It´s been awhile. Welcome back to the every-so-often fireside chats hosted by your two and only favorite latin american travel-bumblers. The past ten days or so have been a whirl of mistakes, uncontrollable facts of nature, and lucky breaks. Nothing has gone as planned, and that feels, well... just about right for Spencer and Holly. We may have invented the phrase flying by the seat of your pants. Though I´m not quite sure what it means, literally.
So... last you heard we were in Salento, which settled firmly in my mind as a combination of just the right elements: hiking, meeting friends, amazing hot chocolate, and a town so friendly that the only thing that might worry you at night is getting overly excited about so many fireflies (or at least this is a problem for me). But change is the nature of our travels, so we packed up and headed out... taking the easy way down through the rest of colombia (i.e. only 7 hours at a time in any one bus). Stopped in Popayan, a surprisingly beautiful colonial city with plazas, whitewashed churches, and one of the best examples of globalization I´ve seen... we sat down in a ¨tex-mex¨restaurant, noticing as we did the menu in Spanish and English - almost a first on our trip through Colombia... turns out the owner is a Mexican who moved to New York, met his Colombian wife while working in a restaurant, and came back to Popayan with her to open this sweet little restaurant. They are hoping it works out... I have high hopes.
Next day on to Ipiales. Some Incan gods were playing with our minds, to go from Popayan to this place... all I´ll say is avoid if at all possible, and if you must go there, lock your door and stay inside. Even if you are hungry the food is not worth eating. However, we took a neat little side trip with our new friend Carlos to a crazy gothic church built on a beautiful bridge deep in a jungly green canyon. See the photos... it was neat.
Border crossing was totally smooth, other than my losing my passport again... (HA! MOM! KIDDING!). Hopped on the bus down to Otovalo, pretty tired and overwhelmed by this point, which wasn´t helped by the bus ¨enforcer¨ ( the guy that sits next to the driver and extorts money and or favors from passengers, and invariably refuses to speak more slowly) all of a sudden waving frantically and practically shoving us off the bus on the side of the road. Turns out we were somewhat near Otovalo, which is where we were hoping to go. Took another bus into the center, and realized... oh damn, Spencer´s new guitar was on the first bus, which was headed to Quito, and then south to Guayaquil. Had a couple moments soul searching - whether to just let it go, as we do with most posessions, and take the endless jokes from friends and family about yet another belonging that we absentmindedly left on a bench somewhere, or to take our destiny in our own hands and FIGHT! Chose the latter option and sprang into action- flagged down another bus going into Quito, and figuring that we were half an hour behind our original, started planning every last detail of our chase. The book was ever so helpful¨, saying ¨Quito´s Terminal Terrestre is unsafe at all hours, worst at night. Taxis are highly recommended, traveling with lugguage is asking for a shanking¨ well, I added the shanking part. But as night fell, and we chased, the oddly victorian-style tasseled decorations in the bus shook along with our knees. The moment we pulled in, I uncharacteristically had all of my stuff together, and we literally ran through 3 flights of stairs, 6 salidas (exits to departing buses) and several VERY armed guards, until one dear machine gun toting fellow took pity on our sweaty wild eyed selves and led us right up to the bus that amazingly, still had Spencer´s new guitar. WHEW! That was exciting. I think by keeping up a continually running pace we avoided getting stabbed. Hm.
After that, the supposedly crime ridden streets of Quito were nothin´. We wandered until Matt got back from Cuenca, and then just happily situated ourselves in his capable hands for 24 hours, hitting up a rain-drenched, crazed fan football match between Quito and Manta, and found the best whole wheat bread we´ve had all trip in his delightful neighboorhood. That and a YOGA studio! I´m so excited - yoga exists in South America, and not only that, the teacher there knew Gil, a teacher of ours in Boulder. Man it´s a small, flexible, lion-faced world.
Matt, however, had serious work to do reforming the Ecuadorian public health system, and we headed out to Mindo, a recommenation from MJ, with cloud forests, hiking, and butterfly gardens. Being us, we fell asleep on the bus, (or were too entranced by Lonesome Dove and Dune to notice) and overshot the town by about 2 hours. Didn´t help that the bus stopped for an hour in the dark, and then slowly, tippily, made its way though a LANDSLIDE. Lightning graced the scene every couple minutes, and I just used deep breathing to keep images of our bus crashing down the side of an Andean slope to stay calm. Got dropped off (sound familiar yet?) on the side of the road´, in a town. Didn´t know what town, but a town. Found a hotel, didn´t know what hotel, but a hotel, and passed out. This, mind you, was Valentines Day... Holly and Spencer style. The cockroaches in the bathroom really added a special note to the day! Next morning we managed to locate a bus back to Mindo, after first locating ourselves, and headed back for attempt #2. SO glad we did. Mindo is just a fantastic little mountain spot... and its a good thing we liked it... the power went out, the torrential rains hit, and out went all roads out. Spent a couple days just wandering around the town looking for people to talk to and tea (both of which we found!) and then finally got a bus out... intending to take the long route back to cotopaxi and the Quilotoa circuit, which was about 8 hours away.
BUT... life just ain´t simple. Long story short, at the mercy of the Ecuadorian bus system and our own conversational limitations, we ended up in the even-more-dangerous Ecuadorian Ipiales... only this place isn´t even on our guidebook map... Never. Never. Never go to Quevedo. Everyone we met asked us to please not go outside (in the middle of the day) because, and they mentioned this casually... we would be mugged. Or killed. Lovely. I pulled a trick out of my bag, and found a cab to take us to the ¨nicest hotel in town¨which turned out to be a hilariously run down wanna-be hilton, with an OLYMPIC sized swimming pool AND slides! We, and about 300 Quevedo kids, had a blast... as the sun was setting i was doing backstroke in the middle of StabTown, Ecuador.
And after a couple more buses through the night, we flopped down on the bed at some hostel here in Cuenca... all that mattered was that it had a bed. This morning, as we set off for a happy day of Cuenca sightseeing, I suggested to Spencer... ¨Hey, what do you think of coming up with a sort of plan for the next couple days, you know, just til we meet up with Brad and Kira?¨ He said...¨Yeah, we could try that...¨
Love, the HAPPY Bumblers.
