JJ's Travelogue

Four hours south of Quito lies the pretty mountain town of Baños. The town itself isn’t much to write home about, it’s fairly utilitarian, but it’s setting is stupendous. Nestled in a valley surrounded by mountain peaks with rivers running through that have eroded dramatic canyons, and to top it off an active volcano looming over everything. The town reminds me a bit of San Pedro, the town I lived in in Guatemala for six weeks whence I began this trip – touristy, but for good reason, and a real town underneath once you scratch the surface. Come to think of it, once you leave Quito, rural Ecuador looks a lot like Central America – beautiful scenery but fairly rough conditions for the people. Men spitting and pissing in the street and lots of unfinished concrete.

I can’t get over how many gringos there are here, including high school and college groups from the States. An amazing amount of hotels and restaurants for such a small town have sprung up to serve all these tourists – some nice, others terribly overpriced. It’s the kind of small town where kids run around playing unsupervised and shopkeepers take IOU’s if you don’t have small bills. It’s also safe – how nice not to have to constantly watch your back when walking around at night the way you have to in the big cities. Interestingly for such a small town, the shops and restaurants are all open quite late. And this doesn’t seem to be for the tourists – I saw the local people eating quite late. Perhaps when the economy is based on tourism they don’t need to get up as early as they do for agriculture, and their whole daily schedule shifts later.

Baños is an odd name for a town, since that’s the word used for “bathroom” in Spanish. The full name of the town is Baños de Agua Santa (“Baths of the Holy Waters”), which makes a bit more sense – the name refers to the natural hot springs that run off of neighboring Tungurahua volcano (5,023 m / 16,480 ft). Tungurahua (“throat of fire” in Quichua) is quite active – in 1999, all 20,000 residents were evacuated for months when the volcano started erupting. Imagine being given only a few hours to leave your house for who knows how long. The locals I talked to were pretty bitter about this (sleeping in shelters far away from home, crops and livestock lost, tourism plummeted) particularly since (according to them) nothing much happened. Ironically, or perhaps having learned their lesson, the next administration apparently did nothing when it actually did rain fire in 2006.

From the guidebook: “Since 1999, Tungurahua has been officially closed to climbers. There is nobody to stop you from entering the area, but the dangers of being hit by flying volcanic bombs are very real.” Naturally, I rented a motorcycle and headed straight for it. The bike had no lights, gauges, dials, or horn, but eventually we bonded after some harrowing sections of “road” covered in thick volcanic mud. A bit scary since I couldn’t tell how deep it was, but the rest of the journey was  fun in a rough dirt-bike kind of way. I made it as far as the road went, and after that it would have been a 2-3 hour hike to the summit. I chose not to do this, mostly because I was paying $10/hr for the bike.

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I’m trying out a new plugin for the blog called Snap Shots – now when you hover your pointer over a link, it will pop up a window showing you a preview of that page. I find it useful for Wikipedia articles when you don’t want to be bothered with opening a whole other page and then finding your place again in the original page, but just want a little shot of more info. I noticed that none of you have been clicking on the links, so I thought this might be more enticing. On the other hand, it might just be annoying. I’ll get rid of it if enough of you tell me, but you can also disable it yourself by clicking the little gear icon in the upper-right corner of the pop-up and selecting the options from the menu. Sorry, but I don’t know how to get rid of the ads at the bottom. I wish I could.

The search function built into WordPress is terrible, so I’ve changed it out for a Google Custom Search. You should get much better results now.

I realized many of you may not know that you can subscribe to the blog, rather than manually checking for new postings. You can subscribe to the blog RSS feed using your browser or favorite news reader. Or, enter your email address here to automagically receive an email every time I push out a new blog post. No more than one email per day, and you can cancel anytime. Gawd, I sound like an infomercial.

You can also subscribe to my Twitter RSS feed or subscribe via email with this form. Don’t worry, you’ll only receive a maximum of one email per day, even if I tweet more than that.

In other site news, I thought perhaps one stumbling block in getting the blog visible to more people was the clunky address. Therefore I recently registered jjtravels.net and jjtravels.info – easier to remember than thetechtable.net, and they will both take you to the same place. [I wanted jj.me, wouldn't that be a cool domain name? Incredibly it's available, but since .me is owned by Montenegro, it would have been very difficult and expensive to register.]

