And the story begins with a cleansing--a period of sobriety that exists on many different planes. Being present. Sleeping when it's dark. Waking in the light and walking and being silent, alone. Adjusting--relocating to a new frame of mind, not just a new place. Starting to occupy a different life, and now the constraints aren't easier or better, but necessary, and different. Welcome.
The Calendrio Agricola Lunar of 2007 tells me the "energetic sensibilities" are high today. Apparently this is a good thing. The day did find me with enough energy and sense to pen a letter to Rachel after a day in sun and dirt. I think of her belly swelling with new life and how I am not there to see it. I think of Cooper and his strawberries and how they rival the berries growing here. I miss them. Now that Freebird has taken off into a new era of flight, Rachel has no computer, no email. Being forced to write with ink and paper is hardly a disaster, but I have no return address...
After a week at the base of magestic and dormant Cotopaxi, I am now in a verdant valley below the black and active Volcan Tungurahua. It last erupted in 2005, covering the towns on the other side of Baños with ash and rubble and shutting down tourism in this tourist town. She makes noise every day, puffing out huge dark plumes of smoke that rise to mix with the clouds. I awake every morning to find my things covered in a fine, black grit and sometimes the pink and red petals of the dahlias are covered in it, too. Last night I saw magma spurt from the mouth and light up the sky, falling to the slope and crackling black and orange as it cooled. I wonder if I should tell Mom and Dad...
I arrived here at my first "farm" just 5 days ago and already my hands have taken on a greenish-yellow tint and the dirt under my nails seems permenant, but I'm enjoying every minute of it--the weeding, gathering volcanic stones that Tungurahua resupplies every day, harvesting cabbage, carrots, chard and lemons just a few feet from my bedroom door with which to prepare my meals. I gather mint and oregano and lemongrass for tea. I boil water to drink. I am the only volunteer here for now, and so my days are spent in a Spanish world, working with Mario and Don Victor, who is 97 years old and still wielding a machete and caring tenderly for young lettuces. At night I am alone save for the rhino beetles, the rumbling of the volcano, the rustling of cane grass and the whipping of tattered banana palms in the wind. I make tea. I write. I retire early. All of this is welcome, as my head had gotten so overwhelmed there in NY--too much of too much. No clear space in which to think, not even in my head, and so I'm happy for this quiet solitude
Today was my day to make lunch for the "crew" and I prepared a chicken soup, complete with feet--a first for me. I did not eat them, for it was enough to cook them. They kept sticking up out of the pot like a bad Chinatown joke. I am proud of these lunches, and of my creative culinary experiments with things called Camote and Papa Chino.
It was humbling to realize I'd come here to farm and yet couldn't tell a weed from a plant. But I have learned. I have learned that carrots need little water, gentle earth cover, and lots of sun. Cilantro on the other hand needs very moist ground and plenty of shade. Clover secures nitrogen to the soil and can be sown as a natural fertilizer that has the added bonus of being beautiful and smelling delicious. Potatos grow by planting potatos, leeks by planting the ends of leeks, but still no one can tell me where to find the seeds on a carrot.
Conversations with Carol have been incredibly rewarding. Women like her, and Cherie (my hippie in Otavalo), offer me an understanding of how Ecuador moves, and how it has changed, in a language I can understand. They are like key masters, opening up doors that would otherwise remain closed. Thier knowledge is invaluable to me. Were I just playing tourist I would never get this--these relaxed moments at the end of a day where worlds of understanding unexpectedly unfold. One likes wine, the other walnut leaf tea. There it was a darkening garden cafe in a city, here it is a darkening garden in the mountains. I speak with Carol while lemonade cools on the stovetop, and leftover soup from lunch awaits me for dinner. Here a conversation meanders, it is not an interview or an interrogation, and it winds its way from talk of dogs and medicinal plants to politics and history.
Despite our language barriers, Mario and I have developed a rhythm of work and play. We struggle along, but we are also able to joke with each other, though sometimes I wonder if we're both just laughing because I have no idea what is going on! The work day is short when measured in hours. We begin between 7:30 and 8:00, work until Noon, depending on which one of us is making lunch, for then we get to stop at 11:00. We eat and then "siesta" or rest until 1:00. Then it's just two more hours until quitting time. On my first day I hoped for hot water in my much needed shower, but found myself luxuriating under the frigid spray regardless. It is as cold showers are: bracing, rejuvinating, a reminder that you're no longer at home. And right now, this is fine by me.
Monday, November 12, 2007
At The Tungurahua Tea Room: Planting Radishes, Raising Awareness
*Disclaimer: This blog entry is not about refrigerators.
"Look at the mess we've got ourselves into, just because we invited a gringo to eat some bananas." --Colonel Aureliano Buendia, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude
Photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch
Carol told me her favorite book growing up was The Secret Garden. While her garden, The Tungurahua Tea Room, may be no secret, it certainly is a wonder, and from many an Ecuadorian point of view, it's a mystery, an incongruity, and a waste of time. They think she's crazy--just another gringa loca transplanted here from the land of promises above Mexico. Despite her bountiful garden, they don't think she knows the first thing about farming. And this is partially true. She came here not even realizing she wanted to have this garden-meets-farm, nor knowing how to do it, and so her mind was wide and free as it began to take shape, and her methods are often...unconventional.
You see, Carol doesn't hate weeds. If a wild cabbage seeds itself in the middle of the mandarin orange orchard, so be it. "If it wanted to grace us here, with its growth, well it's more than welcome. We'll just plant around it." This is one Carol-inian sentiment, and it's not just another hippie notion. While we certainly do an extraordinary amount of weeding, nothing is wasted. Some of them are edible--the dandelion and wild mustard have leaves that spice up a salad. Nettles, though brutal on your hands, are medicinal in many, many ways. With them we can make a tea, a poultice, a soup. Some have flowers that become bouquets on our little log table. And those that are, sigh, simply just weeds, those get tossed into the compost pile where they will become rich soil, or burned on the bon fire to become ash for fertilizer.
Her neighbors hate her living walls--cane grass and agave plants, trailing vines of passion fruit and tall spiky palms. Their dried leaves and baby fruits fall into their yards and paths. They throw the broken branches and the often still ripe fruits back over onto her property. "Why can't she build a normal concrete wall like the rest of us?"
