YOU HAVE THREE WISHES! booms the genie in my head between the time I crawl into bed and the time I fall asleep. (Apparently Grandma Helen falls asleep at the exact moment that the pillow meets her head; but I got the Swanson genes of lying awake and thinking for a long time before the Sandman takes me.) WHAT’LL IT BE?
“Great!” I say to myself, “I’d like to be independent, and… exercise more.”
I must be the kind of fairy tale junkie that misses the moral of the story: “be careful what you wish for.”
On Friday night after most of our classmates had set off for weekend beach excursions, six of us girls set out to find a specific club which supposedly had several different locations within a radius of the hotel. We never ended up finding it, though we stopped for directions about 5 times, and after trying out a couple of other locations ended up eventually right back where we’d started, in the same bar we always go, with the bartender we know.
Wish numbers 1 and 2 got me lost three times this week. Trying to save Grampi the (short) trip to the Carcelen Supermaxi, I rode the Carcelen bus all the way to the end of the line, which happened to be behind the basketball courts of a more run-down barrio than I’d walked around in to date, and a run-down barrio that I could not locate on my mental map of Quito. After making a few phone calls, I jumped on a bus that I assumed was going back into town, to get off at Supermaxi after all… When I realized the bus wasn’t going where I wanted to go, I hopped off onto a graffiti’d cement street and felt the grey walls and street and sky pushing my panic buttons. My hit-or-miss sense of direction (also inherited from my dad) started me walking up the hill the way I wanted to go, and there it was: Terminal Carcelen, right at the bottom of the street where Grampi lives. “I’m extra-happy to see you,” Helen laughed as I walked in a few minutes later, and nudged me toward the cookies.
The next morning I went to church with Grampi and the pastor spoke like a poet, with all the pauses, breaths and emphasis of a great word-speaker. He spoke of finding time and making time for God, drawing from the New Testament poets Paul and Jesus the way Fake Andrew draws from Shihan, Shane Hawley, Sage Francis and each other. I felt comfortable again, I found a fellow speaker of the word.
Later on in the house I found more words, this time printed and leather-bound: a shelf full of classics with publication dates like 1921 and old owners’ autographs pencilled onto the title page in the precise curly script of the last century.
Back in the city on Monday, I set out with an address copied from a guidebook, my passport, and $10 to renew my soon-to-expire 90-day tourist visa. Feeling determined and capable, I took the bus to exactly the right place only to be told that I was at the wrong place, and the right place was mere blocks from my home base, on my own turf, in my own ‘hood! So I took the Trole bus back, crammed so full of people we didn’t even have to hold onto anything in order to stay standing, to the address they gave me. And there I was directed across the street and to the following morning, to an office only open from eight to noon three days a week. Feeling discouraged but at least better-informed, I trudged back home in another gathering storm. This time the heavy clouds promised refreshment, but the iron gates in front of the hotel were a welcome sight.
I have power-walked back and forth to that office at least 5 times this week. Twice I’ve been the first one there and spent two whole mornings tapping my feet waiting for my number to be called, waiting to be told what other documents I needed to fill out and what other payments I needed to make. Finally I think I did everything, but I have to go back again to pick up the final visa, my passport and other necessary documents. I am frustrated and finally understand why everyone hates bureaucracy. Fabian said, “Now you know what it’s like for us getting visas to your country.” That’s not even the beginning of it. By the time I shell out the exit tax at the airport, I will have paid a dollar a day just to exist within a space defined by invisible borders.
Sick of getting my exercise under extremely stressful conditions, I did a graffiti tour of the town with Taylor yesterday, and set out this afternoon with Brad and Katie to Parque Alameda to take a turn in the rowboats. Quito’s buildings are covered with spray painted political messages, not as artistic as some North American displays, but definitely more politically aware than a lot of the shows I’ve seen. Or rather, more aware of mainstream politics: “Pobre país en los manos de naños listos,” a reference to President Correa and his brother, who are making a lot of changes and a lot of enemies.
Parque Alameda has been on my destination list since my second week here. It boasts an old observatory with astronomical, meteorological, seismological instruments dating back over 100 years, and one of the oldest functioning telescopes in the world. We finally rented a rowboat ($1.50 for half an hour) and took two laps around the lazy river carved into the park. On its banks people nap or read; beyond them buses and cars belch black smoke into the air between the towering office buildings framing the valley on one side and the mountains on the other. And above that, sunshine, finally.
