Galapagos: Las Islas Encantadas – Day One

Day One of Leslie's and my week in Galapagos started in our hotel, Iguanazu, with the complementary breakfast and wifi. The hotel owner has a dog, some kind of big-headed lazy and obnoxious bulldog named Cacho (better suited would be the name "Chancho"), that at some point decided that my feet were very interesting things. At one point he tried to eat one of them, but instead of getting angry I just wrestled with him until he gave up and waddled away.
When we got to the airport in Guayaquil we were surprised by how rapidly we and our bags were processed by the extra Galapagos security as well as the regular airport people. We found a place to wait for our plane where we could charge Leslie's laptop and my i-pod and she could access the free wifi in the airport. The major hotels in Ecuador all have free wifi, and I think it's because they recognize that the majority of their customers are tourists with laptops and they want these tourists to want to come back through their airports.
When we were getting ready to board our plane, we realized that we had been assigned seats in the first aisle. We weren't sure if that meant the first aisle of first class or the first aisle of economy class. We had booked everything with a "last minute" deal at our travel agency so they were required to give us whatever seats were available on the plane that the all-inclusive rate they had offered us. Turns out the only seats available at the last minute were the bulkhead first class seats. It was awesome; I fit in my seat on the plane. And the seat reclined like a La-Z-Boy does. When we got to the airport, on what looked to be a desert island with a tiny open-air airport, we got off the plane as soon as we could (aided greatly by our front-row seats) to get through the special Galapagos customs lines. We had to pay a hundred dollars each just to enter Galapagos, because all the islands are a national park and our tourist money is what finances the upkeep of it all. On the other side of the hundred dollars was a National Park guide named Juan, waiting for us and two other people with distinctly more hispanic names than Laura Jenkins and William Reed. I went and grabbed our checked bags and we waited a little longer for the other two people who ended up never showing. Juan took us to the bus we had to take to get to the dock where we had to take a boat to another island where we had to take a taxi to get to the other side of the island to get to the other port and really the only city on Santa Cruz island, Puerto Ayora. Juan took Leslie and me to lunch and we decided to get the most traditional Galapagos/coastal Ecuadorian dish we could. We got the fish sango...



...which is kind of like a non-spicy fish curry that, like everything else down here, comes with a mountain of rice. The picture is of Leslie's plate after she'd decided she was full. Don't worry, the sango didn't go to waste :-P
We then got into a little speedboat that was supposed to take us to Isabela Island, the biggest of the islands, in about three hours. A few locals and two other tourist couples ended up on the boat with us and then we took off. The boat was miserable. The driver was going too fast and falling asleep most of the time because he didn't really have windows to look through, only his GPS. He kept going head-first into every wave we passed, sometimes sending the entire boat (engines included) out of the water and crashing back down into it. The English fellow named Simon (turns out we three tourist couples were gonna be together for a while) and I ended up getting incredibly soaked and at one point something big and round fell off the top of the boat and whapped me on the head. It was one of the things they use to keep boats from rubbing up against each other when they're stopped next to one another. I ended up having to hold the damn thing the rest of the way. Simon later said that he'd been sky-diving, bunjee-jumping and "the lot of it" and that the boat ride from Puerto Ayora to Puerto Villamil on Isabela Island was the most violent thing he'd ever been put through. The six of us ended up joking about it when we got off the boat, but the only joke I could make was "I'm sure I'll laugh when I can hear what you're saying." The guide for the six of us, named Javier, met us at the pier and helped us get our bags into the Hotel's truck...



...and we hopped in and were on our way. I think this was when we finally got to meet each other formally. The English couple traveling the world was Simon and Katy, the Venezuelan couple who now lives in Canada was Jose and Maria, and we were the Americans currently living in Ecuador. They ended up being incredible companions for our days on Isabela Island; we couldn't have asked for a better group. Everybody loved talking and had their own different but funny sense of humor and everybody could take a joke and give one too. We dropped our stuff off at Hotel San Vicente...