Tobacco, which grows wild here, is something that Carol cultivates--not as a cash crop or as something to smoke, but as a natural pesticide. The leaves can be soaked for a week in water and then sprayed on plants to keep bugs away. The prolific seeds of the plants are easily distributed by birds and the wind, which means they often end up in the neighbors fields, sewing tobacco all around town. For many Ecuadorians here in Baños, tobacco is a weed to be eradicated--this is maybe how they view Carol, too. Many now prefer chemical pesticides, having left behind the traditional methods of farming in their culture in favor of "modern technology" which the world laughably lauds as "progress."
When you see women at the market, their baskets full of gleaming mangoes and tender avocadoes, you can easily imagine both woman and fruit have come from a utopian farm somewhere in the mountaneous distance, where they've cheefully grown and hand chosen each and every one just the day before, cows grazing dumbly and happily in the pastoral scene. The truth looks more like young women and men emerging from an entrance to a field somewhere alongside the PanAmerican highway, wearing a bright orange hazmat suit, goggles, gasmask, and a plastic backpack full of poison.
How is this better? How is this progress? Becoming a free market means having to compete with global markets. Competing successfuly means moving at a pace that cannot be supported by the simpler, more patient, healthier practices of the past. And too often, despite trying to change "for the better," all collapses anyway.
Carol does not have to worry about feeding her family, or supporting herself, or her land, from the produce she produces. Her utopia hinges on the resources she had at her disposal upon moving here. Her farm is worlds apart from the farms surrounding her. They need to make money. Carol wants peace. She can enjoy the luxury of experimentation. Her strawberries can fail, having generated maybe one or two plants out of 30 that bore fruit, and she can say, "That's alright. What matters is that they grew. We'll try again next time." The woman on the hill next door, with the tent-like green houses full of hundreds of tomato plants can't just "try again next time." But this is not to say that chemicals are therefore the only answer, the only way the poor campesino woman can survive. So what is it that stops her from using tobacco water instead of chemicals? A misguided belief that the chemicals are foolproof, that they guarantee the bugs won't destroy the crop, and a deliberately disseminated campaign of fear that methods like tobacco are "a risk." And yes, protecting hundreds of plants as opposed to 30 requires a different kind of diligence, but the earth was never really meant to support hundreds upon hundreds of just one solitary crop on one patch of ground. The tobacco would work, but as family farms turn into gigantic agrobusinesses, the integrity of the fields, the cycle of nature that works best and has worked best for thousands of years becomes disrupted and destroyed. Whereas before, if you had tomatoes and corn and cabbage all growing around each other, the corn bugs and the tomato bugs and the cabbage bugs would all sort of cancel each other out, and if one crop did fail, you had two others to rely on. Now, if the tomatoes go, there's nothing to back you up.
It would be easy to point fingers and blame the Ecuadorians (or the Africans or the Peruvians, or the fill in the blank) for their poor, impetuous, blind-faith kinds of choices. But what choice have they other than the limited ones thrust and forced upon them by powers greater than they are? Maybe Carol and her farm are a faint suggestion of a different kind of possible choice.
As Ecuador swiftly hurtles into the "modern" era, gently and steadily shedding this label of "3rd world," the 1st world steadily and not so gently rushes in to reap the benefits of a population who want so desperately to "advance." When you care to look closely, foreign investments and the farce of international development--which more often than not ends up destroying not developing--are revealed as hydroelectric dam projects that have poisoned rivers, displaced ancient cultures, decimated ecosystems and community networks that stretch for miles and millenia. They are oil fields where rainforests used to grow. They are giant supermarkets importing apples from Chile when you could just as easily buy them from the woman up the road--but she can't afford to sell hers for less than twenty cents apiece. It's dollarization, when the US dollar replaced the Ecuadorian Sucre in 2000, that purportedly saved the Ecuadorians but that now means people can't afford to keep their farms and so they sell off land that has been in their families for centuries. Who buys it? Well, a lot of them are being bought up by Colombian drug lords who are seeing their fields sprayed with an agent-orange like substance in Colombia, compliments of the United States Government, and so they're moving here. 30,000 Colombian refugees live in shanty towns on the Ecuadorian border because their crops died, and they fled lest their children die, too. This is modernity. This is what it looks like to emerge from a so-called darkness. It looks like hell.
Carol told me some of Ecuador's recent history through her eyes. She's been here 14 years, the last 7 of which have seen Ecuador going through its most rapid rate of change. It used to be that lines in the airport stretched for what seemed like miles. People traveling back to Ecuador traveled with everything imaginable--refrigerators, ovens, new tires, garden hoses--because none was readily available here. Then: Dollarization. Walk through Quito today and you can get Japanese meditation stones, french cheeses, Converese sneakers, not to mention refrigerators and tires. It is easy to mistake the flashing lights and bars and cute restaurants and new pickup trucks and other western amenities that now abound here in Ecuador for "progress" and "success." It all depends on how you measure such things, and whether or not you take them at face value or dare to search out their underside.
After 2000, the Ecuadorian economy became "lower risk" and "more stable" for foreign investment, and suddenly anyone could import anything, which meant that stores and markets were flooded, mostly with cheap crap from China. This country is drowning in plastic, drowning in disposable garbage that infiltrates and crowds out their culture and all things cultural. And they buy it. People who hadn't needed a refrigerator for centuries suddenly needed one simply because it was available. So, they saved and saved and spent their money, which maybe could have sent the youngest child to school, and inevitably, in few months, maybe a year, it broke. They can't afford to fix it or buy a new one, and so it gets tossed to rot somewhere, usually beside a river in town, poisoning the ground, and the Ecuadorian goes back to buying milk from a neighbor farmer and not from Nestle, and back to leaving their eggs on the counter--which, by the way, is totally harmless anyway.
This flooding of a formerly local, indigenous -goods market with foreign imports also meant a decrease in the profits for Ecuadorian people themselves. The dollar meant stabilization of a rapidly devaluaing sucre, but it also meant $1 ended up having a lot less local purchasing power than 25,000 sucres. But why had the sucred plummeted so far so fast? Partially because of national debt--owing foreign investors more than they could ever pay back for those aforementioned so-called development projects.