I have had a great run in this country and even without a genie I’ve had lots of wishes come true. But when this genie comes back to ask for my third wish, I’m going to say, “Genie, I want to go home.”
27 August 2009
18 August 2009
la patria: playing limbo for family, country and home
“So, I just have to ask,” says Steve Macdonald through the phone from Vancouver, in the middle of his third confirmation call, “are you Canadian?” I laugh. “No, I’m from Minnesota. Not too far off.” I imagine him shaking his head. “Normally I pride myself on being able to pick out accents, especially Canadian accents… But yours had me stumped!”
This is a common problem: “Where are you from?” someone might ask, intending to spark some pleasant small talk. I inevitably hesitate, calculating which town or country would make most sense to this person and which one I would most easily be able to explain in ten words or less. During this pause, my companion’s smile falters as they wonder what kind of space cadet they are talking to.
Fortunately I have invented a simple formula for such situations. When someone thinks I’m Canadian, I’m actually from Minnesota. When I meet members of the North American university crowd I strike up a rousing chorus of Um Yah Yah, and I make people laugh through bitter Minnesota Januaries by speaking with an Upstate New York accent. If I can get a national discount for being Ecuadorian, I whip out my cédula, and as far as street cred goes, in my favorite restaurant 4 Ases, I’m a legit quiteña.
On August 15, my family dresses up in their Indian best to sing Jana Gana Mana with the subcontinent’s 1.15 billion. But as Ecuador’s Bicentennial passes (el 10 de agosto), I find myself more tightly wrapped in the yellow F.E.F. jerseys and close-toed shoes of my country of birth.
I spent most of el Día de la Independencia on a bus with my friends, on our way back from a weekend in Baños. We slept most the afternoon, but just before we got into Quito I looked out the window between the curtains and lost my breath. In the soft pre-dusk light everything looked sharper – the road and the trees unfolded in front of us like pages of a pop-up book, the mountains exploded navy purple against the cloudless sky, snowcaps glinting pink in the falling sun. The sun itself shot a crown of rays through the sunset clouds and the valleys and then we crested a hill and the snakelike city of Quito spread out beneath us. I felt very patriotic, at home between walls of sierra.
Baños reeled me in with its pungent park and glowing steeples, $1 earrings and Andean street bands and cuy (an equatorial cousin of the guinea pig) roasting in front of shops. The main drag sported restaurants, bars and heladerías, and little sweet stalls piled high with fresh-pulled taffy, rich berry syrup, dulce de leche and fruit paste. Tourists roar past on ATVs and dune buggies while Mama Tungurahua looks down over it all with a stern but loving eye, crowned at our arrival with the clearest rainbow I have ever seen.
Stationed at the headwaters of the Amazon, Baños is surrounded by waterfalls. I knew the gorge from a ten-year-old memory. From the one-bus suspension bridge I peek out the window and look straight down hundreds of feet to the river crammed between two sheer rock faces. On the other side some of the students find their inner Superman on the zipline across the canyon, while below them I inevitably miss the next rock in my trail and fall into the river. We visit three more waterfalls and take a metal basket tarabita across one of them, singing the Indiana Jones theme song with the wind whipping through our hair. The last of them is so massive it is called el Pailon del Diablo, or the Devil’s Cauldron. We get soaked within meters of the falls, whose deafening mass crashes down on top of another rainbow.
We eventually rustled up $15 for a cuy, and ended up taking more sensationalist photos with its head and claws than eating its dark meat. José came back from his biking excursion with cuts all across his face, and on Dana’s birthday one of the bartenders whipped up some flaming shots and colored bendy straws “solo para las chicas!” The blue-lit church steeple tempted me to Mass (I resisted in favor of dinner), and Hannah made me cry with a song she’d written about how we too often stop believing in things as we grow up, we have to be in control of our selves and our emotions, and the ways we try to get that hope back. It struck a nerve, and she has a beautiful voice. Unlike the parrot in the backyard, whose squawks beneath our window never failed to make me jump. A bright green hummingbird also took up residence in the tree just outside, sipping from white flowers.
