Baños

Baños was a gringo town, swarming with burnt-nosed Caucasians, nestled in a narrow valley, protected from Tunguruhua, an active volcano, looming over it, constantly coughing billows of thick ash, by a great slice of verdant mountain. The slice of verdant mountain had a long, thin waterfall. This cascaded down next to the thermal baths. The place was, then, unrubbish.

To see the volcano - and because we are bear-trackers, trained in walking - we scrabbled up the hillside, past some sleepy tapirs, to the pylons atop a huge pointy rock-wodge. Baños got tinier and tinier as we zig-zagged steeply up. But, long before we reached the ridge aimed for, we realised the clouds were going to foil us.

The clouds. They loved that volcano. They hugged it so tight. They would barely allow a glimpse. (They were still great, though. There were convex ones, dappled yellow, that suckled tight to the ridge tops like cake-icing, covering them completely.) Eventually, just enough air cleared for us to be able to discern which were volcano-coddling-clouds and which were spurts of mushrooming ash. It was enough: we had seen an active volcano.

A few days ago, as we lounged in the beach resort of Mancora, North Peru, Tunguruhua erupted again.

We saw just one person in the four or so hours it took to ascend. He was walking his dog; we gave him a wave, he waved back. Then we headed stutteringly downwards. The sun was sliding down the angle of the ridge, morphing from yellow to orange, and in the hazy valley swifts - little black and white ones - were dipping and weaving. Careening, really. One just missed my head, becoming the third bird to narrowly avoid a collison with me (the other two, for enthusiasts, were fighting hummingbirds on Tabla Chupa, Intag, Ecuador). Talking of hummingbirds, a few moments earlier, a little green fellow had lightninged into view above the ridge before zapping away. And, oh, also, there was an area of proper English woodland, complete with brown spines littering the floor and a piney smell, that we stumbled suddenly into and out of on the way down the mountain.




At dinner that night there was free pool while we waited for our meals. This is a theme in South America: free pool, free table football, and extreme Jenga and Connect 4 strewn around the bar. This probably doesn't seem like such a big deal, but to someone who has had to fork out a quid a game in Cardiff for the last few years, it's pretty special.

Next day: Canyoning. That is, abseiling down waterfalls. And blow me down did Andy and I look pretty darn super in our wet-suit get-up. Cor! It was lots of fun, but over too fast - and, without wishing to go all danger-junky, the waterfalls were quite small. Only afterwards did I realise the extent to which I had burned. Burned - and been savaged by mosquitos. For the next few days I wore an angry red skin-vest complemented by crusty orange welts speckling the ankles. I slept little. Now? Bite-free and golden brown, thank you internet; I sleep sandily but soundly.


Before we headed for Cuenca, our last stop in Ecuador before we hit the Peruvian coast, we felt we had to try the hostel's steam bath. After signing up for the 7.30am slot, we went for a pleasant visit to the sweltering thermal baths. An Ecuadorian Mackenzie Crook lookalike, clearly high on some drug, gurned at us from across the brown musty waters. Elsewhere, a viciously beautiful woman fondled her stoic boyfriend's immaculate face on the perch at the side of the pool. Other canoodling couples were not so pretty. Dipping one's head into the opaque pool was the best tactic when a giggling, droopy twosome embarked on yet another series of amorous ticklings.

We left, ate, went to bed, and scratched ankle through the night.

The steam bath. This little Ecuadorian chap placed us in wooden cuboids in which only our heads protruded. Think the robot designs of a three-year-old, or really rubbish-looking torture equipment. Then he left us and I got scared. A little lever inside the contraption altered the speed at which steam shot out from near your feet; but I was more concerned with just how the hell I was supposed to itch my face when my arms were trapped in a box. Blowing didn´t work - and there was the danger of saliva leakage, which would cause further itches. Meanwhile, my hair turned into gluey tendrils which stuck themselves into my retinas.

Luckily the Ecuadorian chap came back and released us, taught us the towelling down with cold water technique.

That was nice, I thought.

Then he put us back in the box.

This went on for a while: put in box; get itchy face; twitch face about in frustration at not being able to scratch; Ecuadorian man comes back; taken out of box; cold water towel down method.

