Coming of Age in Pablo’s Kingdom
I spent the most important summers of my youth almost exclusively outdoors, in the days before the internet and cell phones and when video games existed largely as upright, quarter-gobbling monoliths. This, along with the bucolic pace of my rural town, ensured that I counted the days and hours with friends, playing baseball in the streets or endless games of basketball at the elementary school hoops, with their seven-foot tall rims and chain-link nets, the temperature and aridity of the high desert air causing our finger tips to crack and split with every dribble of a dirt-covered basketball; calling out Marco/Polo at the municipal swimming pool; or playing tennis with girlfriends at the weedy, faded-green tennis courts, trading kisses and serves equally errant. Few of us were rich by even the most generous definitions; almost all of us had working mothers and more than a few had absent dads and it seems to me, in hindsight, that we spent a lot of time unknowingly teaching each other how to negotiate life as young men.
Later, in high school and with the responsibilities of a job and a rusted-floor truck, carefree life in small-town Nevada diminished but never really ceased. On summer nights our doors remained not only unlocked but wide open to allow through the cool desert air. I had no curfew to speak of, and my life in rewind, were one to look for those moments where I could have strayed down a road less paved, could be safely boiled down to lying to Mr. Crow about the ownership of a mechanical pencil, playing cards while smoking Swisher Sweets, and one regrettable night with a bottle of Southern Comfort.
I was a freshman in high school in 1985; that year Medellin, Colombia, was well on its way to earning, and deserving, a reputation as the most dangerous city in the world, a title it wouldn´t relinquish until the nineties were well over. By comparison, today’s murder capital is San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with a rate of 171 homicides per 100,000 people – Medellin in 1991 had a murder rate more than double that. And it was essentially the work of one man, Pablo Escobar.
It is hard to tell the story of Medellin without mentioning Escobar, but Hernán Echevarria, who also grew up in the 1980’s, refuses to say his name, and calls him only “the famous criminal.” As a child, Hernán lived in Campo Valdez, a poor-but-not-the-poorest barrio of Medellin where his father moved as a young man, uneducated but dedicated, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week at a juice cart, showing Hernán by deed and word that hard work and education was the only true way out of Campo Valdez and into better worlds. “It was safe when I was a kid,” said Hernán, but the neighborhood grew worse as he grew older. Hernán had a bomb go off near him one day when walking to high school, and the driver of the motorcycle responsible for assassinating Luis Carlos Galán, a presidential candidate in 1989, was a childhood friend. “It was a poor area, and there were few opportunities to work, so being part of the narco culture was attractive.” It was ostensibly easy money, though mysteriously gained, and some started calling these kids “los magicos” because they could make money appear. For Hernán, a man who clearly loves his city, the change in ethic was palpable, and he fears that it still exists, albeit manifested in a slightly different way. “Have you seen the mannequins?”, Hernán asks me (I have; there is no way to not see the mannequins, they are cartoonishly and anti-gravitationally well endowed and lined up outside storefronts beckoning you in). “You can sit in the café and watch the street and play the game of ‘real or not’ as the women walk by.” Hernán is adamant that this is not a show of wealth and prosperity, but something more insidious. “It is the descendant of the narco culture, about a perception of what it means to be beautiful and glamorous, and it’s not just for the women. It used to be okay that men could be ugly,” he continued. “We have a saying that means ‘men are like bears, the uglier the tastier,’ but I don’t think this is true anymore.”
Regardless of whether it is narco culture or just newly found materialism, being Colombian, and in particular a Paisa – someone from Medellin and the surrounding area – means interminably and frustratingly answering for the Escobar years, something they see as akin to asking a German to explain Hitler or a Russian to explain Stalin, as if it is their fault for producing such a monster and their duty to explain why and how it happened. For Diego (last name withheld), the questions are a bit more difficult to answer. The second youngest of thirteen children, he was close to his younger sister but a small child when his older brothers were in their late teens and early twenties; when Diego was playing a version of freeze tag in the streets, his brothers – at least one and as many as four – were forming the gang that would become Pablo Escobar’s most feared and prolific assassins. Diego’s last name is Italian and unusual in Colombia, and when the police started referring to the gang simply by his last name, life became, to say the least, difficult.