...and headed out to the Flamingo Lagoon. Turns out there aren't ever more than maybe five flamingos in the lagoon at any time anymore, due to the eruption of the volcano Sierra Negra (Black Mountain) and the fact that the people of Puerto Villamil (a town of only three thousand) needed the laguna for pumping fresh water into the city. Here's a picture of one of the three or four flamingos we saw.



After the Flamingo Lagoon, Javier took us into the center of town to show it to us and to explain to us that it's a very safe place. The people there want nothing more than to help you out. Then Javier took us for a short walk along part of the town's beach where he showed us a couple good bars to go to if we wanted a drink after dinner in the hotel. The only one whose name I can remember is "Coco Bar." We ended up at a place on the beach that had a lot of volcanic rock. We stepped up onto it and saw tons of little iguanas running around. They were actually as fascinated by us as we were by them, and around fifteen of them gathered in front of us to stare back. One little guy even popped up next to my foot to check me out.



I'm only putting the one picture here because we saw tons and tons of iguanas and I have better pictures to post that I took on later days. After walking on the beach, Javier showed us how to get back to the hotel and we ate dinner there. Afterwards, Jose and Maria decided to go for a run and Simon and Katy and Leslie and I decided to go try out the Coco Bar, see if we could get a drink. We get there, and there's crazy loud music playing and the place is empty. Everyone else just stepped out but I decided to cut off the music and see if anybody's notice. I mean, Javier said the people from his town were nice; I was sure the owner of the bar would understand that we only wanted to catch his attention and order some drinks. After a few minutes, somebody did show up and he did understand and we sat at a table outside on the beach and ordered our drinks and had a really nice conversation. After that, we just went back to the hotel to sleep.

Galapagos: Las Islas Encantadas – Day Zero

I'm starting with day zero because the week leading up to our vacation in the Galapagos Islands is a whole damn story in and of itself. We signed the contract for our new apartment, which has gorgeous views of the city and is overall incredible even though I've had to spend the last few days fixing everything in it, and we spent most of Thursday and Friday (up until our buseta left for Guayaquil) just getting all our stuff from the Coloma's house into our apartment. Fortunately, we were able to spend the night in the apartment Thursday night before spending a (useless) half-day at work on Friday. After work, we bolted for the apartment to get all the rest of our errands run before our buseta left in five hours. We didn't even eat lunch, or at least I didn't, and we packed food for dinner to eat on the way to Guayaquil. There was a construction delay on the highway somewhere along the descent from the mountains, but we didn't mind much because we were watching a movie on Leslie's laptop. When we finally arrived into Guayaquil, our hotel sent their car to pick us up at the buseta company's office (normally that costs too much more than a taxi, but we got a deal for booking it with a travel agency in Cuenca), and we cut rhough town over to the hotel Iganazu. It's a great hotel in an incredible location on a mountainside overlooking the town. It has wifi and breakfast is included with your room. Depending on the day, the best part of the hotel is either that it has a pool (because it's so damn hot in Guayaquil, Ecuadorians call it “El Horno”) or that you can't even tell you're in Guayaquil where you're at the hotel. I have another great story about Iguanazu but it'll have to wait until I write about the day on which it happened. They ended up giving us the “family” room, with two bunk beds (4 beds total) and a double bed upstairs in a loft. Everything in Guayaquil has air conditioning, so our hotel room did as well. We ended up going to sleep pretty much immediately after arriving to the hotel, and that should be enough of a leadup into day one of our Galapagos trip.

The Galapagos Islands

So, we don't have internet at our apartment right now but we will have it soon. I'm out using public internet right now and I don't have much time until my laptop battery is gonna die, so I was just posting to let you know I'll be posting sometime soon and to show you a picture of the newest addition to the Ninja Turtles.