But then subtle variations were brought in. One time, Andy got out of his box and with no warning at all the guy slung a big tub full of cold water over him. I was ready for that. But I wasn´t ready for the part where - after another five minutes itchiness in box - we were taken to separate rooms and instructed to sit down in a porcelain, curved inlet full of cold water up to the chest.

The Ecuadorian guy began to rub vigorous circles into my stomach.

"Wow," I thought. "I wouldn't have believed it was possible to win at life this much before breakfast. But here I am getting a stomach massage from a tiny Ecuadorian chap after being forced to sit in a robot box. Happy, as they say, days."

I was enjoying my stomach being rubbed so much that I wasn't really listening to what the guy was saying; didn't realise he was just demonstrating how I should do it until he was practically shouting at me. Eventually he saw that I finally understood and left. So I tended to my stomach alone for a while. Pleasant.

At the end we got a proper hose down during which we were instructed to assume lots of strange positions like some very wonky signalmen. For breakfast there were pancakes.

Despues Los Osos (Part 2)

So we went down to Quilotoa crater lake and gawped and whispered and bathed deep in nature's magnificence; and then we climbed back up.

Later, we slept - very cold at 4000m, with sputtering stove.

There were no buses back towards the big road which takes one down through the mountains to the big towns. (There were not even any buses to the smaller roads, the give-you-jaw-ache roads, which take one, doubtlessly, to more little villages like Quilotoa, where there are many children who shout and dogs who bark and people who smile; to put it concisely, there were no buses at all.)

So we began to walk back towards Zumbuhua, the nearest village, 13km away. Pack-laden, it was going to be a hard trek, but the distant, ice-speckled ridge to our left was more than enough to keep spirits up for the thirty or so seconds it took for a truck driving past to offer us a lift ($2 each).

When we were bear-tracking, we would get a lift most mornings on the milk-truck, bumbling along on the rounds, waving at all sentient beings we passed, stood-up and holding tight to the central rail as more and more people jumped aboard amid the clanging canisters. We must have caught almost a hundred lifts on the back of trucks by now - and it remains fun every single time. There is no better way to see the country than speeding along, clinging to a wobbly post, hoping your arm doesn´t pop out of your shoulder socket.

The lift on the truck to Zumbuhua was a particularly special lift. Great green sudden thrusts of mountain pyramided up into the air all around. One peak - my favourite - looked exactly like a witch´s hat, kinked kookily at top and doughily crumpled at base. There were no clouds save thin, spiky ones hacking at hazy ridges in the far distance. It was perfectly clear above: pure deep blue with a white void of sun. And the road was smooth, well-maintained. A couple of locals hopped aboard and I attempted to keep my eyes open against the whipping, frigid wind. It was the best truck ride so far - though also the most expensive (Don Jose would charge us 25 cents for the lechero in Intag).

Zumbuhua Saturday market, just starting to get into full swing as we arrived, was a great deal more colourful than teeming Otavalo´s. Pink, red, and rainbow ponchos were particularly stinging on the eye - in contrast to the navy blue and white, plaited-pony-tailed and be-trilbied men and women of Otavalo market.

(A note on the trilby in Ecuador: a near-requisite for men over 40 and women over 25, before it appears most males gel their hair to a thick, oily slick - or wear a baseball cap. They are brown or green or sometimes dull black, and the most beautiful of females seem to spurn them. I want one, for mine - deep, dark blue - is on a bedroom shelf in England.)

The market took place on the main square, at the centre of which was a large rock, pasted with the plaza´s title. A badly-tuned radio blared out fuzzy Andean tunes across the whole village, but nobody seemed to mind. We wandered through the food-court section where perhaps twenty, perhaps fifty corrugated dogs scavenged beneath battered tables and benches. Trundling vendedors wound past - one selling light bulbs, the next plastic cups of red jelly festooned with a swirl of pink froth. Climbing the central rock, we watched a woman fry a truly enormous empanada while closer, leaning against our boulder, a group of identically-clad old men passed around shots of stinking purro. From the top of a nearby bus a sheep bleated over the hissing radio.

After savouring the sights, sounds and mostly smells of the market, we retired to a small park to sit and read - waiting for a bus back to the Panamericana. On the bench opposite, some small girls giggled as I tried to take a photo of them. Eventually, I managed to get a good shot of the tiniest one, later slung up and tied to the back of the tallest girl, wrapped into an oblong bundle using a yellow and black sheet.