I am in awe of these miracles. Last week we took a field trip to a flower factory where they grow roses at high altitude and in direct sunlight to export to florists around the world. A lot of the mountain towns sell only one thing: Cayambe, aside from the flowers, specializes in a crunchy bread snack called bizcocho, while Pelileo sells denim and Quisapincha all kinds of leather. On top of the TeleferiQo at 4100m with Grampi and Matt, I check out the distantly visible socioeconomic spectrum of Quito’s barrios through the telescope. We take turns at the oxygen bar, a lab-like set of tubes with different colors of liquid bubbling inside them. They slip a tube over our head and into our noses and we breathe scented oxygen while looking down at the city and the cable car gliding up and down the mountain. (Grampi testifies to the supervisor about how the oxygen bar glorifies God, and she nods along until the 15 minutes are up.)
In the cloud forests of Mindo we step into a netted jungle, a butterfly breeding ground populated by at least 12 species of different sizes, shapes and colors. The tube guide of Mindo is dark with golden honey eyes, muscles rippling like the river as he pulls and pushes seven tubes tied together over rocks and rapids with eight or nine people on top. Our canopy guides hook each of us onto the ziplines to soar over the jungle with our lives in their hands and a playful smile. In another moment of identity crisis I become a butterfly, flying upside-down, arms and legs stretched out, over the jungles, under the sky, between the peaks. Around the fire at our campsite that night, somebody stumbles upon a huge wolf spider with an equally huge egg sac at her abdomen. We take turns petting her before Xavier the bug expert sets her free in the dark with the fireflies.
My cousin Matt just graduated from high school in Chapel Hill, NC, and spent a month in the jungle and a week in Quito before heading off to become a Sun Devil at Arizona State. He looks the part, tall and very blond, his face pink from the sun and his shoulders tanned from being on the river all summer. That week we saw the crime-fighting cuy in Fuerza-G and toured the Voice of the Andes – the HCJB radio station and Hospital Vozandes, with a personal tour from jungle doctor Wally Swanson. On Matt’s last night in town some of our jungle cousins surprised us at the hotel. We all went out to 4 Ases, where a ten-member band and a German with dreadlocks burst in drumming, making handicrafts out of beads and wire and singing raucously over their cheap Ecuadorian beers. The lead singer, a wiry little man with long black hair, started giving shout-outs to all our patrias, to Ecuador, Germany, Colombia, Bolivia… Matt told them he was Swiss, and I said I am from Quito. They didn’t believe me at first, but then they laughed and asked my name. “Ah, you are Clarita, and she is Oscurita!” one man chortles, pointing at the cheery little Bolivian woman in the corner. She waves, I catch the eye of the clear-faced German, and everyone starts singing again.
I am all of this; I am what I say and what I make: the Tour d’Eiffel earring stand for Natalia’s growing collection of arretes, the gringuito fish and potato wedges for dinner, apple oatmeal for breakfast. I am a presentation about xenophobia and a poem about love. I am from many places and many people: my Swedish great-grandparents, the gathering of Latin American presidents in the Estadio on August 10, my two sets of missionary grandparents. I am ROLLING in social capital. I am independent, interdependent, a cynic and a believer, a crier, a laugher, a lover and a liver. I’m LILLY, I am the QUEEN, and I like EVERYTHING!
This is a common problem: “Where are you from?” someone might ask, intending to spark some pleasant small talk. I inevitably hesitate, calculating which town or country would make most sense to this person and which one I would most easily be able to explain in ten words or less. During this pause, my companion’s smile falters as they wonder what kind of space cadet they are talking to.
Fortunately I have invented a simple formula for such situations. When someone thinks I’m Canadian, I’m actually from Minnesota. When I meet members of the North American university crowd I strike up a rousing chorus of Um Yah Yah, and I make people laugh through bitter Minnesota Januaries by speaking with an Upstate New York accent. If I can get a national discount for being Ecuadorian, I whip out my cédula, and as far as street cred goes, in my favorite restaurant 4 Ases, I’m a legit quiteña.
On August 15, my family dresses up in their Indian best to sing Jana Gana Mana with the subcontinent’s 1.15 billion. But as Ecuador’s Bicentennial passes (el 10 de agosto), I find myself more tightly wrapped in the yellow F.E.F. jerseys and close-toed shoes of my country of birth.