No, I have not flown south and become a raging communist. I am not saying that Ecuadorians (or Africans, or fill in the blank) don't need or shouldn't have refrigerators. But development could be more cautious; it should be. And in our global society where greed and want trump everything requiring patience, caution is thrown into the poisonous wind. Those who benefit, those who horde the resources and windfall with which they can escape the catastrophic fall when it comes, those people are not the Ecuadorians selling tomatoes in the market. Sell your land for a satelite dish. Sell your soul for a can of Coke. These are not just hyper-reactionary statements. In the longest run, they will be the truth. They will be the the only things we'll be able to say when we look back if we don't start doing something different now. How do we stop the corporotocracy steamroller, where those manning the controls live by privatization, capitalist zeal and corruption, all in the name of an insatiable greed that snares everyone and benefits few? Maybe we look to Carol and how she and her farm fit into all of this...
The Tungurahua Tea Room offers an example of an alternative kind of change. A tempered progress that makes lasting, positive impacts on the land and the people who work it. There you can see a balance between the ways of the past and the future of a globalized universe where everyone sports Nike sneakers and a satelite dish and where there is no time line, only instant gratification. Globalization is not a bad thing in and of itself. It was, after all, the thing that helped lead me to Carol in the first place. It can be a tool, or a weapon of destruction. It is up to us how we choose to wield it.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
The Gringo Back Road
New Pictures Available for Viewing at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch
This trip is different. Despite the obvious. It is different from the last time I flew off to Ecuador. My approach this time, and thus my experience, is different. It is not at all how it was two years and some months ago. My intentions, different. My time frame, different. My goals, different. My route, different.
Last time I arrived I checked in to a "party hostel." A backpacker haunt full of other seekers. I met people instantly, and those I met that first night would factor in again and again throughout my two months in this tiny country. It began a link--the Gringo Trail was more than a route, it was a network. I would meet people who would lead me to places where I would meet other people who often knew the first group. A reccomended hosteria in the hills would turn into a gathering of friends who had met at one time or another throughout the country or the continent. Then I would meet the old friends of my new friends, and so on. It was amazing. My 3 weeks volunteering in the jungle left weekends free for exploring, and the 4 or 5 great people I'd met there would accompany me on a 2 day adventure away from the planting of trees and the silent racket of jungle nights. I had company the entire time.
Now, a full month into this trip, other than Cherie at the Hippie Den, I have been pretty much alone. Blazing a gringo back road, not a well traversed trail. Part of this happens to do with the "season." Traveler infestation is at its peak during our summer months. Now I observe lots more couples and, quite unexpectedly, many middle aged or genuinely O-L-D people. Many are on tours, but regardless, it warms my heart and makes me smile to see the 70 year old French-Canadian with his 27 friends, huffing up the steep climb from the tour bus to the lodge in Cotopaxi Park, all kitted out in his brand spanking new khaki, convertible, waterproof hiking pants--not a speck of dirt on them! But hey, at least he's prepared.
The other part of this lonely equation is that I have sought solitude, partially with the intention for it, and partially because something unconscious pushed me in this direction. I chose the cheapest, shittiest hostel possible in Quito upon arrival, and then I went out to a lodge that is written up in only one guidebook, and it's the guidebook rarely used by the "typical" backpacker (Lonely Planet is the most popular choice, but I prefer Rough Guides, for the obvious reasons I suppose.). And then I went for a whole week, whereas most stay for one or two nights. Tambopaxi is most popular with tour agencies and climbing guides. It serves as a luxury luncheon spot where there are no other choices but for brown bagging, and other than the mountain refuge, it is the only acclimitization lodging option. It is a departure point for those ascending the Volcano. As I have zero budget for alpine climbing, and a terrible fear of those icy heights, I was alone at Tambopaxi--no guide, no plans except to wander. I watched many a group come and go, while I bonded with the staff! Well, there was Matt, but he was 20, and could talk of nothing but his iPod and climbing the Volcano and he complained that no one spoke English. Not my first choice in company.
In Otavalo I met Marco, the sexy Swiss. He was staying at my hostel with me, but then I only stayed for 3 nights before moving in with Cherie. I loved her. I loved my time there, but mostly, if I wasn't hanging out with her, I was studying or in class, or, you guessed it...wandering some more. Otavalo is "dead" midweek, as the typical traveler only comes for the Saturday market. Having spent 2 and half weeks there, I can tell you this is a shame. I purposefully chose to study Spanish there and not in Quito, even though prices were slightly higher. Why? Because Quito can be a madhouse and distractions abound. (I am very easily distracted.) And I had just left the mad, distracting house of NYC! Quito and its bars and parties and people were the last thing on my mind. Otavalo was perfect. And I did meet Jan, a 64 year old Alaskan who had studied indigenous "Eskimo" tribes for the last 2 decades and was here scoping out a place to retire. I met Deb, a friend of Cherie's, who was a retired adevertising big wig from New York. She and her husband Tom moved here permenantly 2 years ago. They bought property in a "development," yup, a white adobe suburb outside of Otavalo, close to Laguna Cuicocha, reputedly a portal to the center of the world. We went to the Chachimbiro baths together, got stoned, and swam and talked about the energy of the equator. She's invited me to visit her at her home when I head back up north, and I plan to take her up on it. How she ended up here, the story of her life, it fascinates me!
Then, as soon as I completed my lessons, despite Cherie's pleas for me to stay with her (for free!) I left for this first farm--The Tungurahua Tea Room--where I am, for now, the sole volunteer. Always budgeting, I stayed farm-bound for the first 6 days, spending a total of $12 at the local tienda on eggs and milk and things we don't produce. I`ve only just ventured into the town center this weekend. I have spent my time with Mario, the head worker, and even more time with just the dogs, Ellá, Leo and Princessa (the Lady, the Lion and the Princess). Carol, the Dueña, or owner, is rarely there, and though our few encounters have been full of incredible conversation, they have been brief.