While we sat and read, the girls slinked through some railings and played a game that involved bashing each other with sticks until someone fell over. When someone fell over - I suspect intentionally - they would be set upon by the three others and sat on and smashed some more with sticks; also, smothered in grass and leaves. It looked a good game. Back up at Quilotoa the day before, walking back from the lake, we had encountered a group of boys and a group of girls slinging huge clumps of mud at each other. As we passed, I watched a tiny chap, skittering away from the girls after a unstrategic assault, squeal with delight as a huge wodge of dirt disintegrated against his back.

And then we took a bus to Latacunga, another to Ambato, another to Banos (with he who sold the green-boxed Colon Cleanser).

In Banos, there were more great things. However, there were no DVDs as great as this one, found on the table of our hostel in Quilotoa.

On the day after we left bear-tracking we were in Quito and as we wandered back to our hostel I noticed a small boy, four or five years old,

staring down at the trail he had just urinated right out into the centre of the road. He looked simultaneously utterly shocked and quite pleased with himself. Nearby, the security guard of a shoe-shop idly traipsed his fingers down the silver barrel of his pump-action shotgun, and looked on impassively.

Top 5 Weapons The Police Carry In Ecuador

5. Nine-millimetre Handgun
4. Pump-action shotgun
3. M16-esque machine gun type thing
2. Really massive sword
1. Rapier

Despues los osos (Part One)

And so we left the casa de oso amid much hugs and the stench of burning swords - and we went to Otavalo.

Andy bought a poncho. It is big and blue and very nice indeed. I refrained, despite the great temptation of many lovely grey ones, and the come-hither smiles of gilt-toothed Otavelenos.

The next day we boarded bus and trundled down the sierra to Latacunga; the starting point for our trip to the crater lake of Quilotoa.

A DIGRESSION ON VOLLEYBALL

Everybody plays volleyball in Ecuador; and every settlement - from the tiniest church-and-two-huts hamlet to the sprawling megopolis of Quito - has at least one court. Quito, in fact, probably has thousands. Often people play for money. Sometimes as much as $50. Big bucks anywere - ridiculous here. The quality on show is usually good, but not excellent. Ecuadorians, on the whole, are really not tall enough for volleyball. Andy, at 6 foot 3¨, is at least a head taller than almost everybody.

In Latacunga, however, we came across a match, on one of many courts behind the huge fading market, around which were clustered hundreds of people, toes tight to the blue rope that marked the court´s edge. They play three people on each team here: a guy who sets the ball, a smasher/tipper and an all-rounder. In Latacunga, each side had an alpha male, who would spit insults in the vague direction of his teammates when a point was lost. At one point, red-t-shirt guy - the alpha of the younger, late-teenage team - squared up to the referee, pressing his nose into his face in that peculiar, slightly homoerotic way some guys do when they want to look like they want a fight - but do not actually want a fight. It was tense. There was a long break in play when an older gentleman in the audience started lecturing red-t-shirt guy. Would the lanky youth punch him in his wrinkled face? It turned out no. But man was the testosterone winging about. I felt that we were one bad refereeing decision away from a proper ruck.

And you would not believe how good they were. This one kid, he can´t have been any taller than 5 foot 9¨, would leap about twice his height to bash the ball right in the very corner, or prod it just a millimetre over the net. There were sneaky shots and cheeky shots and show-off shots and flukey shots, but mostly it was just really, really fast and agressive and impressive. In the end, the salmon-like kid walked off, fed up, I think, at the violence spilling about everywhere. But while it lasted it was sublime.

END OF DIGRESSION ON VOLLEYBALL

The bus out to the little village of Quilotoa from Latacunga was clad entirely in red felt, the televison - also red - holstered in a cube of red plastic. Two dirty white frills ran the length of the vehicle, hanging down over the top of the windows. It felt like an oversized hippy-wagon.

There were a few other gringos, huddled together on the back row - Quilotoa lake is one of the country´s biggest tourist-draws. Indigenous locals filled up the rest of the bus; they all fell asleep, green and brown trilbys lolling drunkenly, within a few minutes. I have yet to master this impressive Ecuadorian art.

