Quito and the Equator

Quito. Too big, too many people,  too much everything. We stayed just the night to catch our flight the next day. We spent most of the day at the equator line. True, it’s imaginary but I’ve just always wanted to put my feet on it.

The beautiful Volcan Cayumbe in the background.

We went to the real equator. There’s another place that claims to be on the equator but it is not . That place demonstrates a bunch of tricks and deceptions about the Coriolis effect but it’s all staged. The number of tour busses that disgorge people is astounding we heard. But we went to the real equator, the one determined by science, the Quitsato Sundial, and practically had the place to ourselves. We got a great explanation of the science behind the place, took some photos, and had a $2 lunch at a roadside place. I’m also proud to say that we did the trip independently using city and local busses. You can get a tour out here for $60 but we did it for $3.25 round trip. We learned to navigate the Quito city bus system on the fly, by asking fellow passengers, the driver, and the transit police for help and directions. It was great. 

Back in Quito with a few more hours to kill, we walked around to the main churches, took in our last Latin American vibe, and had a tasty last meal of an empanada, tamal, and a bolon. Washed down with my favorite Inca Kola, it was a great ending.

Cuenca Part 2

Markets and stately churches around every corner, colorful and friendly people, and a safe atmosphere made Cuenca oh so pleasant. The climate was perfect, dress in layers for mostly sunny 60 degree days and its heavenly.  

We took a $5 taxi to Turi, a viewpoint in the hills above the city. 

A little walk further up and you’ll see Turi Parque Extremo, a rickety place that had all these decrepit “rides”. Even thought there were parts missing from the rides and  questionable suspension cables, Maya thought that was all part of the fun. Here she is on a swing contraption made mostly of rebar, flying over a steep cliff.

Another day we took a day trip to Gualaceo and Chordeleg. Each town is known for a particular handicraft.  They were fun to walk around and soak up a different atmosphere. We just took public busses from town to town and ate in the markets per our usual. We thought there was a parade comming through town because of the loud drumming and clowns on stilts, but it was just a promotion for an appliance sale.

Lots of the things we observe are out of our ordinary, like a kid carrying a dog in a black plastic trash bag on the bus, carrying it like a baby. Don’t worry the pup’s head was sticking out of the bag.  Oh and the salespeople on the busses! There’s the usual drink and snack sellers that hop on and off at every stop. Then there’s the product sales people that hop on just as the bus is pulling out of the station. The person does a big spiel accompanied by props and sometimes music. The speech is long and dramatic. Ginseng, hand cream, socks, you name it. Sometimes as they are talking they hand out the product for your inspection and if you don’t want it they just collect it back. We had entertainment too. One guy did karaoke, he just sang his heart out. There was a comedy duo that got all the passengers going. They collect tips at the end of the show. This happens on every single bus.

Great park squares to sit in day and night, also with entertainment. We saw a a fun group of breakdancers, an acrobatic troupe, singers, and classical dancers. Old churches and colonial buildings around every corner.

Cuenca Highlights

We have 4 fulll days here in this lovely colonial city.  It’s loud and bustling but right sized. It feels really safe and walking at night isn’t a problem. I’ve heard there are 10,000 expats from the US and Canada here in Cuenca, but we haven’t really seen any.  The clerk at our hotel said the influx caused real estate prices  to skyrocket but now there are more good restaurants. 

And there is great food here.  Most places offer an almuerzo, a set lunch of soup, meat, rice, vegetables, and a drink for $2. That’s an incredible deal and fills us up for the whole afternoon.  Eating in the markets is our favorite, stall after stall of crazy good food. We like to share a dish at 2 or 3 places to get a good variety. 

We’ve had a lovely time walking around visiting churches and museums. Along with the traditional museums showcasing pottery shards, shrunken heads from Amazonian people’s, and life sized dioramas, we went to Museo de Arte Prohibido.  Basically a goth fest.

The owner suggested we check out the bathroom for its artistic details.

It was weird and fun.  And then Maya said “this is the kind of place that turns into a sex dungeon at night”.  Well, I had to agree.

Back at the market, underneath the stairs, there are traditional healers offering a Limpia for $3.  This is a spiritual practice, passed down through generations from mother to daughter. The client is lightly beaten with a bouquet of herbs and flowers, then an uncracked egg is vigorously rubbed all over the body, and finally the practitioner drinks some kind of herbal concoction and spits it out in a mist on your head and on your back. The egg is cracked into a bowl and your energy is read from it. Unfortunately, I could not understand anything the woman was saying about what the egg was revealing about Mayas energy. The debris from the bouquet  on the floor represents all the bits of negative energy that has been beaten out of the client.

