty boring for the most part. I spent some time hanging out with friends in the city, but not much more. For Christmas a bunch of us ex-pats who weren´t going home got together with a few Ecuadorians and cooked ourselves a nice dinner which included shrimp parmesan, chicken, and various other things. We have these sorts of cooking get-togethers ever few weeks though.

For the new year we made an effigy of the old year (el año viejo) and burned it in the street and then proceeded to leap to and fro over the flames. It´s a cool tradition that I plan to bring back with me. Way more fun than watching the ball drop.

Teaching has been going just fine, although my students haven´t been as much fun as they were last cycle. Next cycle I may be doing a teaching tag-team with a writing/literature course which I hope will be very useful to our students who need a lot more exposure to natural written language.

I´ve begun climbing mountains again as I work my way up to Cotopaxi, and perhaps even to Chimborazo. But you won´t be seeing many more pictures since my camera died from water damage on a rainy hike recently.

This past weekend was a four-day weekend for Carnival. I spent a few days near Montañita, a busy party town on the coast. We stayed within walking distance of the town, but at a pretty chill part of the beach. It was the first time I really fell in love with the beach and could see myself spending long amounts of time on one. A lot of us went and mostly we hung out, went body surfing, walked around, ate, drank. The stuff you normally do on the beach.

And now I´m back at work and I don´t really want to be. But oh well. That´s life.

I´ll be posting in another few months, so don´t stay tuned, lol.

Chao.