As ever, an array of goods were on offer.

A DIGRESSION ON THE SALE OF GOODS ON BUSES

At bus stops (and when the bus slows down, and when it doesn´t really slow down but perhaps changes gear), men and women hop on and shimmy down the aisle hawking their wares. So far in Ecuador, solely when bussing, we have been offered the following products: needles and thread; fritados; sweets; newspapers; music CDs; digital watches; regular watches; apples; bananas; DVDs of Hollywood movies; strange and unknowable meats; strange and unknowable fruits; around 10 different variations of ice-creams and lollipops and ice-cream/lollipop amalgamations - and pornography.

Occasionally a seller will begin their bus-rush with a mournful monologue; I only understand about one word in every four or five, but the tone of voice tells the story - and it´s never a happy one. These sellers tend to do a little better than their more vociferous compatriots. But most don´t sell a thing. The average seller spends perhaps thirty seconds on board before they hop off.

The best product-pitch so far was a couple of days ago on the bus from Ambato to Banos, where we have spent the weekend and today (Forgive the chronologal rupture, internet.) The man looked Eastern-European, but his Spanish was fluent - undoubtedly his first language. Every one of his features was slightly wrong. His nose hooked cruelly to a narrow point, encroaching on his top lip; greasy tendrils of hair escaped sporadically from where they had been slathered into the centre of his head, drawn away from thinning temples; his eyes were wild, impassioned, flitting from passenger to passenger as he lurched back and forth down the aisle, barely keeping his feet with the jolts of the road; his facial hair, clustered around top-lip and chin, looked like tiny sprinklings of iron-filings.

He pitched for over half an hour, handing out little green boxes to every passenger - except Andy and I. It took me about five-minutes of neck-craning to read the white capital-letters on the box. "Colon-cleanser," they pronounced. No wonder he felt he had to put on such a performance.

To no avail, though. After an age of pleading and plugging, the little green boxes were collected back up into his suitcase. I didn´t see him take any money at all, but I like to think someone surreptitiously slipped him a couple of dollars, burying their little green box deep into a seatside bag.

END OF DIGRESSION ON THE SALE OF GOODS ON BUSES

At Quilotoa, we dumped our bags at a hostel and wandered off to the lake. The lake in a crater. A volcanic crater (inactive, unlike the volcano near us here in Banos; don´t worry, internet, the lava runs down the other side).

I have overused the word beautiful to a silly degree in these blogs. And anyway, the word doesn´t do justice to the sight of a crater full of bright emerald water surrounded by jutting, craggy mountains, soaring up into the clear blue sky. It just doesn´t.

"That´s one of the most beautiful things I´ve ever seen," said Andy - and it didn´t seem a hackneyed or embarrasing thing to say at all. Because it was - for me, too.

And now I´ve been hogging the computer for too long and have written barely a quarter of what I would like. But I must go.

Today we abseiled down waterfalls. It was good.

On Tracking Bears

We´re out of the cloudforest, the bear-tracking is over.

There´s far, far too much that I´d like to write about - and there is no time. There is never any time. So i must restrict myself to highlights. Highlights and perhaps a few pictures.

But first: practicalities. How does one track bears? What does it mean to be a bear-tracker? Does an ability to track bears make one greater than the average human? (Probably.) Did I get the chance, at some point, to set my machete on fire and, thus, wield a flaming machete (Oh, yes.)

So. We tracked the bears - four of them ostensibly, but really just two females; the males being too far away at the time - using radio equipment. The bears are fitted with radio collars after being trapped using a cage and a tempting cow leg; the collars transmit a frequency that the bear-tracker tunes his radio to; the bear-tracker then notes the location of the bear using a sighting compass, after finding the direction that the beepbeepbeep of the bear´s collar is coming from; the bear-tracker repeats this process from at least two other stations (points in the cloudforest from which a GPS reading has been previously taken). Then, using the three points of data, the position of the bear is triangulated to a decent degree of accuracy. And then, this point of triangulation is plotted on a satellite map of the Intag cloudforest area. Finally, once lots of these points have been plotted, a polygon - the bear´s home range - is established. This information can then be presented to Ecuador´s Ministry of the Environment, who will, doubtlessly, then ensure that the cloudforest in this area is not deforested. The bears are saved! Hurrah!