Another unique experience in Quenca is to go to a spa. Piedras del Agua is about 20 minutes by taxi outside of town. If you look on their website they tell you which nights you can get a two for one deal on the spa circuit. We had a Turkish steam bath, a red mud bath, a blue mud bath, subterranean contrast pools (One hot and one cold), and a steam box. Followed by two swimming pools,one of them a Japanese Onsen pool. All of this for $17 each, what a bargain! We left exfoliated and relaxed.

We got back into town and had a lovely plate of chicken, rice, and salad for $3.50 what a bargain.

Gastronomico

We returned to the corn field in the late afternoon as Anita was worried the pending rain would ruin what was left of the crop. The family uses the summer corn harvest for food for the entire year. We went to help and were soon joined by Anita’s parents and a young relative, a girl aged 10.  They were truly thankful for our help since we were able to finish the entire field.

We carried the sacks of corn on our backs back to the house where everyone gathered to separate the kernels according to their use. The main focus of this work was to get the biggest ones, about the size of a dime, off the cob so they could be processed, by hand, into dough for tortillas. We left the family at this point to get ready for dinner at Shamuico, and unlikely gourmet restaurant in the middle of nowhere.

This meal was an intensely rich 8 course extravaganza. About the chef: he was born in Saraguro but moved to Spain as a child, married a Spanish woman, and was trained in classical European cooking. He returned to Saraguro and opened Shamuico using his classical training with local ingredients and recipies. His talented staff produced some amazing dishes, all beautifully presented.  The menu was hard for me and google translate to decipher, but between my bad Spanish and the waiters better English we had an idea of what we were eating. 

For all the foodies out there this is what we ate:

A lovely slice of bread served in anindividual tiny basket with a smear of herbed butter on a rock.

These are lentil wafers with dots of cilantro cream served on a traditional fan used to stoke cooking fires.

Maya wanted a cocktail. Ok it was a special occasion. This is horchata tea, made with 28 flowers and herbs, lemon, and panela which is a natural sugar. Her version was spiked with alcohol of unknown variety,  and served with this beautiful bouquet representing some of the botanicals in the drink. 

A delicious corn fritter ball studded with pork served on a splat if cilantro cream and placed on a piece of broken pottery.

A plantain fritter also with pork and cilantro creams but served on a rock.

A lovely lentil soup with cheese wafers and fried cheese bits, served in half a coconut shell.

This was my soup but I thought it was my main dish since I had ordered the fish. A super rich cream base with bits of sea creatures. I could identify tenticals and crab but that’s it because I’m not really a seafood person so o wasn’t sure what other guys were in this soup. There was a dollop nearly raw egg yolk which was curious. My soup came when maya got her main dish do I ate some then traded with her as she thought the seafood soup was outstanding.

These were the main dishes. Maya’s was chicken meatballs in a gravy with pasta and vegetables. There was a distinct flavor of cumin which was odd. It didn’t really work but it was prettty good. Mine was a piece of whitefish on a bed of pepitas and peas served with potato balls. I was so full by the time this case I could just eat a few bites.

But there’s always room for dessert when it’s chocolate, and this was really really good!

When we returned to the house the family was still working on making tortillas from the corn we had picked earlier. The kernels were ground and mixed with water, egg, salt, and sugar. The extended family gathers in a smallish hut to make the dough, pat it into thick tortillas, and cook them on a pan over a fire. They keep them stored a d eat them fir a month or more.

We ate some for breakfast and they reminded me of hardtack.

Helping the family get the kernels off.

It’s a lot of work. We also made sugar cane juice with the community owned hand powered machine.

The three hour bus to Cuenca was really nice and we are here for four days.

