I was having a morning. I couldn’t seem to get a coherent plan in my head as to what I should bring on the tech trip, so I threw everything laying in plain sight into a series of plastic bags and threw it all on the porch. My ride, Roberto in a white jeep Cherokee, was ˝ hour late. After picking up the 3 other gringos on via Puerto Limon, we headed to Quito. Roberto drove like a maniac and sung along to his poorly mixed tape of 80’s pop, causing the jeep to fishtail at one point because the car was overdriving his brain.
Quito is alright by me. I found M+M’s at the first carryout I walked into. The climate is nice and cool and everything is green. When we stopped for gas, we spotted an area of American fast food restaurants. We exploded out of the 2 vehicles and ran up the street under the pretext of “just taking a look”. We all came back with food.
To call the mountainous green expanses east of Quito “beautiful” would be inadequate and fairly trite. I’m not going to call them anything, then. I’ll just say it looks like a cross between central Idaho and The Land Before Time. We ate trout at 4000 meters altitude and then splashed around in thermal hot springs that cost us a buck to get into. A few of us decided to give ourselves pneumonia by jumping back and forth between the ice cold air temperature pool and the hot springs. The air was cold and wet and the clouds draped lethargically on every mountain surrounding us. What, you might ask, happens to the human body when boiled like a lobster at 4000 meters altitude and then released back into wet frigid air? You fall over dead, of course. Your heart pounds inside your chest and a ring of little translucent parakeets circle your head. You struggle to appear casual while desperately trying to catch your breath, but alas, you die, unless, like me, you are already dead.
We arrived after dark at our “hotel” somewhere near or in Chaco, Napo. All were pleasantly surprised, not only by the quality of our hotel, but also that there was not enough room for Roberto and the brass and they had to search elsewhere in town for lodging. I’ve been putting “hotel” in quotations because it was actually more like a small motel. However, motels in Ecuador and probably all of Latin America are places you take prostitutes and rent by the hour.
After the brass left, we all piled into one room and emptied the contents of 2 Castillo Blanco bottles. Lee and Sarah then went out in search of beer while the rest of us stayed behind. While we awaited their return, Pete and I tried to arc streams of urine off the balcony with enough pressure so as to land them on the roof of the next building over. Lee and Sara met locals and got distracted from their task, so the rest of us got tired waiting for them to came back and went to bed.
