Chapter 21

“Food is an important part of a balanced diet.”
Fran Lebowitz.

The late start gave me time for a nice leisurely morning as my last day in Quito. I lingered over breakfast in the American Bagel and then strolled around getting quite sentimental about the place before ambling back to my room to finish packing. At twelve everyone assembled and we loaded the truck and set off for my second visit to Otovalo. It occurred to me that if I had not refused the changed itinerary it would be my third.

We were staying this time at the Valle del Amancer which was a pleasant if relatively basic hotel surrounding a pretty courtyard just a couple of blocks away from the main plaza. When I had last been here it had been Market day and the Plaza de Ponchos and all the surrounding streets had been filled with stalls and people. There had been noise and colour and a vigour that came from the true collision of a local market with a tourist market. Now it was all empty. The Plaza was a large open concrete expanse that looked as bleak and forlorn as an English seaside resort in December. I walked around the periphery of it looking at the cafes and shops which were for the most part empty. It was a dull grey day and the town looked nowhere near as inviting as it had last time. A little disappointed by this transformation I headed back towards the hotel.

Next morning I woke up without a hangover which surprised me as my evening wanderings had eventually taken me to the Sahara - an odd place where we sat on scatter cushions on the floor - and rather a lot of beer. Instead I had a throat that felt as if I had been gargling with razor blades. From my bed I could pull back the curtain and peer out at the day. It was grey and drizzly and held no promise of excitement should choose to get up. I instantly decided that my course of action should be inaction. I would sit around under the sheltering eaves and write and read for the day. The courtyard with its wooden buildings and homely atmosphere was a perfect backdrop for this kind of activity.

That was what I did. I ate a little breakfast, had several coffees and sat around idle but content for the whole day. I left the hotel only once to slip out for a burger at lunch time. As I sat there various other members of the group ambled by from time to time. Tony and Denise, a couple from Tasmania, passed on their way to a nearby town famous for making musical instruments where Tony was intending to try to buy a mandolin. Sarah and Lynn - two friends travelling together and Carl, the youngest person on the trip at the moment passed on their way to go horse riding. Beer passed on his way to the bar. I chatted with each of them in turn but wasn't tempted for a moment to do anything rash myself like walking around.

In the evening we all gathered together in the hotel's restaurant for Gnomes to get out the maps and give us a detailed day to day breakdown of where we would be going over the next few weeks and to meet four of the remaining five members of the group who turned up half way through having been sent on from Quito by one of the other drivers there. The only missing person now was Maria. We had no idea when we were likely to see her as there had been no word from her about the scale of problems that Pichincha was causing to her arrangements.

After the discussion we all went out for dinner and entirely by coincidence most of the group seemed to end up in the same rather small restaurant on the south side of the Plaza. Although I didn't realise it at the time this was to be the turning point, the moment when the rot started to set in and undermine the trip to the point where I would consider leaving. The incident that started it all was completely trivial, rather amusing even. I was one of the first group to arrive and I ordered the meat lasagne from the rather good menu. Before long others had started to turn up and naturally they joined us. One of them was Suzanne, who had been in Ecuador for some time, learning Spanish with rather more success than I’d managed. She also ordered the meat lasagne. When one came out a few minutes later she took it not realising that it was probably mine. I didn't mind. We were all there together and I was in no hurry. I would wait and have hers. More meals came and eventually everyone had been served apart from me and it became obvious that somehow I had been overlooked. I called the waitress and asked where mine was. Even with my Spanish I could manage

'Donde esta mi comida?'.

She seemed confused, believing apparently that everyone had been served. I assured her that this was not in fact the case. She went away again and more time passed. People had by now started to finish their meals. I called the waitress back, possibly a little sharply as it was getting past a joke.

"Donde esta mi lasagne con carne?"

I asked. She looked puzzled again.

"Con carne? No con carne, con verduras."

I indicated with the aid of the menu that I wanted a meat lasagne not a vegetable one and she hurried off again.

Everyone had now finished eating and I still hadn't started. Finally a meal appeared and I ate it and as I was finishing the waitress brought a free dessert from the kitchen to make up for the inconvenience.

As I say it was an entirely trivial incident, but I discovered later in conversation with the few people who were by that time still prepared to speak to such a social pariah, that some of the group interpreted my desire for dinner as churlish and ill mannered and my sharpness, due solely to my limited Spanish, as rudeness. From my point of view I had been polite and good humoured finding the incident funny rather than annoying but I have to say that I still don't think it would be unreasonable to be a little sharp when two hours after ordering your food you discover they haven't yet begun to cook it.

First impressions may be wrong but they can be difficult to overcome later. The rot had started.

The drive from Otovalo to Misahualli is a long one but it is saved from much of the tedium of truck days by being a particularly scenic one. Initially the route was similar to the one I had taken with Explore when we left Otovalo but it soon veered off into new territory, away from the tarmacced roads and onto winding dirt tracks that led up into the hills. The views of the mountains and the volcanic chain were spectacular and we stopped for lunch in a roadside clearing which the signposts assured us was not far from a thermal springs. Gnomes showed the new people around the truck and soon lunch was underway.

The trucks are, or rather this truck was - for they vary in size and some specific details - sixteen ton Mercedes with custom built bodies. Inside the seats are laid out like coach seats except that four of them face backwards at the two tables. The trucks have, for reasons I couldn’t really fathom, all been given names. Amber, our truck from Alaska to Panama had been slightly larger with space behind the back row of seats for day packs. Choncho, Latin American Spanish for Pig, was slightly smaller and lacked this feature. They are all equipped with a music system and a fridge for food and outside there are an assortment of lockers. The largest of these, at the back, is where all the luggage is kept, Others contain food and drink, tables and chairs, cookers, tools, pots and pans, shovels, axes, sledgehammers and so on. Amber had also had a locker for tents but in Choncho these were stored on the roof.

