Big Heaping Update!

Well, I´ve had myself some pretty crazy travelling times since you heard from me last, with the photos to prove it, and as I find myself in Quito where the internet flows like the salmon of Capistrano, I figure it´s time to dump out as much as I can tell in one sitting. First off I´d like to give a shout-out to my beautiful and intelligent girlfriend who just completed all of the paperwork in Spanish for me to get a volunteer visa and stay another 8 months... I wouldn´t be here if not for her, and I wouldn´t be staying if not for her efforts. Awwwwwww sappy.

Anyhoo, dry your eyes and pull up a chair: we took off... what, like two weeks ago? on a trip to the 'Oriente', which is the local name for the Amazon rainforest, to meet up with a bunch of Peace Corps kids that had organized a rafting competition in El Chaco for Halloween.

We priced out the hassle and money it´d cost to make it to El Chaco, and found that for the four of us -- Andrea, Jason, Monica and I -- it´d be better just to rent a car for $40 a day, so that´s what we did... FREEDOM! Andrea buzzed it out to El Chaco with a quickness, and we started making plans for all sorts of other places we could hit on the way home.

This is our team, Los Topos Mojados, which was supposed to mean 'The Wet Beavers', but we just found out that we effed up the translation and we were actually 'The Wet Moles', which isn´t quite as funny of a double entendre.
Andrea chilling next to our beer which is also chilling.

The travelling team minus Yours Truly, with Jason doing the Pumpkin Party Patrol dance.

The Wet Moles before losing pitifully. Note Monica´s sick airtime.
Yes, the right side of our boat was a bit of a week spot. Back right, Garrett, fell out within 30 seconds of starting, and front right, Wes, decided to take many strokes off. There was little Andrea could do to salvage the situation...
Sadly, the Wet Moles were terrible at rafting, but our spirits remained high.

We had two nights in El Chaco, the second night being a big Halloween party organized by the rafting guides, and we showed up in orange ponchos we´d found back in Pedernales (used for shrimp pond workers in the rainy season) and a vision of being the Pumpkin Party Patrol. With liberal use of black sharpy, our dream became reality, and we spent the night wandering around El Chaco drinking orange and vodka, then partying and showing the PC kids how to do our recently invented Pumpkin Party Patrol dance. Very technical stuff.

On Sunday, as we were not invited to take part in the second and third heats of the rafting competition, we climbed in our compact chariot, picked up a kid that needed to get back to his site in the Amazon, and headed for Tena, which is the jumping off point for Amazonian expeditions. I can´t remember the names of all the places we stopped at, hopefully Andrea can clear that up, so let these pictures speak for themselves:

Our friend John jumping into an Amazonian river, no big deal.

A monkey with a piece of garbage that LOOKS like a beautiful pink flower:
The Amazonian mountains from outside of Tena.A meeting house under construction.

Some kids in front of our friends Peace Corps house (17 people, one bathroom, one bucket shower. Wow).
Crap gotta run! Second part coming up on the Andes and then Isla de Plata (The Poor Man's Galapagos). OUT.

Tabuga Walkthrough!

So I've realized recently that I don't have many pics up of Tabuga herself, and took off on a one hour photo-shoot tour of the town. Here is our village!


Don Mala's house and bar, 'Uptown' or 'Tabuga Central':
Makeshift high-school classroom, Tabuga Central:

Tree and house, between Old Tabuga and New Tabuga:

House between Tabuga Central and New Tabuga:

Our bus-stop, New Tabuga (La Llanta Blanca, or 'The White Tire'):

Comedor Buen Amigo, or 'Good Friend Eatery', New Tabuga:

Street in New Tabuga:

Don Anchundia's house, New Tabuga:

Don Chinto's house (where Andrea lived for two years, Jason for 6 months, and Kara lives presently):

Street corner with banana trees, New Tabuga:

Pig wallowing in mud, ladies washing clothes, New Tabuga:

Don Verne's garden and house (our next door neighbor), New Tabuga:

As always, more to come. Things are running between great and really, really great here. Come visit!

Life, Normal.

After more than a month back in Tabuga, we're finally reaching the point where it stops feeling like an adventurous vacation and more just like normal life, where the quirks of living in a bamboo quasi-shantytown on the coast of Ecuador just seem the same as the quirks of living anywhere else in the world.

As I idly picked a tick off my neck this morning while enjoying my morning coffee in our front-porch hammock, I thought briefly that I ought to share that moment, and some other weird ones, with all you folks out there on the interwebs who may have different definitions of normal.

Normal for me is picking a tick off of someplace on my body, pretty much every day. I don't mind too much, as they don't carry Lyme disease here, and I don't get itchy from their bites like some other folks. They're about as harmless and annoying as mosquitos for me now. I'd like to emphasize, however, especially to people who are thinking about visiting -- not only is this past month high season for ticks (the upcoming rainy season they dissapear) but also that we've been walking through forest and jungle every couple days as part of the processes in our upcoming (hopefully) land purchase. For those who don't know, we're trying to buy quite a lot of primary tropical forest for quite a little bit of money, with some very cool goals in mind, which may or may not happen but has been really cool to look into. Expect a full post about this from Andrea or I in the weeks ahead. Regardless, the ticks don't infest my house, so don't think that -- I've kind of been actively searching them out.