“My last year of high school was awful,” Diego says. “When a teacher would call out my last name, the entire room would go quiet. When grades were posted, my name would always be circled or underlined with some comment written next to it.” Diego was regularly followed (he believes it was usually the police), and one day, tired of seeing the same car tailing him for weeks, he dropped his books in the street and, crying uncontrollably, faced the car with his arms spread wide. “Kill me now!” he shouted. “If you’re going to kill me, do it now! I am just a student so leave me alone!”
The tailings stopped, but not the violence. Diego heard explosions around the city seemingly daily, and came home from school one day to see the windows of nearly every house on his block shattered, the effects of the bombing of a business near the family home. He saw a young man murdered literally in front of his eyes, and believes he lost at least ten friends to the violence, some of them personally involved and some of them not. “The police were powerless,” Diego says, “either from corruption or out of fear. Escobar put a price on every police officer’s head. At stop signs, other cars would stop a hundred feet away from the cops in case a bomb went off or if the gangs started shooting at them.”
The misery, of course, was particularly personal to Diego. One brother was murdered in Bogota in the late 80’s; another died in 1991, along with sixteen other people, in the bombing of the Macarena bullfighting stadium in Medellin. A third brother committed suicide, and two others were killed, probably by police, in targeted raids on the same day in different parts of the city. “My father died of a heart attack,” he says, “but I am convinced my mother died of a broken heart.” After the death of a husband and five sons, Diego says his mother essentially shut-down. “My best memories of my mother are of her singing and cooking. Her voice was my alarm clock, and she never let any of us, no matter how early, leave the house without making breakfast.” But she quit cooking, then quit singing, then seeing – Diego says she closed her eyes one day and refused to open them – and then, finally, quit talking. The last words Diego heard his mother say was in response to his asking why she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, open her eyes: I don’t want to see the world.
I asked Diego if he, or his parents, knew what his brothers were doing. “I knew when I was older, and was able to read and understand more, and I think my parents knew. We just never talked about it.” Sometimes we don’t ask the questions to which we don’t want to hear the answers.
But for as much as Diego and Medellin would like to leave all that nonsense behind, those who came of age in Pablo’s kingdom are generationally intertwined with cartels, cocaine, political terrorism, murderers, and, perhaps most importantly, helping the rest of the world to see Medellin’s citizenry for who they are – generous, optimistic, and kind, with an acknowledged but well-intentioned self-importance and sense of pride in belonging to something bigger than themselves. Which are all things not Pablo.
Perhaps. To a small extent, I can sympathize with Hernán’s plight. Being a Nevadan means having to regularly explain that the state is more than just Las Vegas, more than just gambling and legal prostitution (we have more mountain ranges than any other state save Alaska, damn it). Humans are naturally inclined to embrace the good while deflecting the bad when pride is at stake, but this seems a bit disingenuous. Maybe we do have to account for where we’re from. Because for all the demurring of narco culture and Pablo Escobar, Hernán also shares a telling Colombian proverb, one he says everyone knows and labels the “eleventh and twelfth commandments”: The first (or eleventh) is that “when someone offers papaya, take it.” Easy to mistake this sentiment as something similar to “never look a gift horse in the mouth” or the more pedestrian “don’t pass up an opportunity,” until you hear the twelfth amendment: Never offer papaya. Essentially, don’t present me with an opportunity – even one at your expense – because if you do, I’m going to pounce on it. This might be the culture of industriousness and optimism, but it also contributes to a culture of conflict and a history of violence that has played out, ironically, almost entirely within Colombia’s own borders.
Hernán tells another story, his recollection of an uninformed childhood discussion over the reasoning behind Escobar’s declared war against the government. Escobar was angry at Colombia’s extradition policy with the United States, which aimed to prosecute the drug cartel’s leadership in the U.S. judicial system. Escobar said “a grave in Colombia is better than prison in the U.S.,” and one of Hernán’s friends said that his father supported Pablo, likening the extradition policy to a bad kid getting disciplined not by his own father, but by his neighbor’s. “I can understand this,” says Hernán. “But I don’t think we were very good fathers.” And here is an element both Hernán and Diego raise, the importance of not forgetting. Both say the current generation, who embrace narco culture but do not fully understand the havoc Escobar and his cronies wreaked upon lives in this city, run the risk of living through the same hell through which Diego and Hernán lived.
