JJ's Travelogue

Normally I avoid night buses since they’re meant to be dangerous, I enjoy watching the scenery, and I have trouble sleeping on them. But I had no choice in going from Puerto Lopez to Quito in order to meet Eloisa on time. This one was well organized – we boarded the bus in front of the police station where they frisked us before boarding. In spite of this, they still gave us stern warnings not to put our day packs under the seats or in the overhead bins – instead, to keep them on our laps the entire time. Besides thieves on the buses, occasionally one will get pulled over by armed robbers. This bus was a direct express, which made that scenario less likely.

I was actually able to sleep on the bus, so I arrived in Quito at 6 am fairly refreshed. It’s rare for me to return to someplace I’ve been, and oh so pleasant – I’ve already done the legwork – I know where the good coffee is, the cheap hotels, the fast internet. After settling on a hotel and having a leisurely brunch, I went to the airport to pick up Elo. A great reunion. We spent that night (Friday) in Quito, meeting up with one of the crazy Couchsurfers I had hung out with before. Saturday we bused up to Otavalo so Elo could see the famous indigenous market there. I took more photos of the beautiful people, which I’ve added to that post. [Incidentally, I've also recently added a video and more photos to the beautiful Baños post, after discovering a memory card I'd forgotten about!]

Elo keeps teasing me that I’m destined to marry one of the indigenous women, the way I keep going on about how beautiful they are. It’s true that I do find their natural beauty more attractive than many mestizos or caucasians. Part of it is that androgynous look that I love so much – the men with their gorgeous long hair that I always wanted, the women with their elegant fedoras. You don’t often catch them smiling, but when they do it lights up the square. There are surprisingly few photos on the web of the type of people I mean, but here are a few: One, two, three, four, five, six.

In the few weeks since I was last in Quito, they have opened two new bus stations, one in the north and one in the south of the city. Whereas the old bus station was dingy and dangerous, these new ones are gleaming examples of the future of Ecuador – modern architecture, light and airy, clean, and safe. You can only reach the buses themselves by showing a valid ticket, which should significantly cut down on petty theft.

On Monday morning Elo left for the Oriente (Amazon region) for meetings with the parks department there. I woke up terribly sick (fever, aches, pains, runny nose, all the signs of H1N1!), so I decided to just lay low in Quito for a few days to try to kick this thing. Elo graciously left her MacBook with me for those few days so I could get some work done in the hotel rather than at net cafes. My iPod has been slowly dying (the hard drive keeps crashing, making a wince-inducing clattering noise), and since it’s Mac-formatted, I needed a Mac to be able to work on it, which are non-existent down here. How many commas can I put in a single sentence. I was nervous about losing everything, so I didn’t reformat it which is probably what I should have done to map out the bad blocks, but I did take the opportunity to load it up with a bunch more Spanish language lessons, new music, and a couple of movies. So provided it stays alive, I have all that to look forward to.

A couple of days later I was feeling well enough to travel again so I headed south to pick up again where I had left off (this will all make much more sense as soon as I finish that Google Map showing my route!) Never one for long bus journeys and especially not when sick, I stopped overnight in Friobamba Riobamba (see, that was a Spanish joke – “frio” means cold, and that town is freezing!  I don’t hear you laughing.) The sun made a rare appearance and I saw for a fleeting moment all the volcanoes and mountains surrounding the city. I thought about trying to take the famous steam train again, but pressed on instead to Cuenca, Ecuador’s third-largest city.

Leaving the party town of Montañita, I headed up the “Route of the Sun” a couple of hours to Puerto Lopez. This town is a big disappointment coming from the mellow pueblo of Montañita. Puerto Lopez is spread out, a bit trashy, just not terribly attractive. But a lot of fishing boats are based out of here, and it’s fun to go down to the beach in the morning and witness them all coming in with their catch and haggling with the townspeople to sell it all. But I didn’t come here for the town – I came because it’s the jumping-off point for trips to Isla de la Plata, known as the “Poor Man’s Galapagos“. I was lucky to get on a boat – there are twenty-some companies each with several boats, and I got the very last seat!

For some reason I was expecting a lush tropical island. Far from it – this is the dry season, and the island is brown and barren. But living up to it’s nickname, there are many unusual birds, all so tame that you can walk right up to them. The blue-footed boobies are the most prevalent. They were hanging around all over the place, some mating, some just chilling out with their fluffy young. They make a very strange sound when talking to each other. Just like in the Galapagos, the animals are so tame (no innate fear of humans, since they haven’t known us long enough to be afraid) that you can walk right up to them. Disconcerting.

Frigates (also known as Man O’Wars), are also in abundance out here. The males are striking to look at with their stretchy red throats that they fill with air to impress the females. Apparently Frigates can stay aloft for up to a week at a time! (One wonders how they sleep.) One reason they stay aloft so long is that they can’t take off from water.. imagine, spending your life flying over water, but you can’t even take a break to rest on it. Although they dive for fish, they are also kleptoparasitic. Love that word.

Albatrosses apparently also live out here, but I’m not sure whether I saw any. I’d love to see one up close – I’ve been telling that long-winded riddle about albatross soup for so long.

The companies all charge the same price, $40 for the boat plus a $15 national park fee. The tour was well organized, safe, modern, and efficient. We actually wore life jackets if you can believe it. After touring the island they took us a bit off-shore for some snorkeling. It was ok, the people who had never been snorkeling before were pretty impressed, but for someone who has been to the Bay Islands or Great Barrier Reef, this was no comparison.