All the Way to Saraguro

The getting here was long.  I've now figured out that bus schedules are posted online, which I've never before seen anywhere in Latin America.  When we missed the 7:30 am bus for Cuenca by 15 minutes we had to wait around the bus station for the 9:30 bus.  It took 6.5 hours to get to Cuenca cruising through some of the most beautiful Andean Mountain scenery we've ever seen.  The bus makes a few short stops for the bathroom and lunch.  At bathroom stops, sometimes you can use the bus company office facilities, or you have to walk down the block to public restrooms. You always have to pay a small fee to use public bathrooms in Latin America.  They are staffed by an attendant who takes your money and gives you a wad of toilet paper.  We do always carry our own just in case because sometimes they don't give you any.  I'm holding a grudge against the ancient attendant in Alausi.  The cost of enterance was kind of blocked from view, so I gave her 1$ for both of us.  She just looked at me and put the coin in her pocket.  I asked her in Spansih for my change.  She said something I didn't understand.  I thought maybe she didn't have any change, but I could see a big box of change.  I asked her again for the change and she just said something, who knows what it was.  By now we really have to pee and we are worried the bus will leave without us, but I'm like, Lady, please give me my change! For reasons I still don't get, she would not give me my dang 70 cents.  Now I am wondering, do I start raising my voice? Do I reach my hand and get my own change? Do I even care about 70 fricken cents at this point?   We use the bathroom, and when we come out I ask her again for my change.  She smiles and that's all.  Should I fight this 85 year old woman whose job is to attend a public restroom? Forget about it.  I throw my hands up and I probably said something like  "For crying out loud lady!" And we walked away.  I'm getting mad thinking about it. 

Arriving in Cuenca, we ran around trying to find the bus company that was going to Saraguro.  In the US we just have one bus company and one ticket window.  Here, like most places in Latin America, there are many bus companies going every which way and you have to go from window to window looking for the company going to the place you need to go.  Lucky for us the next bus to Saraguro was in 15 minutes, with the next one being 3.5 hours later.  That journey was 3 hours long traveling mostly at 9,000 feet.  We arrived after dark, which I never like to do but we didn't have a choice.  We got a taxi to our hotel,  Achik Wasi,  which was situated on a hill above town.  Thee seemed to be only one hotel in town, but on others bookable online. We chose Achik Wasi because it is part of the larger community tourism project going on in Saraguro.  We were too tired to manage finding dinner, and there weren't any places to eat near the hotel.  It was freezing up there as well, probably 45 degrees, and with the wind howling at this altitude it was cold.  They did get us some hot tea which we drank and then promptly burrowed under many wool blankets and fell asleep.  In the morning I still didn't know how we would be getting to the house where we had arranged a home stay, but sure enough someone showed up and told us we'd get picked up at noon.

View from the hotel and a little breakfast. So cold you need a hat, and right after you take a shower and get dressed you need to put your coat back on.

We are now here in the home of George and Anita and their completely adorable 12 year old daughter.  The home is very cozy and clean, situated ab 10 minutes drive up then the hills above Saraguro in the Quisquinchir community.  

This one of several family homes that offer hmestays as part of the community tourism project, Saraurku.  They  made us a good lunch and then we went with her to milk the cow, which was a 10 minute walk up and down dirt roads.  She retrieved a calf from somewhere that she used to get the cow's milk flowing.  She shooed the calf away and got a full bucket of milk.  

Maya getting her farm animals fix.

We walked to a rickety shed in a field where she added some liquid to the milk that I think included lemon juice which acted to coagulate the casein protein (curds) in the milk. She wrapped up the bucket in a jacket and we went to feed both animals some cut up green bananas that she said made the milk sweet.  Back at the shed, she put her hands in the milk, mixed it slowly until curds appeared, and then gently squeezed and pressed the curds until they were in a large soft ball, separate from the liquid whey. 

She dumped the whey into a pan and fed it to the horse and the dog.  We headed back towards the house with the bucket full of cheese curds. 

On the way back we encountered the community preparing to practice for a big corn harvest festival that is to take place this weekend.  Everyone was dressed up in the traditional garb, and since they were in a parade I felt comfortable being a tourist and taking photos.  It was a pretty special sight. 

Night time brought another simple country meal and a gaze at the stars in the Southern Hemisphere.  You really haven't lived until you've experienced a different night sky than the one you see every day of your life at home.  It reminds me that I'm infantensimal and not really all that important.

Today we helped her harvest corn.  I noticed the corn field was planted in the Three Sisters tradition of Native North Americans, meaning corn, squash, and beans in the same field.  

We picked corn for about 2 hours and were utterly exhausted.  We've been napping after lunch ever since, even though she went back out to milk the cow.  

Tonight we are having dinner at Shamuico, which is an unlikely famous gastronomic delight in the middle of nowhere.  I suspect that will need its own post!