So how do you do this? How do you simultaneously ask the rest of the world to stop picking at the scab that is cocaine and Pablo Escobar and see instead the beauty that is Colombia and Medellin? How do you convince people to move on, but to not forget? This is the same message the city is trying to share through social urbanism or, as Hernán calls it, “democratic architecture.” Medellin installed a grand public library, a beautiful cubist building, on the top of the hill in a dangerous neighborhood, and outdoor escalators grace the steep hillside in the depressingly named “District 13” where, before the escalators, residents had to walk up and down more than 300 steps to get to the city center and home again. The idea is not only to make life easier for the city’s most destitute, but to let them know that the government cares about them and that they should care about themselves as well. Whether the projects have improved the quality of life of the residents isn’t clear – we saw the escalators used only by a jubilant dog and a smiling little girl taking out the trash – but that the residents take pride in their community is: both neighborhoods are clean and active and colorful, District 13 particularly so. Locally-painted murals grace the walls of the homes that press in around the stairs, and house plants are in abundance.
Medellin is also mall-crazy, and has a smoothly running metro system that is the pride of the city. There is not a piece of garbage or stain of graffiti to be found in any station or on any train. The city turned the dirtiest, druggiest, prostitutiest area of downtown into a public library with a neighboring bamboo garden and monumental park of towering lights; there is free Wi-Fi in every public space; and favorite son Fernando Botero donated a new sculpture of his peace dove to sit next to – but not replace (move on but don’t forget) – the original Pajaro de Paz that was blown up in 1995. This is not reinvention necessarily, but reinforcing pride and focusing the positive. And maybe it works. Medellin, once the murder capital of the world, was named 2015’s “City of Innovation.”
Diego today is single and lives with two of his sisters in Laureles, an upscale area of Medellin. For a living he teaches Spanish and English to businesses around the city, and a few days a week he volunteers in the Ocho de Marzo barrio, where he gives free Portuguese lessons to children who live in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Medellin, one where you can be killed for wandering across the “invisible frontier” and into the territory of the la Sierra barrio. People ask Diego why Portuguese, why not English, but for him it doesn’t matter what he teaches. “It’s the message that is important,” he says. “I’m telling them they don’t have to be what other people expect them to be. They can be something different and better. They can be someone.”
Eating the Dead, Dancing with the Living
Cassiani de Cassiani’s face is beaded with sweat but his smile remains steady through the regular wipings of his forehead. Whichever of Colombia’s 314 ecosystems we presently occupy on this dirt road sixty kilometers south of Cartagena is tyrannical. We are standing on the main street of San Basilio de Palenque, the first freed-slave city in the Americas and the last one still in existence, and my shirt is soaked. The heat and humidity is causing me to hallucinate. A man limps towards us, alone, a dwarf and a cripple wearing a cocked baseball hat and a basketball jersey and his face smeared white, the constant base beats of Palenque music coming from the gathering of local men sitting on a porch down the road behind him seemingly urging him forward. He pays us no mind, slurring loudly but in an unrecognizable language as he walks past. This village has done its best to resist outside influences for the last four hundred years, and today will be no different.
Most of the following is probably true: Sometime in the late 1500’s, Benkos Biohó, an African island king, was seized by a Portuguese slave dealer off the coast of Guinea-Bissau, sold to a middle-man with the last name of Palacios, then deposited on the fortified walls of Cartagena and sold to a Spaniard. Benkos quickly decided to forge his own path, organizing an escape with ten other slaves and making his way to the swamps and low mountains west of the Magdalena River and south of Cartagena. He founded the Village of the Cimmarróns, organized an army, helped to free other slaves, and repelled the forces of the King of Spain, making the Hollywood transition from a minor island monarch to a major pain in the ass for the Spanish one. But the best tales of heroism end with martyrdom, and Benkos Biohó, liberator of slaves, King of Handguns, and idol for generations, was duped into peace by the governor of Cartagena. In 1621, after walking ignorantly carefree through the city streets, Benkos was caught, hung and quartered. Today his statue stands in the San Basilio de Palenque main square, his back to Cartagena and his unshackled arms stretching out towards the west coast of Africa.
