Kat had an unexpected four day weekend. That is to say, her expected three day weekend turned into one of four days when she discovered that Thursday was an exclusive holiday for the employees of the University where she teaches – meaning it not technically for the professors and students, but also meaning that the employees who have sole possession of the keys to the classrooms were unavailable to perform their daily duty of unlockings – thus effectively rendering Thursday a holiday for all. This strange and illogical distribution of labor is characteristically Ecuadorian in its inefficiency. While an extranjero like me, living in Ecuador, is generally delighted at the discovery of this cultural quark because it means I have been here long enough to recognize something that is particular to Ecuador, the manifestation of this inefficiency are usually, well, inefficient, and thus troubling to the North American mentality. But in this case, it gave Kat the excuse to make the nearly 10 hour bus trip from Ambato to Cuenca, where she could visit me and see one of Ecuador’s cleanest and oldest cultural hubs.
I was excited for a visitor in general, but more excited to see Kat, who had been my closet friend during our month of orientation. She called a few days before her arrival in order to seek advice about what presents my host family might appreciate as a gift for housing her for the weekend. She had initially thought to bring a nice bottle of wine, but because my familia ecuatoriana consists of a woman who I have never seen drink, a former addict and another woman who is currently breast-feeding, I suggested she bring something else. When I picked her up at the terminal at 6am, on my way to my excessively early morning class, she immediately showed me the two large cans of canned peaches and coctal mezcla her family had sworn to her were a very nice gift to any Ecuadorian family. Despite the early hour and the general discomfort of being gringas in a terminal where every man is either smooching at you or offering you a ticket to Montañita, our own cultural training made us loudly erupt into laughter at the idea that canned fruit was any sort of delicacy or gesture of gratefulness. We had both seen that canned fruits were housed in the same aisle as desserts and candies (including $8 bags of M&Ms) at any supermercado we entered, but our vision of canned fruit only belonging in hick America was too prevalent to seriously accept the fact that canned fruit might be worth something to the elites I was living with. It was a humorous thought we would continue to giggle at throughout the weekend.
Upon Kat’s arrival I realized I didn’t really know what to do in Cuenca besides wander around, which is what I usually do after my morning classes. My anxiety about this lack of activities was soon resolved when we realized that this happened to be a big weekend for visits in Cuenca. There were about 15 volunteers from our program in town in Cuenca this weekend, and while Kat and I were the only ones from the March group, the September volunteers were friendly and ready to hang out.
So that Friday we all congregated in the centro at mid-morning. After scarfing down some eggs and humitas (deliciously sweet tamales native to Ecuador) we all bused it to the Feria Libre, a hub of buses and themed stands selling everything from large almuerzos (which technically mean lunches, but are actually available for consumption from about 8:30am on) to cheap hair supplies to pirated DVDs and CDs. The plan was to catch a bus heading to Guayaquil and hop off in the Cajas, a beautiful national park about an hour and a half west of Cuenca. But upon discovering that such a bus would not be leaving for another hour we decided to transport ourselves to the park in the second best manner in Ecuador – by asking a complete stranger to out us in the back of their truck. Seeing the hoard of gringos wandering to every truck driver we saw, a friendly security guard eventually offered his help. Leading us around a few corners, to a man who was most likely a brother-in-law of the guard, we soon secured a ride with an old man whose white pickup was complete with tall wooden barriers around the back and a thick dusty substance covering the floor. We joked it was likely we were sitting in lyme or anthrax. Nonetheless, we piled in and 75 minutes and 40 bucks later we were in the Cajas.
If my popping ears had not warned me before, the immensely colder air would have told me we had climbed significantly in altitude. Zipping up fleeces and pulling on hoods we roused our sleeping limbs to climb out of the truck and gaze upon rolling brown and green hills, the extensive span of which was obscured by misty grey clouds that blew and dispersed throughout their concave passages. With no trails per se we simply started walking. Each ascent to a new ridge would undoubtedly reveal another small lake nestled in the relative flatness existent at the foot of numerous hills. Although the wind changed direction frequently, it blew consistently and made the light brown shrubs that coated the mountains resemble hair under water – fluid and weightless. While guide books and posters hype the possibility of seeing wildlife in the Cajas, the most interesting species I saw were the smallest – tiny plants with buds striped in the same colors as circus tents and cactus-like vegetation that sprouted upwards in purple and green stalks and seemed to want to engulf the air around them. There is likely some lesson to draw from that, about the diversity of life – even on the smallest scales – but I was more interested in simply looking at the foliage, and in using the digital macro feature on my camera.
So that’s what I did, took pictures, walked in the cold, cursed when I stepped on something I believed to be a mountainous rock covered in moss and subsequently discovered the moss in fact only rested on water. A few of us had to return to Cuenca for evening classes, so we all hiked towards the sound of passing cars and soon found the road. Without anxiety we were soon able to flag down a different white pickup, and the man and his family were more than happy to have us pile in the back. I was surprisingly comfortable in the middle of the discarded tire in which I found myself sitting.