Baños, the town I'm closest to, is the place in Ecuador from which to base outdoors-ing adventures. And so what I have observed this weekend are groups of tourists all on 4-wheel, ATV contraptions or bicycles or atop garishly colored tour busses blasting music, bounding off on their way to fun. Anyone who has traveled alone will confirm that you are much more open and willing to meet people than you are when you're ensconsed in the safety net of friends. You are much more willing to engage with the local population, much more open to being open, much more likely to look in windows or explore doors to nowhere. You have a quiet in your head that gets drowned out by company. A bus ride becomes a tour, or time for refelction. You are looking out the window, not gossiping about life at home. You ask questions of yourself, not of your seatmate. You read the map. You figure out where you're going. You lead. You don't follow. What you are not more open to are group activities, or chatting up tightly knit circles of other travelers. At least I 'm not. I remember Africa, and being in Bolgatanga, the northermost town in Ghana, at the border of Burkina Faso. I remember how desperate I was for some companionship that I perservered and pursued this very unfriendly girl who I met while we were both on seperate guided hikes to visit some sacred crocodiles. I was determined to hang out with her, friendly or not, because that was near the end of my trip and my only other alternative was more conversation with prepubescent boys who all wanted to "guide" me further or become my "friend." My determination paid off and Kate and I had a dinner and a few beers and it turned out she wasn't horrible--just not as desperate as me, at least not yet.
Ecuador is completely different in this regard to Africa. No one here is desperate, not even me. I am relishing this quiet for I predict it will change soon and I will be again wishing for solitude. This is me, trying to enjoy exactly where I am while I'm there. Already a month has passed. Too soon it will be over, I know.
On Tuesday, 2 new volunteers are scheduled to arrive at TTR. I look forward to it. People my age, on a similar mission if you will. I will have company while I fertilize the mandarin orchard and weed the broad beans. We'll be cooking for 5 and the kitchen atmosphere will be livlier, and messier! Tomorrow, my last day alone, I will pay close attention to the silence, a quiet broken only by the rumbling volcano, the rustling of the cane grass, the flapping of the tattered banana palms as the wind whips up the canyon. I will head to my mosquito-netted bed around 7:30 , just as the rhino beetles begin to descend in earnest, and I will read myself to sleep after a cup of freshly picked peppermint tea. At 6 am I will hear Mario arrive and unlock the shed, turn on the radio and begin boiling the kettle for coffee. I will rise, and share coffee, pull on my rubber boots and smelly socks, and prepare to meet, at some point in the day, my new compatriots, who will break the silence but offer me new stories and a new path to follow, for however long it lasts, until I pack up and happily move on to the next place, alone.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch
This trip is different. Despite the obvious. It is different from the last time I flew off to Ecuador. My approach this time, and thus my experience, is different. It is not at all how it was two years and some months ago. My intentions, different. My time frame, different. My goals, different. My route, different.
Last time I arrived I checked in to a "party hostel." A backpacker haunt full of other seekers. I met people instantly, and those I met that first night would factor in again and again throughout my two months in this tiny country. It began a link--the Gringo Trail was more than a route, it was a network. I would meet people who would lead me to places where I would meet other people who often knew the first group. A reccomended hosteria in the hills would turn into a gathering of friends who had met at one time or another throughout the country or the continent. Then I would meet the old friends of my new friends, and so on. It was amazing. My 3 weeks volunteering in the jungle left weekends free for exploring, and the 4 or 5 great people I'd met there would accompany me on a 2 day adventure away from the planting of trees and the silent racket of jungle nights. I had company the entire time.
Now, a full month into this trip, other than Cherie at the Hippie Den, I have been pretty much alone. Blazing a gringo back road, not a well traversed trail. Part of this happens to do with the "season." Traveler infestation is at its peak during our summer months. Now I observe lots more couples and, quite unexpectedly, many middle aged or genuinely O-L-D people. Many are on tours, but regardless, it warms my heart and makes me smile to see the 70 year old French-Canadian with his 27 friends, huffing up the steep climb from the tour bus to the lodge in Cotopaxi Park, all kitted out in his brand spanking new khaki, convertible, waterproof hiking pants--not a speck of dirt on them! But hey, at least he's prepared.
The other part of this lonely equation is that I have sought solitude, partially with the intention for it, and partially because something unconscious pushed me in this direction. I chose the cheapest, shittiest hostel possible in Quito upon arrival, and then I went out to a lodge that is written up in only one guidebook, and it's the guidebook rarely used by the "typical" backpacker (Lonely Planet is the most popular choice, but I prefer Rough Guides, for the obvious reasons I suppose.). And then I went for a whole week, whereas most stay for one or two nights. Tambopaxi is most popular with tour agencies and climbing guides. It serves as a luxury luncheon spot where there are no other choices but for brown bagging, and other than the mountain refuge, it is the only acclimitization lodging option. It is a departure point for those ascending the Volcano. As I have zero budget for alpine climbing, and a terrible fear of those icy heights, I was alone at Tambopaxi--no guide, no plans except to wander. I watched many a group come and go, while I bonded with the staff! Well, there was Matt, but he was 20, and could talk of nothing but his iPod and climbing the Volcano and he complained that no one spoke English. Not my first choice in company.
In Otavalo I met Marco, the sexy Swiss. He was staying at my hostel with me, but then I only stayed for 3 nights before moving in with Cherie. I loved her. I loved my time there, but mostly, if I wasn't hanging out with her, I was studying or in class, or, you guessed it...wandering some more. Otavalo is "dead" midweek, as the typical traveler only comes for the Saturday market. Having spent 2 and half weeks there, I can tell you this is a shame. I purposefully chose to study Spanish there and not in Quito, even though prices were slightly higher. Why? Because Quito can be a madhouse and distractions abound. (I am very easily distracted.) And I had just left the mad, distracting house of NYC! Quito and its bars and parties and people were the last thing on my mind. Otavalo was perfect. And I did meet Jan, a 64 year old Alaskan who had studied indigenous "Eskimo" tribes for the last 2 decades and was here scoping out a place to retire. I met Deb, a friend of Cherie's, who was a retired adevertising big wig from New York. She and her husband Tom moved here permenantly 2 years ago. They bought property in a "development," yup, a white adobe suburb outside of Otavalo, close to Laguna Cuicocha, reputedly a portal to the center of the world. We went to the Chachimbiro baths together, got stoned, and swam and talked about the energy of the equator. She's invited me to visit her at her home when I head back up north, and I plan to take her up on it. How she ended up here, the story of her life, it fascinates me!
