Heaping Continued

It's hard to recall right where to pickup the update, as I'm now typing from glorious, internetless Tabuga – but I'm pretty sure it was right after the El Chaco arm of our Halloween trip. I definitely skipped over some funny stories, such as walking around El Chaco at night dressed as a band of pumpkins, saying 'Happy Halloween' to all and receiving an excellent mix of confused stares in return.

Another was on our way out of El Chaco, on our way to Tena. Only 20 minutes outside of the town, we stopped in a line of cars with no indication of what the stoppage was or how long it would be. Some drivers in front of us lounged outside their cars, apparently unconcerned, but for five hungover Americans this was unacceptable. It didn't take much nagging to wear down Andrea's insistence on staying in the line, and we spurted free of the line into the open opposite-direction lane. Just 15 cars in front of us or so was a police blockade, the operator of which waved us over to the side with an annoyed look on his face.

For me, these situations are like Christmas, because I don't think Andrea's complete mastery of Ecuadorian Spanish is perfectly showcased until she finds herself in situations that require a delicate mix of completely improvised logic and 'Angry Gringa.' The poor policeman at the blockade never knew what hit him, as he tried to advise us that there was a bicycle race about to start but quickly crumbled under Andrea's verbal assault. He radioed his captain.

The captain showed up, a stout dark man with clipped speech and a bureaucratic air, and made some gestures as he walked up to our rental car that we needed to turn around, as if it could possibly be that easy. He bent over to the window, and received a long winded explanation that our friend Jason here had a plane to catch in Quito in just two hours, it was an international flight, he couldn't possibly hold us up, and what's this? A two hour delay for a bicycle race? Well that's fine, just take us as far as the 'Y' in the road up ahead and we'll go that way, and drop Jason off to wait at a bus stop to get the next bus to Quito, we couldn't possibly just wait here on the road, there was no where to eat or go to the bathroom, sure, sure you can just escort us up the road, no sir there's no way we're headed to Quito, the 'Y' will be fine.

I would've applauded if it wouldn't have blown our cover – we only wanted to go to the 'Y' anyway, and the logic of going up there to get to Quito was wonderfully misguided and circular, but nonetheless did the trick. The captain grumpily strutted to his truck and pulled in behind us as we pushed up the windy road, hoping not to see hundreds of bicyclists around the next curve. We took a left on the 'Y', thereby leaving the race course, and pulled over as Jason needed to find a bathroom. As he got out, we heard a police siren 'boop boop' from behind us; apparently the captain wouldn't be satisfied until we actually drove all the way into the next town, assuming that we were just trying to trick him and as soon as he left would turn around and speed into Quito, gleefully plowing through bicyclists as we went. Andrea stepped out of the running car to go talk to him, and got back in shortly thereafter to drive the short way up to the next town. At which point the rental car started shrieking alarms, and turned off its own engine 30 seconds later.

So there we were, the aforementioned five hungover gringos in a rental car that was making it hard to concentrate by sounding ear-piercing sounds with regularity and was completely disabled, backed up by an annoyed and increasingly suspicious Ecuadorian Police captain.

When we rented the car, the rental agent had pointed at a blue light to the left of the steering wheel and warned us many times over not to smuggle the car into either Columbia or Peru, as the car had an automatic shutoff system that was tracked by GPS, and they'd be able to turn the car off remotely. I had scoffed at this point, not thinking that the place we'd rented from – named 'Renta Car' and quite a few steps down in service and quality from the next door Budget Rental Cars – had access to this kind of technology. However, it now appeared that they did have this technology, and furthermore Andrea had unwittingly turned the car off by getting out of the drivers seat and then getting back in, without turning the car off. No amount of button pushing would get the alarm to turn off, or the car to start – we even had the police captain push all the buttons to prove to him we weren't in charge of this angry beast of an automobile. The captain got increasingly fed up with our insistence or inability to leave, and gave us a stern lecture that if we turned around and headed to Quito, we'd be in a very large heap of trouble as he'd radioed ahead our license plate number. This being clear, he sped away, leaving us with our noisy rental car.

Some combination of unlocking, locking and climbing in through the open car window eventually got the alarms off (though it may have just been the passing of time) but the car still wouldn't start. Andrea fished out the business card of the guy who'd rented it to us, who told us to call some other lady, who had never heard of the first guy and didn't have anything to do with our rental car, so back to the first guy (thank god we were in cell phone service) who reluctantly gave up the placement of the reset switch for the cars alarm/black box system after 20 more minutes of haggling.

This done, we sped on towards Tena!

An enjoying and fairly uneventful (except for the dramatic Amazonian scenery) trip to Tena and then beyond to a delightfully named town called Misahualli, we partook in a classic Ecuadorian meal supplanted by monkeys chattering in the green square beyond, and then an enjoyable beach visit with some cliff diving and swimming through a strong current in a wide, rushing river. I now see in my guidebook (had to look up how to spell the name of the town) that Misahualli sits at the confluence of two major rivers – the Rio Misahualli and the Rio Napo. They were both lovely, and the area was crowded as our Halloween trip just happened to coincide with an Ecuadorian national holiday, so there were plenty of national tourists around to keep the beach lively with music, soccer and swimmers.

From there we drove straight to Quito, as it was Monica's first day of work the next day (for those of you who don't know Monica, she's a friend from my Duke days who turns out to be half Ecuadorian and now lives in Quito – who'd a thunkit!). For those of you who haven't driven from the Amazon up into the high Andes in the dark, I say this: .... crap, can't think of anything glib. You should try it, though. We spun the radio dial constantly to keep up with the changing stations at our different altitudes, and spent the 5 hour trip singing loudly to a mix of 80s American pop and current Ecuadorian pop, which led to many an interesting thesis on why they sound exactly the same.

We awoke the next morning (Monday) at our buddy Hamilton's apartment, armed with a hazy inclination to use the rental car as well as possible before we had to return it later that night. Jason had forcefully expressed his intentions to hang out with friends in Quito that we didn't know – what?!? You hang out with friends other than us? Bastard! -- but when he heard we planned to head to Cayambe, the Andean city where he and Andrea did their Peace Corps training two-and-a-half years prior, he succumbed to the pressure to continue hanging out with his most amazing and spirited amigos, Andrea J Crosby and Alex H Johnson, Esq.

The drive to Cayambe reminded Yours Truly of his long-ago travels through California – hilly, scrubby and a dull yellow for most of the way, like Grapevine Hill outside of the City of Angels. We climbed higher in elevation and the air got colder, the vegetation greener and an hour and a half later we were up in Cayambe.