Clouds

I have escaped from the cloudforest for just a few hours to Otavalo, famous for its artesanias market all over the continent. There is a surfeit of ponchos here. A veritable surfeit. But I haven´t got time to gabble about the really very groovy intricately carved wooden bottles and tiny chess sets and swarms of hippy trousers. I have to catch a bus back to the middle of nowhere very soon so that, barring landslides, I make it back for the party at the thermal baths tonight. I´ve never been to a party at a thermal baths before and it sounds very indulgent. It makes me think of Romans and spies and the word lozenge. Lozenge. Another reason I must be rather speedy is that the guy in the cabin next to me has been searching on google for "machine guns" for the last half an hour. He is now on a Swedish militia site. I worry, internet, what his next step will be.

So I want, in the brief time I have, to talk about clouds.

There are many types of clouds in the cloudforest and they are all truly excellent clouds. A friend of mine once said that if clouds existed in only one place people would come from all over the world, and pay hundreds of pounds, to see them. He´s right. Clouds are great. Really top. And the clouds in the cloudforest are some of the best clouds there are.

Sometimes the clouds seem coughed out by the forest itself, forming from nowhere into tiny pockets, clinging to the serried trees where the mountains dip away; sometimes the clouds cluster suddenly and chase you up and down the trails, impossibly fast, and thickly threatening; sometimes the clouds splatter themselves into a meandering path of pearly globules on the strip of struggling milky blue at the horizon; sometimes the clouds choke the sky in layers of thick grey carpet, closing in, slowly darkening and darkening through the afternoon until they burst and fill the world with rain for hours and hours and hours; sometimes, when you´re very high up, machete-hacking your way through a verdant plateau, the forest disappears in the swarming miasma and it´s possible to believe you are standing on some magical floating island, glinting every hue of green above an endless, vaporous void. Occasionally - and only ever in the mornings - some determined blue fights its way through the grey and white; and
even more occasionally, the sun, usually a jaundiced yellow, barely visible, sweating behind viscous layers, burns itself a searing hole and threatens our skin and our eyes.

But it doesn´t matter so much. The sun will come later. At the coast. In Peru. For now, the clouds - not to mention the jungle, sweltering in the swollen air; the local children, perma-smiled, tiny, and ubiquitous; and the locals, forever offering lifts, greetings and scarily strong purro - are enough to ensure I am a very happy bear-tracker indeed.