Then, as soon as I completed my lessons, despite Cherie's pleas for me to stay with her (for free!) I left for this first farm--The Tungurahua Tea Room--where I am, for now, the sole volunteer. Always budgeting, I stayed farm-bound for the first 6 days, spending a total of $12 at the local tienda on eggs and milk and things we don't produce. I`ve only just ventured into the town center this weekend. I have spent my time with Mario, the head worker, and even more time with just the dogs, Ellá, Leo and Princessa (the Lady, the Lion and the Princess). Carol, the Dueña, or owner, is rarely there, and though our few encounters have been full of incredible conversation, they have been brief.
Baños, the town I'm closest to, is the place in Ecuador from which to base outdoors-ing adventures. And so what I have observed this weekend are groups of tourists all on 4-wheel, ATV contraptions or bicycles or atop garishly colored tour busses blasting music, bounding off on their way to fun. Anyone who has traveled alone will confirm that you are much more open and willing to meet people than you are when you're ensconsed in the safety net of friends. You are much more willing to engage with the local population, much more open to being open, much more likely to look in windows or explore doors to nowhere. You have a quiet in your head that gets drowned out by company. A bus ride becomes a tour, or time for refelction. You are looking out the window, not gossiping about life at home. You ask questions of yourself, not of your seatmate. You read the map. You figure out where you're going. You lead. You don't follow. What you are not more open to are group activities, or chatting up tightly knit circles of other travelers. At least I 'm not. I remember Africa, and being in Bolgatanga, the northermost town in Ghana, at the border of Burkina Faso. I remember how desperate I was for some companionship that I perservered and pursued this very unfriendly girl who I met while we were both on seperate guided hikes to visit some sacred crocodiles. I was determined to hang out with her, friendly or not, because that was near the end of my trip and my only other alternative was more conversation with prepubescent boys who all wanted to "guide" me further or become my "friend." My determination paid off and Kate and I had a dinner and a few beers and it turned out she wasn't horrible--just not as desperate as me, at least not yet.
Ecuador is completely different in this regard to Africa. No one here is desperate, not even me. I am relishing this quiet for I predict it will change soon and I will be again wishing for solitude. This is me, trying to enjoy exactly where I am while I'm there. Already a month has passed. Too soon it will be over, I know.
On Tuesday, 2 new volunteers are scheduled to arrive at TTR. I look forward to it. People my age, on a similar mission if you will. I will have company while I fertilize the mandarin orchard and weed the broad beans. We'll be cooking for 5 and the kitchen atmosphere will be livlier, and messier! Tomorrow, my last day alone, I will pay close attention to the silence, a quiet broken only by the rumbling volcano, the rustling of the cane grass, the flapping of the tattered banana palms as the wind whips up the canyon. I will head to my mosquito-netted bed around 7:30 , just as the rhino beetles begin to descend in earnest, and I will read myself to sleep after a cup of freshly picked peppermint tea. At 6 am I will hear Mario arrive and unlock the shed, turn on the radio and begin boiling the kettle for coffee. I will rise, and share coffee, pull on my rubber boots and smelly socks, and prepare to meet, at some point in the day, my new compatriots, who will break the silence but offer me new stories and a new path to follow, for however long it lasts, until I pack up and happily move on to the next place, alone.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Listening In, and Learning Spanish
New photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch
"Confronted by the foreign we grow newly attentive to the details of the world." --Pico Iyer
Tomorrow I leave Otavalo after 2 and half truly wonderful weeks in this mountain town, center of a certain kind of world. I have had to change my original plans to farm outside of this town, and so I will head south to a farm in a small village near Baños, a major tourist center situated in yet another valley. But whereas Otavalo is dropped down in the middle of the two parallel strips of Andes mountains (the Eastern and Western Cordilleras) Baños borders the eastern Andes range and the Amazon basin. It's subtropical, so it's lush and green but still hemmed in by some of the largest peaks in the cordillera, including Volcan Tungurahua, which last erupted in 2006. Mom, Dad, don't worry. Right now, she just belches bunches of tourist-thrilling smoke. (There is no current concern regarding the danger of Tungurahua, promise.)
While here I have been living above a cafe, La Casa de Fruta, with a woman named Cherie and her daughter, Sasha. Old School Hippie and Hippie Nuevo. They have made me so welcome and have opened not only their home and their kitchen to me, but their lives as well. And while I have had so much fun here with them, it is time to go and begin the sweaty, muddy labor of love that is the farming. The question remains: will I love it?
The most important thing I've been doing in Otavalo is studying Spanish. I've had lessons for two weeks, 4 hours a day, one on one with a woman who speaks zero English. I have come away from these classes with more than just a larger Spanish vocabulary and the understanding, finally, of what the Present Perfect Tense is. Learning a new language is an exercise in humiliation, frustration, and well, it can make you feel like a total elementary idiot. However, if you let it, it can change the approach to and the experience of traveling.
One can choose to travel and hear nothing, or one can choose to treat it as a constant exercise in becoming a better listener. We get so used to anticipating what someone is going to say that we often answer without having listened to the question. I find myself newly attuned to everything going on around me. As an English speaker in this Spanish speaking world it would be so much easier to shut out the conversations around me, or to conclude what I want to hear. And often it wouldn't even matter. Not to them. People here are so used to gringos and tourists not understanding that they make concessions for us all the time, like when we say yes to a question when we mean to say no. Or when we say "yes" to a question that requires a response like, "blackberry" or "double occupancy" or "later this afternoon." I know I could go a whole year here and scrape by on my meager vocabulary and survive, but why would I? Because I'm insecure? Embarrassed? Self-conscious? Yes. I am all of those things. But what I missed on my last trip here was the deeper experience of getting into people's lives, histories, stories.
As I often do I compare all traveling experiences to that Ghanaian summer. I had such profound moments there, so much worthy of writing about, so many conversations that blew the lid off of everything I thought I knew, things that made me ponder and think and question. And it was because I was able to talk with people. Yes, as I said many times, the English there was far and away different from the English I was used to, and much was lost in translation, but still I could ask questions, respond, inquire, joke, explain. I want to have those moments here, in Spanish. Fluency may be a far off dream, but this is not the point.
