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July 19, 2005
A Wonderful Weekend
I had one of the most incredible weekends of my entire Ecuadorian life these past few days. I managed to make it to Laguna Quilotoa after attempting every weekend for the last month. I went with Bryant from my SIT program, who was my best guy friend from Ecuador and is here with his friend for two weeks of traveling. So his friend Clayton came, and to finish off the great group was my friend Ming from Brown, who's living in Quito doing creative writing about volunteering in a family planning and health clinic here. Totally great times were had.
We headed down Friday afternoon, and had to fight our way onto the most crowded bus I’ve ever seen. Only one bus runs from Latacunga-Zumbahua every hour and a half, and we tried to get on three times after riding in a taxi to catch up to the bus and flag it down to let us on. The first time, our bags couldn’t make in on with us. The second time, popular dissent from the passengers intimidated us from attempting. Finally, after five minutes and everyone getting angry, one incredibly nice woman named Rosio fought for us and said, “Get on, there will be room, get on up now.” So while standing and straddling the people next to us, and dancing to the salsa and cumbia blasting out of the speakers, we had a very pleasant journey, until the bus got a flat tire at 12000 feet at night. Whether the flat tire was caused by our extra weight, I’m not sure, but luckily the other riders did not make that conclusion. All the passengers got out to reduce the weight and ease the work of the person operating the jack. The starts were magnificent, and I realized how long it had been since I was able to see them this clearly. I also saw the Southern Cross for the second time in my life.
Outside in the cold, Rosio introduced herself to us and said that she wants tourists to have a good image of Ecuador and the Ecuadorian people, and that is why she fought for us. She was surprised that none of us were married, however. Unfortunately, and this always happens, friendliness comes at a price, and she definitely tried to sell us perfume products (this is her job). I mean, it’s friendly enough, and it’s a correct assumption that most gringo tourists have more money than Ecuadorians. I guess buying from her would be a form of reciprocity, but instead we decided to be grateful and friendly back to her as our reciprocity. However, in the end I understood her as a very generous person, and she ended up gifting Ming a beautiful bottle of perfume. A truly lovely and strange encounter, flat tire and all. We arrived in Zumbahua at night and basically just went to sleep.
Earlier Saturday morning, before venturing to the Laguna, we went to a large indigenous market in Zumbahua, which is way less touristy and much more remote than other markets in the country (such as Otavalo). It was beautiful to see everybody out, wearing different colorful clothes, and different vendors selling things from food (every type imaginable, including quail eggs, chicken feet, and cow heads), non- traditional and traditionally indigenous clothing, to electronic appliances, rope, grain, and chamomile. I bought some scarves and shawls for my mom's friends.
Laguna Quilotoa is like Crater Lake in Oregon, except way bigger and at 13000ft. It was a volcano that exploded and then imploded on itself, and with rainfall created a 900ft deep lake. We walked around the rim a bit, and it's really some of the starkest, most jagged, and utterly beautiful and barren landscapes I've ever seen. And riding in the back of the pickup there was incredible, peering out at a completely flat river valley, with the actual river hidden in a jagged canyon 100 ft below the normal valley floor, with the tall Andean mountains surrounding us on all sides. We took a hike around the rim, or at least partway around, and it was so amazing to notice how the colors of the water changed and how the landscape seemed to change depending on where one was located and how the clouds were positioned in relation to you and to the Laguna. Quilotoa is truly a natural wonder of this world.
Saturday night, we somehow made it to this hacienda that sleeps up to 12 people. We changed our plans, decided not to go to Chugchilan, which has a model of sustainable tourist lodging that I wanted to check out, and instead stayed at the Hacienda Tigua Chimbacucho. It is located right outside of Tigua, a tiny rural village famous for its blue-background traditional and very fine indigenous paintings, usually done on leather and containing images of the Condor, the volcano Cotopaxi, Laguna Quilotoa, and various rituals and figures of normal indigenous people. I came across the Hacienda in my rough guide, apparently that's the only English-language guide it's in. Luckily there was space, and the owners are a family with 17-18 year old kids. Their hacienda supplements their dairy farming with keeping guests for the last 3 years (after mad cow disease in 1997 and then dollarization in 2000 made dairy barely profitable). We milked cows, played futbol with local indigenous children, and drank water from the tap (a first for me in Ecuador) because the water comes straight from a spring.