But his memory is strong, and San Basilio today is an economically depressed but culturally enriched town of about 3,000, most of them direct descendants of slaves brought to Colombia from Angola and Congo. Benkos selected the area for its defensibility and others found it by following maps woven into women’s hair; we drive the sixty kilometers in a rental car, stopping for two legitimate toll booths and, after an unplanned diversion into a roadside village, three illegitimate ones, set up by entrepreneurial youths stringing ribbon across the road. Eventually a large brown sign on the side of the highway directs travelers to San Basilio, along a long dirt road that ends in the village itself. We park in the main square and next to a church with a stained glass window depicting not only a historically inaccurate and ironically white Jesus, but one who looks as if he’s been conjured up by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Of two men lounging under a gazebo and out of the sun, Cassiani de Cassiani is the quicker to his feet and far more amiable, and though he speaks only Spanish and Palenquero (a Creole mix of Bantu, Spanish, and maybe some Portuguese), he assures us he has an English-speaking friend. We hire Cassiani as our guide for the day, and after picking up Alberto, whose “English” consists of a few recognizable words ineffectually mixed in with other sounds, Cassiani takes us on a walking tour and oral history of San Basilio.
Aside from the aforementioned Benkos Biohó and the foundations of the Palenque, Cassiani shows us the creek where the women still wash clothes and talk; shares that polygamy is practiced and that he has three wives; tells us of the importance of music in both current affairs (he is dancing or singing more often than he is not) and the role it played in defending the city in the early years; and describes the intense and lengthy funeral ritual of the Palenque. The women play an elaborate role in the ceremony, called Lumbalú, to include mandatory crying, singing, and – here’s where the translation gets tricky – eating. Of the dead. Though this generally isn’t much of a shock for me – I have long been attracted to the sky burial practices of some Tibetan Buddhists and my recent discovery of the Zoroastrian’s Tower of Silence (#161 of 422 things to do in Mumbai!) has only added to my long list of places to see – the casual nature with which Cassiani and Alberto assert that they may have dined on their gammy is a bit disconcerting.
“Do you mean cannibalism?,” I ask.
“No, (something in Spanish and/or Palenquero).” Both Cassiani and Alberto are animated in their denial that they are cannibals, and I quickly realize that this might be an awfully inconsiderate accusation to make towards someone you’ve just met, in their own homes, who are being so kind as to show you around their village. I try to clarify.
“Tu comes los muertos, o tu comes con los meurtos?”
I will admit my Spanish is, to be overly generous, flawed, but we leave our initial meeting with Cassiani under the distinct impression that, at one time at least, eating mami- and papi-bits was a way to both honor and communicate with dead family members. Internet research does not support that the Palenque are cannibals or ever adopted the practice, but nor does it say they are not cannibals. And though “cannibal” seems a bit harsh, the word itself actually comes from the Spanish word caribal, in that the Spanish believed that the Caribs of the West Indies perhaps, occasionally, ate one another.
We make our last stop of the day at the home of Rafael Cassiani Cassiani, just on the east side of a barrio-dividing line none of us can see and at the site of the future police station (San Basilio does not now nor has it ever had a police force, and disputes are resolved by village elders). Rafael Cassiani Cassiani, master of the tabla, apparent novice on the marimbula, and Palenque goodwill ambassador, sits in his back yard, shirtless but with an impressive silver award hanging around his neck and a smile as bright. He lists the countries he’s been to, all of which invited him to play and to sing, and then does the same for us. It is mesmerizing, in part because we are witnessing something so foreign, in part because we have been rewarded for taking a chance without preparation, and in part, no doubt, simply because we are here.
Cartagena in Pictures
Bogota in Pictures
Four Weeks in Bogotá (y Todovía Tengo mi Cabeza).
Bogotá sits on a high plain at 8,660 feet, her more than eight million inhabitants mashed up against the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes mountain range and sprawling west to the very limits of the Savannah of Bogotá. The city is huge – one of the twenty-five biggest in the world and the fastest growing in Latin America – and I can see much of it from my fourth floor studio apartment in the Chapinero Alto neighborhood. I have come here both to try to learn Spanish and to spend a few months transitioning from twenty-two years of government service into a new life in the civilian world; Bogotá serving as an air lock, keeping the figurative bad air from my past where it belongs and letting me breath something new and untainted. Unfortunately, the literal air at more than a mile and half high is thin and, along Septima (7th Avenue), one of Bogotá’s main north-south arteries, throat-achingly dirty. The city has a small army of exhaust-spewing buses and a huge one of tiny yellow Hyundai taxis that yield to no one, and they seem to be on the road twenty-four hours a day.