Spending 4 hours a day in a room with no respite, no English moments, forced me to think differently, and to let go of a rigidity that is natural but unconscious. I think in English. Why wouldn't I? But expressing myself in Spanish beyond telling people what I want to eat or what kind of room I'd like to sleep in, this requires thinking in Spanish, mentally uprooting nearly 3 decades of what I've learned and honed and practiced as an English speaker. That is the trickiest and most elusive practice in learning a new language. To put forth my thoughts or to ask the simplest of questions means constantly rearranging the structure of my phrases and changing the words.
In most cases you cannot directly translate an English sentence into a Spanish one, and this goes beyond just putting the adjective after the noun. Spanish will have one single word for an entire phrase, and this is magical and concise and confounding. The verbs for To Be (Ser) and To Go (Ir) are the exact same words in the past tense (Fui, Fuiste, Fue...). "Um, excuse me, Señora, so, were you going, or were you being? I missed something..." You can say "Espera" and can mean "Hold on" or "Wait" or "I wish." Sometimes it's as though certain words are just...missing from the language, or so it seems, but then I read Marquez´s One Hundred Years of Solitude in English and I am awed by how phenomenal and expansive the Spanish language must be, and how terribly little I will ever really know.
During my lessons I sometimes felt like my brain would not allow a new language to seep in. Maybe I'm too old, it's too late for me. My mind is certain and set in its English speaking way. I nearly wept with frustration at how I would constantly repeat the same mistakes again and again, or how I could never remember the difference between To Put and To Be Able To. Nancy would see my anger, or would hear me say Mierda! under my breath, and she'd respond, "Es normal, normal."
Sometimes I hear people speaking Spanish out my window, and I think that if I just look out I would see them with subtitles. Perhaps it is an American trait, but I'm so used to getting what I want, when I want it, and how I asked for it just by asking for it, that this is not only a lesson in listening, but one in humility as well. I must adapt. I must learn. Or despite the many memories and trinkets and bracelets, I risk going home empty handed.
On our last day of class, Nancy told me that I surprised her again and again throughout our lessons. She said I was "muy differente" than other students. I asked her what she meant and she said that I was bold; that I dared to ask questions, and that I attempted to construct complex sentences and stories whereas others routinely stick to the basics and just silently copy down what she says or writes on the board. She told me to be confident in my Spanish voice, and to keep daring. With this in my mind, I head south...
"Confronted by the foreign we grow newly attentive to the details of the world." --Pico Iyer
Tomorrow I leave Otavalo after 2 and half truly wonderful weeks in this mountain town, center of a certain kind of world. I have had to change my original plans to farm outside of this town, and so I will head south to a farm in a small village near Baños, a major tourist center situated in yet another valley. But whereas Otavalo is dropped down in the middle of the two parallel strips of Andes mountains (the Eastern and Western Cordilleras) Baños borders the eastern Andes range and the Amazon basin. It's subtropical, so it's lush and green but still hemmed in by some of the largest peaks in the cordillera, including Volcan Tungurahua, which last erupted in 2006. Mom, Dad, don't worry. Right now, she just belches bunches of tourist-thrilling smoke. (There is no current concern regarding the danger of Tungurahua, promise.)
While here I have been living above a cafe, La Casa de Fruta, with a woman named Cherie and her daughter, Sasha. Old School Hippie and Hippie Nuevo. They have made me so welcome and have opened not only their home and their kitchen to me, but their lives as well. And while I have had so much fun here with them, it is time to go and begin the sweaty, muddy labor of love that is the farming. The question remains: will I love it?
The most important thing I've been doing in Otavalo is studying Spanish. I've had lessons for two weeks, 4 hours a day, one on one with a woman who speaks zero English. I have come away from these classes with more than just a larger Spanish vocabulary and the understanding, finally, of what the Present Perfect Tense is. Learning a new language is an exercise in humiliation, frustration, and well, it can make you feel like a total elementary idiot. However, if you let it, it can change the approach to and the experience of traveling.
One can choose to travel and hear nothing, or one can choose to treat it as a constant exercise in becoming a better listener. We get so used to anticipating what someone is going to say that we often answer without having listened to the question. I find myself newly attuned to everything going on around me. As an English speaker in this Spanish speaking world it would be so much easier to shut out the conversations around me, or to conclude what I want to hear. And often it wouldn't even matter. Not to them. People here are so used to gringos and tourists not understanding that they make concessions for us all the time, like when we say yes to a question when we mean to say no. Or when we say "yes" to a question that requires a response like, "blackberry" or "double occupancy" or "later this afternoon." I know I could go a whole year here and scrape by on my meager vocabulary and survive, but why would I? Because I'm insecure? Embarrassed? Self-conscious? Yes. I am all of those things. But what I missed on my last trip here was the deeper experience of getting into people's lives, histories, stories.
As I often do I compare all traveling experiences to that Ghanaian summer. I had such profound moments there, so much worthy of writing about, so many conversations that blew the lid off of everything I thought I knew, things that made me ponder and think and question. And it was because I was able to talk with people. Yes, as I said many times, the English there was far and away different from the English I was used to, and much was lost in translation, but still I could ask questions, respond, inquire, joke, explain. I want to have those moments here, in Spanish. Fluency may be a far off dream, but this is not the point.
Spending 4 hours a day in a room with no respite, no English moments, forced me to think differently, and to let go of a rigidity that is natural but unconscious. I think in English. Why wouldn't I? But expressing myself in Spanish beyond telling people what I want to eat or what kind of room I'd like to sleep in, this requires thinking in Spanish, mentally uprooting nearly 3 decades of what I've learned and honed and practiced as an English speaker. That is the trickiest and most elusive practice in learning a new language. To put forth my thoughts or to ask the simplest of questions means constantly rearranging the structure of my phrases and changing the words.
In most cases you cannot directly translate an English sentence into a Spanish one, and this goes beyond just putting the adjective after the noun. Spanish will have one single word for an entire phrase, and this is magical and concise and confounding. The verbs for To Be (Ser) and To Go (Ir) are the exact same words in the past tense (Fui, Fuiste, Fue...). "Um, excuse me, Señora, so, were you going, or were you being? I missed something..." You can say "Espera" and can mean "Hold on" or "Wait" or "I wish." Sometimes it's as though certain words are just...missing from the language, or so it seems, but then I read Marquez´s One Hundred Years of Solitude in English and I am awed by how phenomenal and expansive the Spanish language must be, and how terribly little I will ever really know.