Finally, just to note that the next couple of posts are going to appear in reverse chronological order – i.e., below this one in the timeline. This is to maintain the convention of dating posts when the events actually happened, rather than when I get around to writing about them.

With apologies to Ecuadorians who might be offended by the provocative title of this post…

“Gee, Josh, are you sure we’re in Ecuador? I mean, all the menus are in English.. so are most of the signs. And I try to speak Spanish to shopkeepers, but they immediately switch to English. Plus, most of the people on the street are gringos. I don’t know, it looks an awful lot like Boulder, Colorado..” [Yes, I often talk to myself like this!]

It was a bit of a culture shock coming into Quito, particularly after having been away from touristy places for so long. Of course I welcome the bagels, pancakes, and other comfort foods from home that I haven’t had in so long.. but it’s also more expensive (my breakfast this morning was more expensive than it would be in New York! Somebody is getting very rich off all the tourists, since I know food doesn’t cost nearly this much around here), and you know I usually prefer to stay away from fellow gringos. I’ve been reminded why American travelers have a negative connotation abroad – the loudest and most obnoxious people in a restaurant are invariably American. And they always assume locals will understand English, they don’t even attempt to speak Spanish. So many of us Americans are not like this, but those few bad apples leave a bad impression for the rest of us.

Fortunately most of the above is less true when one leaves the “gringolandia” neighborhood of La Mariscal where all the backpacker hotels, internet shops, travel agencies, foreign-geared restaurants, bars and clubs are located. Quito has an historic colonial downtown that’s been revitalized in recent years. I wouldn’t call it a destination the way Cartagena is, it’s more like the La Candelaria district of Bogotá. There are a large number of impressive churches, including one wanna-be Notre Dame where the service is in Latin. I don’t know why guidebooks spend so much ink on churches – to me, once you’ve seen a few, you’ve seen them all. Actually, they scare me a little bit. I almost never enter them – it’s like entering a hospital for me, too much darkness and death.
Although the city doesn’t have any bodies of water, it is built on a series of hills that afford nice views, reminiscent of Medellín.

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One of the recommended activities to do around Quito is mountain biking.. there are many companies offering one- to several-day trips, and I decided to do a two-day tour with one of the highest-recommend outfits: The Flying Dutchman. It was a bit pricey at $110, but that included transport, bikes, food, guide, and one night of accommodation. This is the trip I chose.

At 7am (ugh) I met up with our fearless leader Fernando and my fellow bikers Ali and Chris who are on their gap year from England. We were a small group, which I liked. Fernando and I hit it off, it turns out the contents of his iPod is about 80% the same as mine. Chris and Ali were also delightful fellow travelers.

After a couple of hours driving south from Quito, Fernando turned the Land Rover onto a crazy bumpy flooded dirt track and started heading up Cotopaxi – the world’s highest active volcano, at 19,347 feet.
Now let me just stop here and report on a few science tidbits the local tour operators boast about – you probably thought that Mount Everest was the tallest place on Earth, right? Well, it turns out it depends on how you define tallest. Everest is in fact the highest point on earth when measured from sea level. But if you define the height of a mountain as the distance from it’s base to it’s peak, then Mauna Kea in Hawaii has it beat, even though most of it’s base is underwater. By the same token, Mount McKinley in Alaska also wins. Similarly, some argue that Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is taller than Everest because it rises straight out of the African plain, whereas Everest is merely one of many peaks topping the enormous base of the Himalayas.
Now, suppose we define “highest mountain” as that which is furthest from the center of the earth. By this definition, Mount Chimborazo (nearby Cotopaxi, here in Ecuador) wins by the technicality that the earth bulges along the equator due to centrifugal force. In fact, Chimborazo is 2.1 kilometers closer to the sun than Everest. A neat fact, although it feels like cheating to me, since by this accounting even the beaches of Ecuador are higher than Everest.

Cotopaxi volcano also boasts one of the few equatorial glaciers in the world. From Wikipedia: “There have been more than 50 eruptions of Cotopaxi since 1738. Numerous valleys formed by powerful lahars (mudflows) surround the volcano. This poses a high risk to the local population, their settlements and fields. During a war between the Incas and the Spaniards in 1534, the volcano erupted and put an end to the fighting as both fled from the battlefield. In the 1877 eruption pyroclastic flows descended all sides of the mountain, with lahars traveling more than 100 km into the Pacific Ocean and western Amazon basin draining the valley.” That’s a long way for lava to flow!

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