Every American guide book and website profess to Bogotá’s decreased crime rate since the 1990’s, but also warn of a continued reputation for violence. As such I’ve restricted my travel to the neighborhoods between la Candelaria – Bogotá’s original pueblo and city center – and the tower-apartmented neighborhoods of the north side of town, where the young and upwardly mobile reside. Regardless, I came to Colombia prepared for the worst, and my threat mitigation involves carrying small amounts of cash; making little eye contact; growing an intimidating beard complete with a Louisiana-shaped bald spot; and adopting a feigned accent where I speak Spanish quickly, hoping to thwart would-be muggers by leading them to believe I am not a gringo but rather an immigrant from some far off land where the Spanish is so pure and golden it is spoken at a pace unintelligible to mere Colombianos. I mentally prepare for my attackers both with imaginary action (where I swiftly disarm them, knocking them out with an elbow to the face and then gently lowering them to the ground, teaching them a lesson in both the power of violence and kindness) and imaginary words (“You want my wallet? Well guess what. I don’t carry a wallet. I carry a money clip. So go fuck off”). But the truth is that I have never felt threatened or uncomfortable, and Rollos (a native of Bogotá [i]) are disarmingly kind and patient.
I spend my first days in the Hotel B3 in the Virrey neighborhood, and over the weekend the neighboring eponymous park fills with runners, leashless dogs of all sizes, a small troupe of teenage acrobats treating a slack line like it’s a trampoline, athletes using the two or three open-air gyms, and the thick, sweet tinge of marijuana. I have never smoked it, but even I can tell what the good stuff smells like. I try to run the footpath, but the altitude sears my lungs, so I instead spend the mornings drinking coffee with the crowd and listening to a gypsy band compete for our attention with an impressively muscular and immaculately dressed transvestite playing a wicked Spanish guitar.
My home for the rest of the month is in the hilly, middle-class, bohemian and gay (both in emotion and sexual orientation) neighborhood of Chapinero Alto, a collection of older two-storey row houses and newer apartment buildings. This city is crowded but peppered with parks, and every inch of space is used. Two blocks from my apartment is Parque Portugal (which I quickly label “Parque Marijuana,” or, after my Spanish improves, “Parque Lleno de Mierda de Perro”) and it is never empty. The benches along the solo winding path host musicians, beer-drinkers, and the ubiquitous necking college students intertwined so tightly they look like a Picasso. A concrete court seems to be used for basketball only early on Sunday mornings; the remainder of the time it is used for fútbol sala by kids and dads; by grimy construction workers on lunch break, uniformly attired in boots, denim jeans and t-shirts, orange safety-helmets lined up neatly on a slope; or by a four-on-four night league where the shoe of choice is a dirty Chuck Taylor and the athletes are so skilled it seems to me that the small, deflated ball might be glued to their feet. Colombianos might be Catholic but their religion is fútbol, and a Colombia national team jersey is the single most popular article of clothing, particularly on game days, when the city is riotous with the yellow uniform (and if fútbol is their religion, tejo is their vice, a Colobmian cultural version of bowling. Except with gunpowder and far more beer and other drunk people standing near your target. Did I mention gunpowder?).
On Sundays the main roads of Bogotá shut down to vehicle traffic for ciclovia, and hundreds of thousands of residents walk, run, and ride (relatively) smog-free. It has been going on since 1974, started as a way to open more roads for pedestrians and bicyclists, and if you take Septima from north to south, you can end up downtown in a modern-day bazaar replete with carnival games, junk vendors, food stands, chalk artists, llama rides, jugglers, cuy races, and street performers with skill levels from drunk to painful to huckster to needs work to spectacularly talented. Keep walking and end up in la Candelaria, home to the federal government, countless hostels, world-class graffiti, and the labyrinthine Botero Museum, a world so fat and joyous that even the graphic shooting of Pablo Escobar looks like it might have been kind of fun.