I spent most of el Día de la Independencia on a bus with my friends, on our way back from a weekend in Baños. We slept most the afternoon, but just before we got into Quito I looked out the window between the curtains and lost my breath. In the soft pre-dusk light everything looked sharper – the road and the trees unfolded in front of us like pages of a pop-up book, the mountains exploded navy purple against the cloudless sky, snowcaps glinting pink in the falling sun. The sun itself shot a crown of rays through the sunset clouds and the valleys and then we crested a hill and the snakelike city of Quito spread out beneath us. I felt very patriotic, at home between walls of sierra.
Baños reeled me in with its pungent park and glowing steeples, $1 earrings and Andean street bands and cuy (an equatorial cousin of the guinea pig) roasting in front of shops. The main drag sported restaurants, bars and heladerías, and little sweet stalls piled high with fresh-pulled taffy, rich berry syrup, dulce de leche and fruit paste. Tourists roar past on ATVs and dune buggies while Mama Tungurahua looks down over it all with a stern but loving eye, crowned at our arrival with the clearest rainbow I have ever seen.
Stationed at the headwaters of the Amazon, Baños is surrounded by waterfalls. I knew the gorge from a ten-year-old memory. From the one-bus suspension bridge I peek out the window and look straight down hundreds of feet to the river crammed between two sheer rock faces. On the other side some of the students find their inner Superman on the zipline across the canyon, while below them I inevitably miss the next rock in my trail and fall into the river. We visit three more waterfalls and take a metal basket tarabita across one of them, singing the Indiana Jones theme song with the wind whipping through our hair. The last of them is so massive it is called el Pailon del Diablo, or the Devil’s Cauldron. We get soaked within meters of the falls, whose deafening mass crashes down on top of another rainbow.
We eventually rustled up $15 for a cuy, and ended up taking more sensationalist photos with its head and claws than eating its dark meat. José came back from his biking excursion with cuts all across his face, and on Dana’s birthday one of the bartenders whipped up some flaming shots and colored bendy straws “solo para las chicas!” The blue-lit church steeple tempted me to Mass (I resisted in favor of dinner), and Hannah made me cry with a song she’d written about how we too often stop believing in things as we grow up, we have to be in control of our selves and our emotions, and the ways we try to get that hope back. It struck a nerve, and she has a beautiful voice. Unlike the parrot in the backyard, whose squawks beneath our window never failed to make me jump. A bright green hummingbird also took up residence in the tree just outside, sipping from white flowers.
I am in awe of these miracles. Last week we took a field trip to a flower factory where they grow roses at high altitude and in direct sunlight to export to florists around the world. A lot of the mountain towns sell only one thing: Cayambe, aside from the flowers, specializes in a crunchy bread snack called bizcocho, while Pelileo sells denim and Quisapincha all kinds of leather. On top of the TeleferiQo at 4100m with Grampi and Matt, I check out the distantly visible socioeconomic spectrum of Quito’s barrios through the telescope. We take turns at the oxygen bar, a lab-like set of tubes with different colors of liquid bubbling inside them. They slip a tube over our head and into our noses and we breathe scented oxygen while looking down at the city and the cable car gliding up and down the mountain. (Grampi testifies to the supervisor about how the oxygen bar glorifies God, and she nods along until the 15 minutes are up.)
In the cloud forests of Mindo we step into a netted jungle, a butterfly breeding ground populated by at least 12 species of different sizes, shapes and colors. The tube guide of Mindo is dark with golden honey eyes, muscles rippling like the river as he pulls and pushes seven tubes tied together over rocks and rapids with eight or nine people on top. Our canopy guides hook each of us onto the ziplines to soar over the jungle with our lives in their hands and a playful smile. In another moment of identity crisis I become a butterfly, flying upside-down, arms and legs stretched out, over the jungles, under the sky, between the peaks. Around the fire at our campsite that night, somebody stumbles upon a huge wolf spider with an equally huge egg sac at her abdomen. We take turns petting her before Xavier the bug expert sets her free in the dark with the fireflies.
My cousin Matt just graduated from high school in Chapel Hill, NC, and spent a month in the jungle and a week in Quito before heading off to become a Sun Devil at Arizona State. He looks the part, tall and very blond, his face pink from the sun and his shoulders tanned from being on the river all summer. That week we saw the crime-fighting cuy in Fuerza-G and toured the Voice of the Andes – the HCJB radio station and Hospital Vozandes, with a personal tour from jungle doctor Wally Swanson. On Matt’s last night in town some of our jungle cousins surprised us at the hotel. We all went out to 4 Ases, where a ten-member band and a German with dreadlocks burst in drumming, making handicrafts out of beads and wire and singing raucously over their cheap Ecuadorian beers. The lead singer, a wiry little man with long black hair, started giving shout-outs to all our patrias, to Ecuador, Germany, Colombia, Bolivia… Matt told them he was Swiss, and I said I am from Quito. They didn’t believe me at first, but then they laughed and asked my name. “Ah, you are Clarita, and she is Oscurita!” one man chortles, pointing at the cheery little Bolivian woman in the corner. She waves, I catch the eye of the clear-faced German, and everyone starts singing again.