Normal for me is a cold shower -- I've only had one warm shower in the last 30 days or so, and that was our first morning in Ecuador when we were at a friend's house in Quito. I live on the Equator, walking distance from the ocean, so luckily a warm shower is not very necessary, and I've come to love our cold straight-from-a-spigot shower.

Normal for me is only being able to understand around 60 percent of what my Spanish speaking friends and neighbors are saying. I'm a work in progress.

Normal for me is a broken mototaxi and a 50cent bus ride to get anywhere with cell phone service or internet.

Normal for me is a cat named Waldo that we only brought on board because A) he was going to be thrown in the ocean (that's how they deal with unwanted litters here) and B) we may have a family of rats living in our roof, and a good cat is the best and cheapest way to deal with them. Waldo is going to be a hell of a mouser.



Normal for me is Gito being huge now, but being constantly flea-infested because we can't stop him from playing with the neighborhood dogs. The fleas only rarely become a problem for us humans.


Normal for me is using a composting toilet, which is 'dry' and has to be constantly filled up with sawdust or woodchips. The payoff is that one side of our toilet is almost ready to be harvested for compost, which we'll be able to use in our garden! Only gross if you think too hard about it.

Normal for me is all of our greywater going into a banana circle, and the four banana trees circling the pit growing visibly taller and stronger with each passing day.

And, of course, waking up each morning to donkeys braying, roosters crowing and Cumbia music blaring is very, very normal. I dig it.

Come visit.

AJ

On Labor, Rats and Gloves

The adage 'When the cat is away, the mice will play' has thus far not applied very well to my four days in Tabuga all by my lonesome while Jason and Andrea are in Quito for work. On the contrary, I've somehow managed to work even harder than when Andrea's around -- but I have good reason. We have hundreds of tiny little seedlings crowding our front and back porches, all tomatoes and peppers and others, that will soon need to be transplanted into some friendly soil in our ever growing and greening garden.

With that in mind, I've set out early each morning to the garden with pickaxe in hand to till and push around large quantities of dirt. As you can see below, I had a not-small piece of real estate that needed to be completely tilled, layered with compost and shoveled into beds for planting, and only the early morning and early evening to work, as my wimpy Irish skin cannot hold up to the daily pounding of the midday Ecuadorian sun. Here are the three beds, taken today before I finished the third:


Sadly, and obviously, my hands (especially after my layaround time in the States) are nowhere near callused enough to withstand 5-6 hours of pickaxing per day for three days, and midway through the first day they made their concerns known with long trails of blisters. The second day I was able to switch hands and become fairly ambi-pickaxe, but today (day three) I needed something better. My Ecuadorian father-in-law (don't worry, we're not actually married, they just think we are) came over yesterday and I proudly showed him my work, explaining that while the work wasn't incredibly hard, my hands just weren't up to it. He took one look at my hands and said that I needed 'guantas', which is the name for the large indigenous jungle-rats that are quite delicious. It says a lot about my estimation of his indigenous medical knowledge that I figured that I needed something along the lines of the fat from a skinned guanta, but later that night I looked up the word in the dictionary and found that 'gloves' are 'guantes', so instead of being weirdly shamanistic he was just being practical. Unfortunately, it would be easier for me to procure jungle rats in Tabuga than gloves, so I made do today with duct tape, which actually worked great.



And yes, I am repping the United States hard core with the above Jersey. U! S! of A!

Lastly, my third seed bed was tough at the end because I happened on a patch of pottery shards. For those of you not familiar with our area, this part of Ecuador was home to a pre-Incan (or maybe Mayan? Aztecan? I'm hopeless without Andrea) civilization called the Jama-Couaque, who were quite prolific potters and have left artifacts all over our region. All I found in our garden was shards, but below is a picture of Dre with an artifact that our friend reckons is around 1,500 years old and was found nearby. Neat, eh?



That's all for now. Please put my mom in your thoughts, she's leaving tomorrow on a three-week tour of Africa to hike Mount Kilomanjaro! Go Carol.