Four weeks is not enough for Bogotá; I want to know the city. After a lifetime of being a mere intruder into foreign territories, I want to feel like a local. I want a bartender to know me by name, I want to give secret directions to cab drivers that show my local knowledge, I want to sing with the nonstop chants and pounding drumbeats at a Milenarios game; to know the feeling of joy when the streets erupt after Colombia scores against Peru. I want to know the hangover cure for aguardiente, or where to find the best arepas for breakfast. Nor is four weeks enough to learn Spanish, and I think the rotating Andres-Manuel-Rafael trio of security guards in my apartment building has learned more of my language than I of theirs. I want to tell them how lovely are the days in Bogota, with their counterintuitive morning heat and afternoon chill. I want to tell the taxi drivers that the music is actually Aerosmith, not Guns and Roses, and that regardless, neither are my compañeros. I want to flesh out, in Spanish, this “American” thing, where apparently every Colombian calls themselves – nee, every resident of every country in North, Central and South America – an “American.” Though I may be a North American, and “gringo”, when non-epithetical, is fine by me, I am certainly not a United Statesian, and after four weeks of struggling to read signs, patiently waiting for a turn at the gym, asking for directions and generally feeling like an immigrant where you don’t speak the language but learn enough to know that you sound like a child, which frustratingly compels you to speak even less; after all of this I feel confident that I can adequately express what it means to be American.
[i] As opposed to “Costeños” from Cartagena, or “Paisas” from Medellin.
Going Hemingway
Quito to Baños and Back Again/8-12 April, 2008
Is there a more harrowing opening scene in modern cinema – outside Saving Private Ryan – than the first ten minutes of Alive? Is there one among us who didn’t experience an empathetic tightening of the glutes, an involuntary clenching of teeth, a collective release of breath once that doomed plane skidded and tumbled to a snowy stop? The 1972 crash – loaded with an Uruguayan high school alumni rugby team – resulted in 29 dead and 16 survivors spending 72 days high in the brutally cold Andean cordillera before they were finally rescued. In addition to the 1993 movie, the post-crash events spawned the delightfully macabre bumper sticker Rugby Players Eat Their Dead, which is, in fact, how those 16 survivors lived to tell their grizzly story.
As I readied for my two-week trip to Ecuador and Peru, my own desperate thoughts of how I might live should my TACA Air airplane crash-land in the Andes had taken refuge in my traveling companion for the total of my nine flights over a two-week period: Mac would provide me plenty of much needed sustenance, if need be, because he’s a good friend, and because I could – I would – eat him. I would. Mac is a big man. Or at least he was. It seems Mac is in love – to a vegetarian, to boot – and he’s a good twenty pounds lighter than the last time I saw him. Fortunately about every third Latino getting on our flight carried a box of fried chicken,[1] so I wouldn’t have to eat Mac after all.
Mac and I had but two goals for our trip to Ecuador and Peru – to see a soccer game and to see Macchu Piccu. The rest would be unplanned, allowing us the freedom and flexibility to go where we wanted when we wanted, to stay or go, to take the backpacker-highway or the road less traveled, to drink heavily or not at all. We opted for each.
Ecuador: Land of Little People
Our first stop is Quito, the capital of Ecuador and at 9,200 ft, way too close to the sun. It takes me less than a day to get a solid base burn that lasts throughout our trip (none of my Latino DNA, apparently, is in my epidermis, and by the end of the trip a cloud of dead skin sloughs off me each time I remove my fleece). But our first afternoon starts overcast, so we kill time with a bowl of ceviche and the first of our many, many Pisco Sours. Bitterly and legally disputed over, Pisco is a native drink of both Peru and Chile but served everywhere in the region. During Spanish colonial rule, imported grapes were the beginnings of what became a hugely successful wine industry. But in 1641, King Philip banned the import of wine, causing the Peruvians (or was it the Chileans?) to find an alternate, yet still alcoholic, use for their grapes. Voilà, Pisco. Add some egg whites, Simple syrup, lime juice and a dash of bitters, and you have the Pisco Sour. Though it tastes like a more acidic Margarita, it sneaks up on you like jungle juice at a frat party. I blame it on the altitude, but the three drinks we had as we waited out the rain, sounding all the world like machine-gun fire as it fell on the fiberglass covered courtyard, left us both feeling adequately prepared for our two-weeks in South America.
It did not, however, adequately prepare us for our first South American riot. There are a lot of cabs in Ecuador – far more cabs and buses, it seems, than private cars – some government owned and operated, some not. The drivers of the some not, on this Tuesday afternoon, are restless, and express their displeasure by clogging the streets and hurling rocks, bottles, fists and feet at every passing yellow cab. There are thousands of men chanting and kicking yellow-cab ass as the cars accelerate through the gauntlet of protesters, and Mac and I get close enough to film but far enough away to stay out of the way of the frequent errant projectiles. We stand safely, we think, next to the sole police officer we see, who is acting on the situation largely by looking the other way and texting messages on his cell phone. An ice-cream truck drives by, “Jingle Bells” drifting lazily from its loudspeaker.