During my lessons I sometimes felt like my brain would not allow a new language to seep in. Maybe I'm too old, it's too late for me. My mind is certain and set in its English speaking way. I nearly wept with frustration at how I would constantly repeat the same mistakes again and again, or how I could never remember the difference between To Put and To Be Able To. Nancy would see my anger, or would hear me say Mierda! under my breath, and she'd respond, "Es normal, normal."
Sometimes I hear people speaking Spanish out my window, and I think that if I just look out I would see them with subtitles. Perhaps it is an American trait, but I'm so used to getting what I want, when I want it, and how I asked for it just by asking for it, that this is not only a lesson in listening, but one in humility as well. I must adapt. I must learn. Or despite the many memories and trinkets and bracelets, I risk going home empty handed.
On our last day of class, Nancy told me that I surprised her again and again throughout our lessons. She said I was "muy differente" than other students. I asked her what she meant and she said that I was bold; that I dared to ask questions, and that I attempted to construct complex sentences and stories whereas others routinely stick to the basics and just silently copy down what she says or writes on the board. She told me to be confident in my Spanish voice, and to keep daring. With this in my mind, I head south...
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Local Transport
Photos available at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatchOctober 4, 2007
Location, The Panamerican Highway North to OtavaloI began this morning's journey by helping my new friends at Tambopaxi unload the pickup truck, or camioneta, that would take me out of the park. Junior and Maria seemed surprised when I leaned over the side and began stacking firewood, then moving it to the wood pile by the kitchen door. Not only did I know how essential that firewood is in keeping people warm while at the lodge, for it was frigid some nights! But I also really wanted to get a move on and assisting with firewood, huge bags of sugar, giant melons and squash, among other things in the bi-weekly delivery, would speed things along.
With a hug from Maria and the ubiquitous gift of a bracelet from Junior, I was off. The aging camioneta bounced its way out of the park, down the steep and winding hill through 2 small communities until we got to the larger town at the bottom, Machachi, where I caught a bus to Quito.
No matter how far the journey, for the first hour or so the bus acts like a local city bus would, meaning that it stops and starts every few minutes, lurching to the side to either pick someone up or let someone off. The passenegers are actually lucky if the bus comes to a complete stop. Usually people are jumping on as the bus continues moving. Old women with heavy burdens in each of their hands, like sacks of root vegetables or bags of grain, a chicken or a bolt of cloth strapped to their backs, heave themselves on board, their two feet barely off the asphalt before the bus swerves back out into traffic. Then there are the mothers: some pregnant, some with babies crushed to their chests, and some with both baby and belly! They balance with one hand outstretched, clutching whatever support they can reach as they swing up onto the raised staircase of the bus. I've even observed women doing all of this in high heeled sandals. The balance, the bravado, the simple normalcy of these practices never fails to capture my attention. And so this, too, adds to the constant distraction, the stimulation of multiple senses, on what should be a simple bus ride.
I never really sleep. I'm always watching to make sure my bags don't disappear, or I'm captivated by the television hanging from the ceiling--I mean really, who can resist Blood Diamond with bad Spanish dubbing?--or I'm watching the endless parade of people and possessions and the occasional barnyard animal get up and on and off the bus, or I'm holding my breath, simultaneously amazed and terrified by the views beyond my window, and silently calculating how I might survive if the bus is to plummet off this mountain highway...
If I leave the windows closed, I'm usually sweltering. If I open the windows, I'm eating dust, closing my eyes against the stinging fumes of diesl exhaust and burning trash. I must then try to hear Blood Diamond en Espanol over the sound of honking horns, when it was already in competition with the baby crying in the back seat and the little boy selling his wares up and down the aisle: "Helados! Helados!"
As we came upon the last hour of the journey, I realized the tension that had built up in my face--my forhead was creased, my eyes squinting and sore from both staring at a too-far away television and from closing them against the dust that filtered in despite my closed window. My teeth crunched a fine grit, and I was thirsty but hesitant to drink water for there were no convenient rest stops. I had a dull headache, and my left butt cheek had fallen asleep (now that's a weird feeling!). But I realized what I was grateful for, despite all of this: I was grateful that I'd gotten on the bus early enough to claim the weird padded section between the driver and the front passenger. It was there I was able to rest my giant pack and keep it in view for the whole ride. I was grateful that I had the first section of seats, where I could stretch out my legs. I was grateful to be on a bus that doesn't wait for a full house to depart, and so I had no seat mate and therefore a place to rest my smaller day bag. I was grateful that the money collector gave me back my change without my having to ask, in an uncertain gringa voice, "¿Tienes mi cambio?" because I never really know what the actual fare is supposed to be.
And then, when I got off the bus in Otavalo, though dusty and aching, I was grateful for the woman who pointed me in the right direction toward town, and for the short, scenic walk needed to reach my hostel, where I was surprised (and grateful again) for clean, floral sheets, a bed with a real mattress, and a bathroom right outside my door. Sometimes the little things are just enough.
Journal Entry, October 2, 2007 8:30pm
"On foot, in a van, on a fleet motorcycle or on a bicycle, a person must be very careful not to become overly concerned with arriving." --Peter Jenkins, A Walk Across America
At night the silence is as massive as the mountain. The vault of stars above in the very black sky both surprises and enchants me--I see so few stars at home in New York.
Home? Is it? Will it be again? Though this journey has just begun I cannot help but think of where I will find myself at its end. Truth be told I´ve been thinking of the future long before this present even began--such is my way. Cursed or blessed, it is who I am and how I think.
I did cry today. Not over some emotional break-through or -down, but by reading that damn book my Mom sent me off with!! Needless to say, it's engaging, enthralling even. I´ve read over 800 pages in 3 days. This speaks not only to the greatness of the book, but to how much time I have, suddenly, on my hands. I can't help but feel guilty as each chapter ends and I plunge into the next. Shouldn't I be doing something? Like figuring out my life, for one? It's too soon, I suppose, for that kind of thing. I need to let these wide open spaces (spaces I asked for) engulf me for a bit, consume me both mentally and physically for awhile. It seems I have a harder time living in the moment than I'd like to admit . And like I said, cursed or blessed, it's the only way I know how to be, and I can only hope that this is a good thing, or at least that it will be in the end, when the trip is over and I return home, wherever that may be.
