Most people are fairly torn up this morning as there was an abundance of
alcohol smuggled into the convent last night as the masses marked the end of
interesting conversations in English. Today we all go cold turkey for a week as
our collective gringodom is shattered like a clay bedpan, whose forsaken shards
are melting into the distant green expanses of Ecuador.
A van took our
suitcases from the convent to a bus waiting down the hill and off the property.
We people arrived at the bus on foot. The bus went to the main terminal in
Santo Domingo, and from there, some of us headed east to Quito and some of us,
I included, headed south towards Guayaquil.
When the mountains disappeared, the
mercury slid up the thermometer and the conversations ground to a halt.
Guayaquil is definitely a modern place. It is also surprisingly diverse. At the
bus station in Guayaquil, Guido (my counterpart) escorted me around like he was my personal
security. We then bussed out to the peninsula where I will be living for 2
years. The green outside my bus window began to dwindle away and soon organ
pipe cacti began to dot the landscape. It looked just like Southern Arizona.
Then even the meager green that was left began to fall away and left nothing
but short scrub brush and dust. That is the setting of my new home for the next
2 years. Dust, sun and heat.
The peninsula of southern Ecuador is the very
northernmost tip of the arid coast that extends all the way thru Peru and half
of Chile. The town of El Tambo looks like a Mexican town in the Sonoran desert.
Every house is a small, one-story morter block structure with unsightly
corrugated steel roofing. Except for the “principle highway” that passes
through town, all the roads here are hard packed beige silt. Guido and I walked
my suitcase to the house where I would be staying, the house of one Julio
Liriano, and then he made his exit.
Inside, Julio showed me to my room and
pointed at the bed saying, “I am poor, I don’t have much”, by way of an
apology. I told him the room was perfect. He asked me if I wanted to use a cool
shower after so much hot travelling. The shower is located next door in what
used to be his brothers house. His brother fell thru the roof of the school
last year and died, leaving 2 small kids and a wife…. and a shower, which
wasn’t exactly cool because the water line lays inside a sun scorched earth.
The water was actually hot. My last hot shower was almost 7 weeks ago and of
course I finally get another one now that I’m in a desert trying to cool off. I
shook dry like a dog next to a dead scorpion and then stepped back into the
full blazing sun.
A soccer game had broken out in the street and the players
were fairly obscured by the dust cloud their tramping about was producing. I
was motioned by one of the guys to join the game, and almost did, before I
remembered I had just stepped out of the shower and should probably forego the
dust cloud if I was to meet the town president later, as Guido had me pencilled
in to do. I sat on the porch and blinked repeatedly at the dust. These soccer
players meant business. They were far better than the guys in San Miguel.
Later, Julio showed me his workshop. El Tambo is a town of skilled woodworkers
that nearly blew off the face of the earth when environmentalists put a much
needed stop to the rampant deforestation that, among other things, was
supplying El Tambo with wood. Julio showed me a few things he was working on.
They were very well made. He told me a table and chair set with a couch would
sell for 200 dollars, but since the economy’s near total collapse a few years
back (due to rampant embezzling of money loaned to Ecuador thru international
lending institutions that led to the dolarization of the currency) the demand
for 200 dollar chair sets had cooled off considerably. Then we walked to a
nearby tienda to buy a few things for dinner. Along the way, I pretended not to
know what the big vulture on the streetlight was so Julio’s explanation would
take the place of total silence.
After dinner, Julio, Guido and I met with the
President of El Tambo. There’s not a lot to report about that encounter except
that I was seeing double from exhaustion and was completely incapable of
understanding Spanish. We more or less just debriefed el Presidente. Then I
went home to bed. I asked Julio if El Tambo had scorpions. He laughed, why yes,
just that morning he had gotten nailed by one hiding in his shoe. He said the
pain had left and there was no swelling, thus, no harm no foul.