That´s the general idea, anyway. Very roughly.

In order to track the bears, mostly we went on walks; beautiful walks along the roads, and down into the jungle, and up the hills, and along the rivers. On the walks we saw many wonderful things and smelled many wonderful plants and ate bear food and used our machetes to smash paths joyously through what Mother Nature had begat.

Smells: There were leaves that reeked of citrus. There was a lumpen fruit - I think it was a fruit - that when sliced open gave off a distinct odour of disinfectant. There was a wooly-surfaced, small, purple-green plant that filled the air with the sweet stench of bubble-bath. When the forest did not smell of these and other things it smelt of wetness, or decaying matter.

Sights: We trekked up to 20km a day through swollen air and sweating forests - luminous green and emerald green and oil-green and other greens - dipping into gloomy inlets where creamy waterfalls fell to glide tinkeringly over our boots. We rolled sometimes down the steeper banks, if they were covered in vegetation softish on the flesh. I lost a pot of jam on our camping trip in doing so; it was worth it. We became used to spectacular views all day, every day - would occasionally stop, panting from the effort of climbing a near vertical slope, and look around amazed, having forgotten in fatigue the majesty of our surroundings.

In the side of the mountain near Apuela, our nearest town, the features of a man looked out - eyes, nose, moustache. The locals told it was an Inca warrior watching over them, but we at the bear house felt it resembled more closely Friedrich Nietsche.

Tastes: The bear food, bromeliads, tasted of water and plant and mush. There was a fruit called grenadias which you cracked open the smooth yellow shell of to feast on the frogspawny insides. Very special. Tree tomatoes: not so much. Incredibly sour lemons, plucked from the trees, were fun to suck on. At the lodge we ate mainly rice and beans and lentils. For breakfast sometimes there were empanadas and they were wonderful. Cody and Mara, our fellow bear trackers, occasionally made cookies and the days in which they did were happy days.

Those were the tastes of bear tracking.

But there were hummingbirds. Ecuador has something ridiculous like 150 species of hummingbird. I must have seen at least five - species, that is. I also saw, very briefly, a toucan - and innumerable different types of parrot. The parrot is like a particularly boring sparrow to me. I see a parrot and I think, "Another parrot? In the wild? In a flock? Flying in a pretty symmetrical pattern? Rubbish. I´m going to go and watch The Thin Red Line on the laptop".

(Never watch The Thin Red Line. It is terrible, beyond awful. Put up even with multi-coloured parrots to avoid it.)

The best bird I saw - better even than the black and yellow chap who hung out at the thermal baths, or the menacing turkey vultures, or the swift-like swoopy things - was the cock-of-the-rock. Apparently, it is one of the rarest birds in the world. Go and search google images for the cock-of-the-rock. Go on. Do it.

Look at it! It´s all red and pretty and it has a fantastic eighties hairstyle in a swoop back from its brow. Look! Cor ... it´s great.

Anyway, we had to get up at four in the morning and head down to the river in order to see the cock-of-the-rock. The air was a muggy obsidian and we utilised Andy´s wind-up torch for the first hour. Then the sun came up, though it was hidden behind wispy, carpeting clouds, and engulfed the world in a bluish pallor. It was a very different kind of beautiful, and lasted only a handful of minutes before the bilious brown of the river and green of everything else emerged.

We saw the cock-of-the-rock at around ten am, having searched fruitlessly up the river for the preceding few hours. It was a vague red blob in a tree. But Christine - the wife of John, the ex-president of the International Bear Association and catcher of over 1600 bears, by the way - had binoculars. And I saw the red swoop hairstlye in profile, and watched it sit there for around twenty minutes observing stoically the raucous rounds of a flock of parrots. And then we went home smiling all the way like people in a crap novel which has a happy ending.

So, that was a highlight. There were many more.

But that is all I have time or energy for - for now. Hopefully I will find some seconds and some minutes soon in which to talk of other things we did when volunteering as bear-trackers, as well as record our latest exploits as we move down the Ecuadorian sierra towards the sun and sand of the Peruvian coast.

Here is me with a flaming machete. We achievied it through the enforced contiguity of blade, paint-thinner and cigarette lighter. A lifelong dream fulfilled. Marvellous.