The high point of the day for me were the whales. Both to and from the island, we spotted dozens of humpback whales frolicking about, sometimes in pairs (mating?), at times only 30′ from our boat! I’ve never been whale watching before, so this was pretty neat for me. These creatures are amazingly huge (80,000 lbs and 50 ft. long) and powerful, thrusting themselves high up in the air before crashing and diving down below the surface. I feel lucky to have arrived here at the perfect time of year, when they’re in transit from the poles in order to breed.

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7/5: I’m sick of freezing up here in the mountains. I’m heading to the coast!

7/6: Arrived in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city. Although Quito is the capital of Ecuador and gets all the attention for being the center of arts and culture (and generally being a prettier city), Guayaquil is the economic hub of the country. It’s brasher and louder than it’s northern sister, and home to the large port through which so much of Ecuador’s commerce passes. Hardly any tourists come here, and for that reason I like it. It reminds me of Tegucigalpa in that way, which will probably get old but for now I like it. And the weather, ahh, so much better – I can leave the hotel without wearing three layers or really thinking about what to wear at all.

7/7: The trade-off to no tourists coming here is that there is very little tourist infrastructure. Most of the hotels are geared towards business travelers on expense accounts; it’s taken me a couple of days to find the cheap places. I thought cities were supposed to be cheap, the economy of scale? But I guess the wages are higher in cities, therefore the market can bear higher prices. Harumph. And for a country that is so wired, it’s largest city has a dearth of internet shops. Apparently the price of computers and home internet connections has fallen so much in the last couple of years that residents no longer have need of the net cafes as they do in the rest of the country. Great for the locals, but sucks for the traveler.

Why is it that coastal people (no matter what coast – the Caribbean of Panama, the Atlantic of Colombia, or the Pacific of Ecuador) always play the game of, “let’s see just how few consonants we can get away with pronouncing.” I really can’t understand most of these people – I swear, some of them sound like they have speech impediments.

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I figured out how to listen to my favorite podcasts again, even after having the iPhone stolen. My Palm Treo (which was my backup, now my primary phone) has a memory card slot. I go to a net cafe and download the MP3 files of the podcasts from the various websites, save them to an SD card, and insert it into the Treo. Then I had to find an adapter to allow normal headphones to plug into the phone. The whole process is clunky and slow, but I’m thrilled to be connected again.

If you’re interested as I am in the ongoing debate between old and new media, there are two recent podcasts I recommend. Both are from This Week in Tech, a freeform roundtable discussion featuring different guests each week.

TWiT #197 from about 5 minutes (skip the opening banter) to 25 or 30 minutes (things get geeky after that) features a discussion around how internet startups have upended the business model of old media behemoths that have failed to adapt. A couple of quotes to whet your appetite:

“The biggest lesson of Google in creating platforms is that when you lose control of something, when people surprise you and take it over, that’s when you’ve really won; as opposed to the old centralized, big media corporate way of looking at things in that they thought their value was in controlling something.”
“Craig Newmark, when he made Craigslist, didn’t know that it was going to destroy the business model of newspapers as we know them, or that people would use it after Katrina to find each other.”

TWiT #199 from about 17 minutes to 40 minutes features a discussion around the failure of the major news networks, and how they’re no longer the first place to go to for breaking news – instead, Twitter is. Myself, I first found out about the Honduran coup and Michael Jackson dying (which peaked at 15,000 tweets a minute) from Twitter. From the podcast:

“I was watching Twitter live, people saying ‘I am being tear-gassed right now!’ You even can see Moussavi’s tweeting, saying ‘they have got me under house arrest.’ I’m thinking, oh my god, this is huge. The election is being stolen in Iran. Quick, turn on CNN! What?! It’s a Larry King rerun with American Chopper. MSNBC, Fox, all the major networks were running reruns.”
“The Iranian authorities immediately turned off text messaging, they blocked Twitter on the internet, they did everything they could to keep people from getting out but people still had Twitter applications on their phones and tweets were still getting out. And if you were reading those tweets you were watching a revolution in the streets live in real time, and meanwhile CNN was showing you how to build a motorcycle.”
[Interesting aside: Twitter had scheduled an operational downtime during all of this, which the U.S. State Department asked them to postpone since Twitter had become critical to the revolutionaries.]
“The New York Times though did an excellent job – it’s ironic. The newspapers did a brilliant job on their websites, they even had video. So I think this might be a turning point – if you want to see breaking news, you go the web now. You do not turn on the news stations.”
“There’s another irony which is that when the networks did start to catch up, what did they do? They read the Twitter posts on the air!”

Speaking of CNN, I recently witnessed an interesting contrast between developing / 3rd-world presidential press conferences and the same in first-world nations. After Manuel Zelaya (the ousted President of Honduras) tried  to return to Tegucigalpa but was unable to land, he held a press conference in San Salvador which CNN Español broadcast live. Everything about it was ghetto. First, although the other Presidents of most of Latin America were in attendance, it was held in somebody’s rec room at old wooden tables with fluorescent lighting. Really? You couldn’t get everybody to a TV-quality studio? Next, the video was transmitted via Skype from a camera on the floor, degrading the quality even further and providing a strange angle to the speakers. When it finally began, I was expecting a few brief remarks from the president of El Salvador before introducing Zelaya. The “introductory” remarks rambled on for 40 minutes! Then Zelaya, looking every bit the cowboy in his 10-gallon hat, grandstanded for another hour. Although I couldn’t understand most of the specifics, it was clearly a rambling, emotional, off-the-cuff speech. I was impressed, however, that CNN Español broadcast the entire thing.

Contrast all of this with the press conference that President Obama and Russian President Medvedev gave yesterday. As one would expect, the entire enterprise was tightly scripted and controlled, everything from the flags in the background to the podiums carefully planned out.

This isn’t a judgment – there is certainly a case to be made for the more raw but real Latin American press conference – but it’s nonetheless interesting to observe.