I am all of this; I am what I say and what I make: the Tour d’Eiffel earring stand for Natalia’s growing collection of arretes, the gringuito fish and potato wedges for dinner, apple oatmeal for breakfast. I am a presentation about xenophobia and a poem about love. I am from many places and many people: my Swedish great-grandparents, the gathering of Latin American presidents in the Estadio on August 10, my two sets of missionary grandparents. I am ROLLING in social capital. I am independent, interdependent, a cynic and a believer, a crier, a laugher, a lover and a liver. I’m LILLY, I am the QUEEN, and I like EVERYTHING!
01 August 2009
sea level: the hemispheric limbo world record
"Hey Brad," Paul shouts over the waves buffeting the hull of our little boat, "what altitude do you think we're at right now?"
I look around at the unbroken ocean and grin over my shoulder at him, "Probably sea level." A few minutes later I am deathly ill over the side of the boat, and he and Brad both grab my waist to keep me from plunging overboard into the spray. The tiny boat has been riding ocean swells like a rollercoaster for almost two hours, and I've had enough. For me, who has hardly survived any boat ride without getting sick, two and a half hours across the open ocean in a pinprick launch is hell.
But a gorgeous one at that. The water glitters clear cerulean, a color I have not seen in probably at least five years and a color that I love. I survive the trip to our glass-front hotel, separated from the beach by a narrow dirt road, and spend the afternoon bodysurfing, watching for sharks in the crests of waves. No sharks, but the silhouette of a sea lion darts through the thin green wall of water fifteen feet away from us.
I am surely more mermaid than sailor.
***
We take rolls of film full of iguanas, splayed out on the rocks to absorb heat or swimming across an island lagoon, a dragon-like head barely visible above the surface of the water. Watch flamingos and herons and fragates and boobies of all colors and sizes, lean precariously over the shark resting area, where at least four white-tipped tiburones hide from the midday sun, over the side of the boat to catch a glimpse of a sea turtle soaring alongside. Three times we snorkel with sea turtles and twice with a baby sea lion, darting around our group and even accompanying us to the shore when we head in to take off our mask and flippers.
Dana and I, sunning ourselves on the front of the boat, ask the boatdrivers if there are pirates in these islands. No? Mermaids? (The Spanish word is sirena, which makes me smile asking, thinking of Odysseus.) "Yes -- two," he replies, grinning at us. They invite us and our ten friends out dancing to Bar de Beto that night. A son of theirs, who bears the magnificent name "El Capitan Junior," becomes a great friend and important landmark on helado-hunting excursions into the tiny town for snacks and ice cream.
The afternoons pass us on the beach, reading, napping, chatting, or bodysurfing. After a shouted exchange with some guys with a soccer ball, they invite us to play and we gather a team. While we duck waves to cool off, my teammate Gabriel and his compañero Luis introduce themselves and invite us to a discotek for islanders. "Bar de Beto is full of Americans," they say, scoffing -- tourists themselves, from Quito and Guayaquil respectively. In these islands, people actually believe that I am ecuatoriana.
We try to do both. The girls all put on dresses and makeup and nurse expensive drinks while the guys hit on the bartender, a gorgeous 18-year-old from Texas. I still don't know how she got there... We girls leave early and leave them to their flirting, and on the way home decide to take a naked dip in the dark ocean.
On our last day on Isabela we hike up a volcano. We start at the bottom in needlepoint drizzle, at first tiptoeing around the mud on the path until we realize it is probably safer to run, and by the time we reach the top our legs are covered in splattered volcanic soil. The sun gradually burns off the mist so we can see into the crater. The clouds moving through it create the odd impression that we are being sucked into the crater, full of four-year-old volcanic rock, and a rainbow crowning the great canyon gives us the impression that unicorns and leprechauns could emerge at any moment.
