I’ve been racking my brain for the past 2 weeks for something to say about my trip to Ecuador, some story, some lesson, something, anything other then just a list of things done, each one of them ending with “and it was amazing…”

Unfortunately, I’ve come up with no such thing. So rather then wait another week, I’m gonna wing it, with the hope that something will come through.

Before leaving a few folks found out I was going. Not that it was any sort of secret or anything, but unfortunately in my latest line of work – living amongst the poorest people I’ve ever shared a meal with and supposedly trying to help them meet a few more of their needs – doing something like taking a vacation to the other side of the continent comes with a nice hardy side of good old-fashioned guilt. An adventure under wraps doesn’t help justify how far the cost of a plan ticket could go, but it does seem to do something for that feeling bad feeling. Mainly deny it. This is a big topic – for another date – so for now we’ll just have to say that that’s yet another part of what goes into planning a vacation down here.

So other then a few overly-traveled folks, most of you all had the same reactions to the subject of Ecuador, including: “Where? Why? What’s there? I know nothing about it, but I want to hear all about it when you get back.” And for the overly-read (or just avid Discovery Channel watcher), “Are you going to the Galapagos?” All of these fit nicely with a simple conclusion I’ve been coming to a lot lately: we (me included) know remarkably little about the world we live in. I spend a good bit of time in my day job talking about where other countries are located (especially now that the World Cup has begun). Thankfully, I like geography. It gets a little frustrating here when folks don’t know where Chile is, but then again, without a National Geographic subscription for the past 15 years, I might not have know where Ecuador was either (even though the name kinda gives it a way). Every time we look at a map of South America in my community, the comment eventually gets made by someone about how small Paraguay is. Today’s map-peering was no exception. “Smallest in South America apart from Uruguay.” Ahem… Actually, Suriname, Guiana, French Guiana (the three usually considered collectively simply as “the Guineas” right before their complete dismissal from the continent and more often then not, from existence all together) are all smaller. As is Ecuador. Sorry Paraguay, you’re the sixth smallest – also known as the eighth biggest.

But back to Ecuador. I could go on and on in a geography lesson about this Colorado-sized country, but you’ve all got wikipedia just a click away so I won’t bore you. I can ramble on about what I saw driving through it though. Lush valleys that looked like something out of Jurassic Park, switch-backing mountain roads, the steepest farming I’ve ever seen, snow-capped peaks, alpine lakes, green canyons, colonial cities, waterfalls, cloudforests, moonscapes, erupting volcanoes, jungle river basins and the sprawling South American metropolis’ that seem to be on the rise just about everywhere. Everything you read about this place will somewhere in the first few lines tell you “it’s one of the most diverse places on the planet”. Turns out that’s more then just clever marketing.

The diversity helps, as does a bit of good timing on my part, but it’s also just an incredibly interesting place. For example, we spent one morning out looking at some waterfalls outside Banos (sorry, I can’t get the ~ over the n). There were like 10 of them within a few minutes of each other and aside from that the entire country seemed to be literary spewing water from wherever it could. One of the falls was actually 2 falls that toppled a few hundred feet into the river valley below. But the amazing part wasn’t these two side by side falls. It was the story behind them. A few months earlier, there actually wasn’t a second fall. The twin cascade didn’t come about until a massive landslide miles upstream collapsed an entire side of the mountain lake that sources the river that makes the fall(s), letting most of the lake empty in one fell swoop and rush down the mountain like something out of an apocalyptic movie. As the wall of water launched into the valley it cut the upper riverbed what appeared to be pushing at least a good 40 feet deeper and collapsed an entirely new side of the drop-off creating the second fall. The cable car station perched on the newly created island on the cliff’s edge was safe refuge for tourists witnessing the torrents channel around them, but a snackbar at the base of the falls was crushed and washed away.

The creation of a waterfall. That’s amazing stuff. Shortly after hearing that account and a few miles down the road, we came to the border with the neighboring state to find that all traffic trying to enter our side was being held at the border because of the volcanic eruption. Damn volcano erupting above town spoiled our chances at playing with monkeys in the Amazon. The pictures (somewhere off to your left) don’t begin to do that night’s eruption justice, but neither will any description I could hope to give. Last year I was lucky enough to be able to visit Hawaii after leaving my job and while there I was lucky enough to get really, really close to some lava. At the end of that night I was fairly certain that was something I wouldn’t get to see again for a very long time, if ever. Less then a year later Mother Nature gave me an encore performance and proved my assumption wrong, in the process proving right my point about just how little we know about this ball we live on.

After a week and a half on the ground, zip-lining through the cloudforest, horseback riding at full gallop along the edge of a thousand foot deep canyon, several lungfuls of volcanic ash, riding ATV’s through the Andes, haggling over the price of alpaca goods in the continent’s largest artisanal market, several hundred photos and a three dollar haircut later, what remains from this place – so incredibly different from anywhere I’ve been – is something incredibly familiar. After a few years of looking back, I’ll remember all these amazing things when I look at the photos and recall the stories and memories, but the thing that will make me get back in a plane and go to Ecuador won’t be the mountains or lava or horseback riding, or hiking or the beach I didn’t see – it’ll be the people. In a week and half of non-stop activity and countless interaction, I earned one dirty look. Of the countless sets of directions I asked I never once got the vibe of “I have no interest in helping you.” The beer lived up to South American standards by still being terrible, but more often then not it was still served with a smile.

It’s a belief of mine I won’t be giving up anytime soon, so hopefully you won’t bore of hearing it: as amazing as any place can be, it’s got nothing without the people who call it home. These folks opened that home up to us – and I think that made all the difference. Being an American who finds himself in the right place at the right time to watch two different volcanoes erupt in one year could be counted as lucky; being one who finds such openness in his travels again anytime soon will need a whole other word.

Enjoy the pics.

Paz,

kb