Today was, had I but known it, to be the second trivial step on my road to becoming the trip’s most reviled human being. Writing it down it is all so inanely trivial that it beggars understanding. The normal practice at mealtimes had been so far that the cook team did all the preparation and washed anything they had used in preparation. Everyone else washed their own personal plates and cutlery and helped with the drying. Obviously people helped out with the preparation and washing up as required. Normally at lunch times I hadn’t been eating much, making do with a sandwich and not bothering with the niceties of plates and such like. On this first roadside meal of the trip I did the same, as usual. I found out much later that this was seen by some members as the group as evidence of laziness and the fact that on this one particular day, the first when we had lunch from the truck I didn’t help with the washing up, which from my point of view was because with the best will in the world it’s not possible for more than three people to wash up using three bowls, clearly marked me out as evil incarnate. It seemed so ridiculous when I discovered this later that I found it unbelievable. As subtly as possible I questioned those people I thought might answer it and found it to be true.

Misahualli is a small town at the junction of two rivers, the Misahualli and the Napo It’s a little shabby but a popular jumping off spot for tourists doing jungle tours. Our hotel was pleasant enough, certainly not the poorest I’d stayed in by a long way. The rooms were clean and comfortable if a little spartan and they all had toilets and showers. We were only using it for one night now, then leaving most of our things there in storage while we went off on our jungle trip and staying a further night on our return. Our guide for the jungle trip was a large dark skinned Ecuadorian called Adonis whose English was perfect, or at least as perfect as his American accent allowed. After a pretty good Chorizo (a fancy name for steak egg and chips) he came to the hotel and gave us a detailed run down on what the three day trip would entail and introduced us to the team of cooks, guides, porters and interpreters that would be accompanying us.

We all went off to bed quite early as the town lacked anything to entertain us tonight. On our return we were told there was to be a Sambatheque - a cross between a Samba dance and a discotheque - at the local hall which we could attend if we wished. The early night turned out to be fortuitous as a few moments after we had all turned in there was a power cut that plunged the whole town into complete darkness. Then the rain started and as the section of the hotel where my room was located was a single storey with a tin roof it was unbelievably noisy. As I lay listening to the raindrops hitting the roof like bullets I had to wonder if the jungle trip was the smartest thing we could be doing. The idea of three extra days in Misahualli was however even less appealing than the idea of hiking through the jungle in the rain. Eventually I feel into a rather fitful and restless sleep.

When I woke the rain had eased off to the point where the prospect didn’t seem so terrible Gnomes drove us to the foot of a very muddy hill where she left us, returning to Misahualli to park the truck so that she could meet up with us later. Our guide was named Azul and his English was pretty poor. Mirta who was to have been our translator hadn’t shown up and Adonis was meeting us at the river for lunch so we were left to our own uncertain translation skills. Evelyn, who spoke some Spanish, was roped in as a temporary substitute. Despite the communications difficulties Azul proved to be an enthusiastic guide. We had barely got halfway up the hill when he stopped off at a tree which was covered with termites. He thrust his hand into the densest mass of them and allowed them to cover his arm before saying something.

“Something about termites, “ hazarded Evelyn.

He said something else and after some discussion and a little mime we decided that he was explaining that the raised ridges on the tree were not actually part of it they were tunnels built by the termites as runs for them and that the material of termite nests when burned made an excellent mosquito repellent.

Satisfied that we had understood sufficiently we moved on to his next explanation, a few yards further up the slope. Here he took a prickly seed pod from another tree and broke it open. Inside were red berries. He crushed them with his finger and proceeded to decorate Sara and Evelyn’s faces with the juice. It was he explained used by the natives as make up and hair dye. He rubbed a little into a few strands of Evelyn’s hair by way of demonstration, turning it bright orange.

At another tree he explained with rather more relish and mime than I felt was strictly necessary that it’s bark was used to produce a preparation effective against vaginal infections and that another could be used to produce a drug that would either act as a contraceptive or produce spontaneous abortions if it was too late for effective contraception.

Evelyn stoically laboured on with the translations.

Another muddy slope led us down to a river where we turned to head upstream, clambering from rock to slippery rock as we went. The boulders were large and the climb not difficult and after about half an hour we reached the waterfall that was our destination. It was quite pretty if nothing very spectacular, falling into a deep pool where quite a few of the group went swimming. I had not brought my trunks so I joined the others sitting in the warm sun on the rocks and just watched. Carl and Michel, who were already marking themselves out as the most gung-ho of the group, were predictably the most daring, climbing high up the waterfall to reach a ledge about half way to the top.

When we retraced our steps down stream instead of going all the way back the way we had come we took a path up the opposite bank and circled round towards our original departure point. Muddy does not begin to describe the track. In places it was three or four feet deep with a sticky bright yellow mud that soon covered everything. It only lasted about half an hour though before we were at the road again and waiting for everyone to catch up before going on down to the Napo and lunch.

Here the cook crew and Adonis met us and served up a delicious tuna and noodles concoction which was filling if not very visually appealing. The water was inviting and I was sorry that I hadn’t brought my swimming things. I would be among the very few who sat in the boat while the others drifted downstream in their inner tubes, alternately floating slowly along and whizzing and tumbling through the rapids. It looked great fun. Eventually they all reached a whirlpool where it was, regardless of the efforts expended, impossible to break free of the circling current. We ‘rescued’ everyone into the boats and a few hundred yards further on pulled into the bank and transferred to the larger boats that were taking us to the camp.