The average height of a Brazilian male, says www.shortsupport.org,[2] is just about 5′7″. The vast rain forest and towering Andes Mountains separating Ecuador (and Peru) from Brazil must include a genetic decline, because Ecuadoreans seem to me to be much, much shorter. Mac and I look like genetic freaks, never more so than when we fold ourselves and our backpacks into public transportation, be it the hilariously miniature Daihatsu cabs – we frequently bottomed out over speed bumps and potholes – or the back seat of the Quito-Ambato-Baños bus we took after our third day in Ecuador. The four-hour journey began with a Tourettic DVD salesman pacing the aisle of the bus for the entire first half of the trip, talking to no one in particular but repeating the same sales pitch with the dedication and regularity of a time-condensed call to prayer coming from a minaret. He would start at the back of the bus, dropping cellophane covered DVDs on each passenger’s lap, making his way to the front. A passenger indicated his interest by picking up the DVD – no matter if you were picking it up simply to give it back. On the salesman’s return trip, untouched DVDs went back into his canvas bag, touched DVDs invited the hard sell. He warmed to us after he found we were American, and we learned from him that a) Columbian women were hot; b) he had family in Florida; c) Columbian women were hot; d) Columbia was the third largest country in South America; e) Columbians liked war; and f) Columbian women were hot.
We rolled into Baños around ten at night, and our desire to both get us into a beer and out of the rain prompted us to break routine and follow the first teenage hucksters accosting us. They took us to the Hostel Freddy, where we were given two rooms – mine smelling like farts and cigar smoke – for $5 each, a pretty good deal until I was woken by the sounds of the bus station, just a block from my single-pane windowed room. Mac, no doubt, slept through the night, lulled by the sounds of his own snores. Five dollars a night might compensate for farts and cigar smoke, it does not make up for unwanted wake-up calls.
Baños, named for the natural mineral baths spread throughout the town, is hemmed in by towering mountains and the Tungurahua volcano, active enough that this city is still clearing eruption residue covering a part of the only paved road leading to town. Mac and I climbed to the top of one of the ranges, braving muddy trails, no trails, thirty degree inclines with no trails, jungle-thick flora, fifty-cent piece sized spiders, diving vultures, and an overzealous guard dog (after starting down the wrong trail, we asked a local woman how to get to the “antennas.” Her prophetic answer: “take a cab”). We walked the road back down, unsuccessful in our attempts to hitch a ride from either of the two cars passing us, pausing only to accept the offer of a local farmer to take one of his granadilla, a fruit looking like an orange on the outside and a pomegranate on the inside, but with the consistency of mucus.[3]
We spend the afternoon as the only customers in a vitriolic Dutch woman’s café, listening to her espouse her theories on American politics and calling George Bush a “fucker.” Her Ecuadorean husband walks past us hangdog, and I am grateful I am not him. On our second and last night in Baños, we visit the mineral baths, where we account for all four hundred something pounds of gringo, our board shorts looking like Capris in comparison to the locals’ Speedos and boy shorts.
The morning brings us symmetry: As we get into our cab taking us to the two and a half hours to the Quito airport, the radio plays Europe’s The Final Countdown, that traveler’s anthem we’ve heard in Mexico and all over Scandinavia.
[1] KFC is the Starbucks of Ecuador, but every box of chicken on our flight was an unknown brand. If anyone knows this phenomenon, please let me know.
[2] Short Persons Support’s mission is to a) Support and provide reference material to persons of short stature; b) Raise awareness of the social and economic issues facing short people; and c) Provide inspiration to short people to help better their lives and attitudes. All I want them to do is tell me the average height of an Ecuadorean male.
[3] Later, in Lima, we explained this story to some other travelers in an attempt to recall the fruit’s name. “It’s not fruit,” stated a sassy Canadian. “Don’t tell me it’s not fruit,” I answered, “it was sweet, it had a peel, it had seeds on the inside.” Or something like that. “No,” she answered back, “it’s snot fruit.”