At night the silence is as massive as the mountain. The vault of stars above in the very black sky both surprises and enchants me--I see so few stars at home in New York.
Home? Is it? Will it be again? Though this journey has just begun I cannot help but think of where I will find myself at its end. Truth be told I´ve been thinking of the future long before this present even began--such is my way. Cursed or blessed, it is who I am and how I think.
I did cry today. Not over some emotional break-through or -down, but by reading that damn book my Mom sent me off with!! Needless to say, it's engaging, enthralling even. I´ve read over 800 pages in 3 days. This speaks not only to the greatness of the book, but to how much time I have, suddenly, on my hands. I can't help but feel guilty as each chapter ends and I plunge into the next. Shouldn't I be doing something? Like figuring out my life, for one? It's too soon, I suppose, for that kind of thing. I need to let these wide open spaces (spaces I asked for) engulf me for a bit, consume me both mentally and physically for awhile. It seems I have a harder time living in the moment than I'd like to admit . And like I said, cursed or blessed, it's the only way I know how to be, and I can only hope that this is a good thing, or at least that it will be in the end, when the trip is over and I return home, wherever that may be.
The End of the Hike
All photos are available at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch/
This is Part 2 of the story of my lungs and the bulls and the search for the hummingbird cave...(scroll down for Part 1)
Now here's the thing about the first substantial hike at altitude: it all goes to your head. This giddy elation takes over, combined with a subtle sense of invincibility. Just when you should be weary or disoriented, having reached 4,000 meters after 2 or 3 hours of steady climbing, you are energized instead.
It's as though you are being moved by a force within, and your vision clears as your chest expands. Sometimes on hikes like this one, my heart is pumping so vigorously it's as though my brain is moving inside my skull, pulsing behind my eyes. It feels like oxygen is reaching parts of my body that have never breathed before: the skin of my forehead, the very bone of my eye sockets, the muscles deep within my back, under my shoulderblades, the inbetween spaces of my spine, even my teeth and gums begin to tingle with fresh, oxygenated blood. My diaphragm never lifted so high! I forget how hard it is, and instead feel an insane desire to push through and overcome the struggle of going up and up and up. I have lungs used to the bars of Brooklyn, and now they must adapt to the high altitude plains of the Ecuadorian Andes.
Having found those tire tracks, I turned right and followed them along flat ground for about 15 minutes before they began to descend. Now the energy and elation came from heading down! When I tell you I danced down the mountain, I mean I danced! With no one around for miles, standing atop this giant, looking across to the massive Cotopaxi, I let loose and boogied with abandon all the way to the bottom and across the canyon, continuing down the dirt road toward home. I turned up the volume on my iPod, conveniently attached to my belt, and heard only the sounds of Phoenix's "If I Ever Feel Better," Metric's "Combat Baby," and Mr. Wainwright's "Oh What a World." I was no longer concerned with any bulls, but rather felt like I was in my own movie, specifically the last frame, where the fabulous, independent protagonist (the one who conquered the bulls) gets further and further out of focus, as her legs carry her proud and strong...and groovy. Now, I dance a lot, and often in unexpected places, but this was a first. And let me tell you, there is nothing like shakin´one's money maker down the side of a lichen laced, wind blown little mountain in the middle of a wilderness nowhere! It was pure freedom, pure joy--complete uninhibited elation manifesting itself in the movement of my hips, my hands above my head, and my hiking boots kicking up impressive dust as I twirled and twisted; my smile as boundless as those hills.
Why am I always on a plane, or a fast train?
Oh what a world my parents gave me!
Always travelin, but not in love.
Still I think I'm doing fine.
Wouldn't it be a lovely headline:
"Life is...Beautiful!"
on a New York Times?
--Rufus Wainwright
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch/
This is Part 2 of the story of my lungs and the bulls and the search for the hummingbird cave...(scroll down for Part 1)
Now here's the thing about the first substantial hike at altitude: it all goes to your head. This giddy elation takes over, combined with a subtle sense of invincibility. Just when you should be weary or disoriented, having reached 4,000 meters after 2 or 3 hours of steady climbing, you are energized instead.
It's as though you are being moved by a force within, and your vision clears as your chest expands. Sometimes on hikes like this one, my heart is pumping so vigorously it's as though my brain is moving inside my skull, pulsing behind my eyes. It feels like oxygen is reaching parts of my body that have never breathed before: the skin of my forehead, the very bone of my eye sockets, the muscles deep within my back, under my shoulderblades, the inbetween spaces of my spine, even my teeth and gums begin to tingle with fresh, oxygenated blood. My diaphragm never lifted so high! I forget how hard it is, and instead feel an insane desire to push through and overcome the struggle of going up and up and up. I have lungs used to the bars of Brooklyn, and now they must adapt to the high altitude plains of the Ecuadorian Andes.
Having found those tire tracks, I turned right and followed them along flat ground for about 15 minutes before they began to descend. Now the energy and elation came from heading down! When I tell you I danced down the mountain, I mean I danced! With no one around for miles, standing atop this giant, looking across to the massive Cotopaxi, I let loose and boogied with abandon all the way to the bottom and across the canyon, continuing down the dirt road toward home. I turned up the volume on my iPod, conveniently attached to my belt, and heard only the sounds of Phoenix's "If I Ever Feel Better," Metric's "Combat Baby," and Mr. Wainwright's "Oh What a World." I was no longer concerned with any bulls, but rather felt like I was in my own movie, specifically the last frame, where the fabulous, independent protagonist (the one who conquered the bulls) gets further and further out of focus, as her legs carry her proud and strong...and groovy. Now, I dance a lot, and often in unexpected places, but this was a first. And let me tell you, there is nothing like shakin´one's money maker down the side of a lichen laced, wind blown little mountain in the middle of a wilderness nowhere! It was pure freedom, pure joy--complete uninhibited elation manifesting itself in the movement of my hips, my hands above my head, and my hiking boots kicking up impressive dust as I twirled and twisted; my smile as boundless as those hills.
Why am I always on a plane, or a fast train?
Oh what a world my parents gave me!
Always travelin, but not in love.
Still I think I'm doing fine.
Wouldn't it be a lovely headline:
"Life is...Beautiful!"
on a New York Times?
--Rufus Wainwright
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