Las Fiestas de Tabuga

As advertised, we're back in Ecuador after a 1.5-month US hiatus (for me – Andrea's was more like 3 weeks). I didn't blog while in the US, as it didn't seem proper to post Amerithoughts on an Ecuablog. Suffice to say, we both had an incredible time back in the homeland – I myself hit vast swaths of Colorado, drove back to Oregon, spent time in the Portland Metro area before jetting to Washington, DC and then up to Concord, NH – and we both weren't quite ready to leave when the day came to go to the Boston airport and head back to Ecuador.
But head back we did, lugging piles of donated clothing for our village, a toaster oven, a cordless drill and various other luxuries that we deemed well worth their weight and carrying annoyance. Being back in Tabuga has been great, minus small yet continued problems with having water or electricity at convenient times – I just had to pause in the typing of this paragraph to go out and help Andrea bucket-shower out of our reserve water tank – but overall we've settled back into the Tabugan grind quite well and have our sights sets on our various goals and aspirations for the next nine months.
We scheduled our trip back to get us to Tabuga just in time for the Fiestas de Tabuga, the area-renowned festival of our little town. During the fiestas, which last for nearly a week, our 400-person pueblo swells to 4 or 5 times that size as all of the out-of-town relatives and party people trickle in from Quito, Guayaquil and beyond. The atmosphere was electric when we showed up on Wednesday night, and promised to mount even more as the festivities headed toward the big Saturday packed with a parade, multiple sports trophies to be won, and a huge community dance with a live band.
Thursday was spent getting our house back together after our long absence, as well as heading over to Lalo Loor Dry Tropical Forest Reserve to put the finishing touches on the open house that was scheduled for the following day. When Friday afternoon came, we gathered up a gaggle of our best friends and neighbors (we could only convince those under 15 yrs old for some reason) to walk with us out to the reserve, and there had a good open house with around 20 people taking part in a forest walk, coloring drawings of jungle animals and checking out the 'Caras de Tabuga' that you've already seen on this blog.
Friday morning was hot and clear, perfect weather for the grand parade that was to tie up the main coastal highway for the next two hours. I eschewed my party clothes for a tank top and shorts as I dashed through the Tabuga VIPs, bands and schoolchildren in the parade, taking the pictures that you see below. When I was satisfied with my photo haul, I dashed back to the house, took a quick shower (thankfully we had water) and changed into slacks and a collared shirt that were more appropriate for the baptism I was to attend later in the day. We spent the next few hours watching dancing performances and marches – our new Peace Corps friend Kari had been press-ganged into a indigenous dance that was very fun to watch – and then set up a booth for Lalo Loor with the aforementioned exhibits, to the delight of the Tabugans, who rarely get to see pictures of themselves. Next came a solemn ceremony of thanking everyone possible to thank, and Jason played his part by giving certificates from the Lalo Loor Reserve to all of the very old people of the town, to congratulate them for being old.
Next up was the baptism of our new godson, Alejandro, who is the son of the President of the town, Augustine Martinez. Andrea has plenty of complaints about the role that the Church has played in many of the ugly dramas throughout Latin America, but still can't say no when asked to be a god-parent, and as for me I was happy to be a god-father for the first time, to add to my other Tabugan title of Don. I was stressed, however, that by going to the baptism we might be missing the chicken-getting-its-head-cut-off game that Andrea wrote about in great detail from last year's Fiestas (www.tabuga.blogspot.com if I haven't linked there before). No worries, they ended up not doing it this year because the soccer tournament had been pushed three hours later in true Ecuadorian fashion, but we did end up paying $3 to go see the cock-fights that were taking place in a open-air house next to the village square.
All of our day-business taken care of, we retired back to our bamboo casa with a bunch of gringo friends that had come into town for the party, and pregamed and watched movies until 11pm, which is the time to go to a dance in Ecuador if it starts at 10pm (you don't want to be the silly bastards showing up early to a dance). Around 11pm Jason got us all moving, as he was raring to go, and we straggled down the darkened main street up to the middle of town. When we arrived at the center of town, we found a place transformed by a vibrating mob of people. The band was named Sabor Latino, and they were a charismatic, vibrant bunch of musical Ecuadorians that played all the popular songs while thankfully not delving too far into the techno Latin beats that we have to hear day in and day out. The gringo posse put together a couple tables and some chairs and settled in like all of the hundreds of other families to drink, dance and drink.
It was quite the party, highlighted by me getting way better at all the main dances and getting half-way to half-way decent at the Salsa, which remains my highest mountain to climb here. The gringos, many of whom were Peace Corps girls visiting Kari, were nervous to dance, but after many men coming and whisking them away over their protestations they got into the groove and started enjoying that part of the party. Andrea and I danced the night away and finally decided to leave when the town power went out around 5am, well satisfied with the Fiestas de Tabuga.
Of course, we paid for it the next day, as we were a wee bit hungover but also visited by one of the hotter days here, and had to deal with it without power or water. The dance the night before had blown a transformer, and it'd be over two days before the power came back up and the pumps were able to start pumping again. We of course also ran out of drinking water at the same time, and were late on the buying spree of drinking water at the two town stores, so we had a hot, sweaty and thirsty two days of recovering from the Fiestas de Tabuga!

Back in Ecualand!

We made it safely back to Tabuga, which wasn't a sure thing because I could've been stopped in the Quito airport to be checked for swine flu as I was running a fever. Wasn't though, got through and got some cheap amoxacillin and am feeling way better, which is good be last night was the world-renowned FIESTAS DE TABUGA. Much more to come later when everything settles down! Talk soon. AJ