The next day we have to madrugar to catch the Launch from Hell at 5:30am. I survive this trip by holding a high stakes conversation with Brad and Dana, covering nearly every possible topic and every possible side of the issue. This time, the rolling waves feel more like a thrill ride and we make it to harbour without incident.
...And promptly onto another boat, a yacht cruise called Poseidon, for the day. We are all so sunburnt from Volcán Chico and so tired from waking up so early that we pass out on the upper deck. At one point I awake under the table surrounded by Brad, Jason, and Paul, all of us sprawled on the floor wherever we could find space. Today we take a few hour-long jaunts around tiny unnamed islands, where I see more carcasses than I ever have before -- of sea lions, iguanas, birds, crabs, and anything else you might imagine. We are also privileged enough to witness the mating dance of the endemic blue-footed booby, whose mating call sounds like the whistle that comes out when you blow on those serrated plastic straws from sippy cups. The boys all vow to try that tactic when they get back to campus in the fall, and I wish them luck. Sort of.
On Santa Cruz we visit a ranch for breeding Galápagos land tortoises. The path is full of guavas and the guide explains to us that someone brought them here and they now threaten the delicate balance of the ecosystem, because their seeds spread and their trees grow faster than they can be eradicated. Between guava trees a few Galápagos coffee trees show clusters of red and green berries, the seeds of which become the coffee beans sold at Starbucks worldwide. The next ranch is more of a country club, where we dance and play cards and sports until lunch. In the afternoon we pull a fast one at the Charles Darwin Research Station, breaking up into groups of three to avoid paying a guide for the afternoon. The Estación basically consists of a cluster of buildings used for researching conservation efforts, and is also the home of Lonesome George, the last tortoise of his species. He is pushing 150 years and refused to use his mating years, so he remains the lone member of his type, and holds the burden of extinction on his rapidly weakening shell.
That night we dressed up and went out for sushi, at an expensive beachfront hotel restaurant where I blew $30 on sushi and the best, creamiest piña colada of my life. A middle-aged American tourist approaches us with the typical traveling-students small talk, and explains that he made a "huge mistake" on his order and accidentally got 64 rolls of sushi, and did we want to help him eat some of it. He didn't even have to ask. We went home full and happy and in awe of the world's little miracles.
***
On one of our excursions we encountered the tree of the poison apple, which burns your skin at a mere touch. The squashed and fallen apples and their pits scatter the path and I can't help thinking as we walk along, "Is this Paradise? Is this the legendary Garden of Eden, the back of the Great Turtle?" The basis of fairy tales and the beginnings of religions, of species, of Evolution. All here in one place, the famed archipelago full of animals found nowhere else on earth, formed from the aftermath of volcanic eruptions, found on the latitudinal Center of the Earth, the impossible made visible and the world's miracles at our outstretched fingertips. It is, and is not, unbelievable.
I look around at the unbroken ocean and grin over my shoulder at him, "Probably sea level." A few minutes later I am deathly ill over the side of the boat, and he and Brad both grab my waist to keep me from plunging overboard into the spray. The tiny boat has been riding ocean swells like a rollercoaster for almost two hours, and I've had enough. For me, who has hardly survived any boat ride without getting sick, two and a half hours across the open ocean in a pinprick launch is hell.
But a gorgeous one at that. The water glitters clear cerulean, a color I have not seen in probably at least five years and a color that I love. I survive the trip to our glass-front hotel, separated from the beach by a narrow dirt road, and spend the afternoon bodysurfing, watching for sharks in the crests of waves. No sharks, but the silhouette of a sea lion darts through the thin green wall of water fifteen feet away from us.
I am surely more mermaid than sailor.
***
We take rolls of film full of iguanas, splayed out on the rocks to absorb heat or swimming across an island lagoon, a dragon-like head barely visible above the surface of the water. Watch flamingos and herons and fragates and boobies of all colors and sizes, lean precariously over the shark resting area, where at least four white-tipped tiburones hide from the midday sun, over the side of the boat to catch a glimpse of a sea turtle soaring alongside. Three times we snorkel with sea turtles and twice with a baby sea lion, darting around our group and even accompanying us to the shore when we head in to take off our mask and flippers.