We all chatted together all night with the family and with the four other guests, which included two medical doctors from Quito (one is a high school friend of the father/owner of the hacienda), one doctor of philosophy, and one American medical doctor from University of New Mexico. They were wonderful company, and I learned about an exchange program between UNM and a university in Quito. They were down here observing the medical clinic in Zumbahua and hope to send volunteer medical students down there soon. In addition, the Dr of Philosophy told me about an incredibly library that contains everything published about Ecuador in its four walls, and it’s located in the North of Quito. Until now, I had doubted that libraries even existed in Ecuador.
For breakfast the next day, we ate amazing fresh farm food in the morning (fresh milk, cream butter, eggs, cream caramel, and yogurt--all straight from the cows 100 ft from the house). It was totally ridiculous and comforting. I have so much caramel now, and it's so delicious. I might even have some left to bring back.
We made it back to Latacunga, two hours from Quito, on Sunday morning in the back of the transport truck of the family who owns Hacienda Chimbacucho. The younger son was heading off to Guayaquil to go to Naval training, and brought his guitar along for the ride. He played a bit but then went to sit in the front while us travelers were left in the frigid cold mist of 13000 foot Andean climate. This journey was spectacular, weaving in and own of valleys, going up sides of mountains, seeing pine and eucalyptus forests and then cleared lands. It was the most remote campo I’d ever been to, and every single house was built halfway into the hillside out of mud and a thatched roof. Yet there were no trees or bushes in sight—I have no idea where the thatching came from. We passed women and children dressed in beautifully bright traditional long sweaters and heavy skirts and tall socks and gold bead necklaces, working away with hoes on their land. As we rose in altitude, everything got colder but the view was spectacular.
When we finally arrived in Quito, we headed straight to La Capilla del Hombre, or The Chapel of Man, a magnificent center of art conceived as a crowning achievement art museum showcasing large works of the absolutely unparalleled Ecuadorian artist Oswaldo Guayasamin. Guayasamin died in 1999 before the project was completed, but what exists in the museum is breathtaking. Most of the works exhibited come from his Rage Stage, where he decries, with great detail and emotion, the hardship, hunger, pain, and violence in many parts of the world, from Nicaragua to Chile to Ecuador to South Africa and Vietnam and Spain and former Czechoslovakia. Giant paintings showcase his vision of the world, and his work always emphasizes giant and expressive hands and faces. He takes Picasso’s Cubism and transforms it into an indigenous call for justice in the world (his mother was indigenous and plays a prominent role in many of his paintings). The building itself is magnificent, incredibly open with an eternal light at the bottom of the second floor that can be seen from the open-center of the upper floor. The light is a symbol of one of his famous quotations right before he died, “Keep a light burning because I will always be ready to return.”
This was my second time in The Chapel of Man, and interestingly, I was quite moved by certain paintings more this time than last time. Especially those in black and white with a little blue, they seemed to come to life and I felt like I could feel the pain expressed in them. One called “Tenderness,” quite a contrast to the devastation of many of his other works, is striking because pain still exists, even in the depicted embrace. At the same time, one of the larger pieces composed of 16 small paintings, which greatly moved me the last time, had less of an effect on me. I’m definitely in a different stage of my life right now, but I’m not really sure about what it might signify that the black and white paintings affected me more. Pleace check out Guayasamin’s work at http://www.guayasamin.com/index_ing.htm, and anyone who comes to Quito must visit this museum.
Posted by Lee Gilman at July 19, 2005 05:08 PM