Dana and I, sunning ourselves on the front of the boat, ask the boatdrivers if there are pirates in these islands. No? Mermaids? (The Spanish word is sirena, which makes me smile asking, thinking of Odysseus.) "Yes -- two," he replies, grinning at us. They invite us and our ten friends out dancing to Bar de Beto that night. A son of theirs, who bears the magnificent name "El Capitan Junior," becomes a great friend and important landmark on helado-hunting excursions into the tiny town for snacks and ice cream.
The afternoons pass us on the beach, reading, napping, chatting, or bodysurfing. After a shouted exchange with some guys with a soccer ball, they invite us to play and we gather a team. While we duck waves to cool off, my teammate Gabriel and his compañero Luis introduce themselves and invite us to a discotek for islanders. "Bar de Beto is full of Americans," they say, scoffing -- tourists themselves, from Quito and Guayaquil respectively. In these islands, people actually believe that I am ecuatoriana.
We try to do both. The girls all put on dresses and makeup and nurse expensive drinks while the guys hit on the bartender, a gorgeous 18-year-old from Texas. I still don't know how she got there... We girls leave early and leave them to their flirting, and on the way home decide to take a naked dip in the dark ocean.
On our last day on Isabela we hike up a volcano. We start at the bottom in needlepoint drizzle, at first tiptoeing around the mud on the path until we realize it is probably safer to run, and by the time we reach the top our legs are covered in splattered volcanic soil. The sun gradually burns off the mist so we can see into the crater. The clouds moving through it create the odd impression that we are being sucked into the crater, full of four-year-old volcanic rock, and a rainbow crowning the great canyon gives us the impression that unicorns and leprechauns could emerge at any moment.
The next day we have to madrugar to catch the Launch from Hell at 5:30am. I survive this trip by holding a high stakes conversation with Brad and Dana, covering nearly every possible topic and every possible side of the issue. This time, the rolling waves feel more like a thrill ride and we make it to harbour without incident.
...And promptly onto another boat, a yacht cruise called Poseidon, for the day. We are all so sunburnt from Volcán Chico and so tired from waking up so early that we pass out on the upper deck. At one point I awake under the table surrounded by Brad, Jason, and Paul, all of us sprawled on the floor wherever we could find space. Today we take a few hour-long jaunts around tiny unnamed islands, where I see more carcasses than I ever have before -- of sea lions, iguanas, birds, crabs, and anything else you might imagine. We are also privileged enough to witness the mating dance of the endemic blue-footed booby, whose mating call sounds like the whistle that comes out when you blow on those serrated plastic straws from sippy cups. The boys all vow to try that tactic when they get back to campus in the fall, and I wish them luck. Sort of.
On Santa Cruz we visit a ranch for breeding Galápagos land tortoises. The path is full of guavas and the guide explains to us that someone brought them here and they now threaten the delicate balance of the ecosystem, because their seeds spread and their trees grow faster than they can be eradicated. Between guava trees a few Galápagos coffee trees show clusters of red and green berries, the seeds of which become the coffee beans sold at Starbucks worldwide. The next ranch is more of a country club, where we dance and play cards and sports until lunch. In the afternoon we pull a fast one at the Charles Darwin Research Station, breaking up into groups of three to avoid paying a guide for the afternoon. The Estación basically consists of a cluster of buildings used for researching conservation efforts, and is also the home of Lonesome George, the last tortoise of his species. He is pushing 150 years and refused to use his mating years, so he remains the lone member of his type, and holds the burden of extinction on his rapidly weakening shell.
That night we dressed up and went out for sushi, at an expensive beachfront hotel restaurant where I blew $30 on sushi and the best, creamiest piña colada of my life. A middle-aged American tourist approaches us with the typical traveling-students small talk, and explains that he made a "huge mistake" on his order and accidentally got 64 rolls of sushi, and did we want to help him eat some of it. He didn't even have to ask. We went home full and happy and in awe of the world's little miracles.
***
On one of our excursions we encountered the tree of the poison apple, which burns your skin at a mere touch. The squashed and fallen apples and their pits scatter the path and I can't help thinking as we walk along, "Is this Paradise? Is this the legendary Garden of Eden, the back of the Great Turtle?" The basis of fairy tales and the beginnings of religions, of species, of Evolution. All here in one place, the famed archipelago full of animals found nowhere else on earth, formed from the aftermath of volcanic eruptions, found on the latitudinal Center of the Earth, the impossible made visible and the world's miracles at our outstretched fingertips. It is, and is not, unbelievable.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)