The Whitewater Girls

CEDEI had seven student teachers from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater come visit CEDEI School for six weeks to help us international always-English-speaking teachers out and so that they could learn from the educational style of the school. The ones with whom I had the chance to work were incredibly helpful in showing me lots of different ways to engage with the children in English. For example, all of the classes to whom I teach English now have a Word Wall: a place on the wall where the students can look to find words they already should know in English and help remind them how the words are spelled. You should remember, I have no particular training for this job, neither teaching children in a elementary school setting nor teaching children English. Having the Whitewater girls visit and teach and help me teach was an incredible learning experience for me as a teacher. I am very grateful for them and for the time they spent with us here in Ecuador.

Our New Apartment

So Leslie and I just finished the process of getting an apartment in downtown Cuenca. It's an incredible apartment with the most beautiful views of the city that I have seen from anywhere other than Turi. However, since we have to get moved in before Friday and on Friday we're leaving to spend a week in Galapagos, I'm not going to have time to write about either the apartment or the Galapagos trip until after December 18th. Just so y'all know, I'm not ignoring my blog, just entering into a very busy couple of weeks. I have a couple of pre-written little posts saved up from one night that I couldn't fall asleep, so maybe I'll post one of those soon. Again, I'm sorry I won't be able to write for my blog for probably a couple weeks.

Leslie's Birthday in Otavalo

I've decided that with this post I want the pictures to tell the story. So I'll start by saying that we decided to visit Otavalo for Leslie's birthday because we had heard that we could get a good dose of indigenous Ecuadorian culture, history and heritage there, because they have the country's biggest artisan market and because of the inn we could stay at that has cabins instead of hotel rooms. We flew between Cuenca and Quito and took the Panamerican Highway between Quito and Otavalo. A couple typical Leslie and Slocomb things happened en route, of which I don't have pictures. The first is that I got sick on the flight home from Quito (I'm better now though) because I am afraid of heights and I refused not to look out of the window the entire flight because I am trying to break myself of my fear. The second is that on the bus ride back from Otavalo to Quito Leslie decided to sleep instead of take in the beautiful mountainous countryside.




This is a picture of me and the cabin chain we stayed in. We were they only people in the building, which was nice both for the privacy and for stealing the other room's firewood for our chimney.




I decided it'd be worth it for Leslie's birthday to spring for the cabin that came with wine and flowers and a good view of the mountains. The view didn't end up being anything special, but the rest was spot on.




WARNING: Llamas are not generally this nice. You'll see that this one is tied to a tree (at our hotel), and it took a lot of effort and patience from me to get the llama to be willing to walk up to me. Llamas can be aggressive and I've heard that they also spit like camels.




But nothing can change the fact that this baby llama is adorable.




Here are a couple pictures of the Otavalo market on a Sunday afternoon. Saturday is the big market day, but we didn't end up eating in any 2nd-floor restaurants on Saturday so we only have pictures from Sunday.




On Saturdays, the market also branches out into all the streets that intersect with it for at least a couple blocks.




We bought enough stuff from this lady that she offered to be in a photo with her little setup in the middle of the market.




One evening we decided to "dar la vuelta" around downtown Otavalo. This is a picture of the city cathedral and the statue of Rumiñawi, considered the strongest Inca ever to rule over this region of South America. Remember the face, it shows up again later in the post.




On Sunday, after our second round of shopping (going back for everything we decided we still needed), we went to Peguche, a small town outside Otavalo know for it's indigenous Andean music. The best place to go for the instruments is this "taller." Unfortunately, Leslie and I can't remember the name of it (because it's in Quichua, the Inca language) and it's not the one you can find online. This lady gave us a tour of the "taller" (pronounced "tah-yér") and a sample of what all of the instruments sound like.




After learning about traditional Andean music, we headed over to the Peguche waterfall. You can barely see them, but there are two men at the top of the waterfall playing different styles of Andean reed flutes. There should be water where they're standing; I think they're playing to bring us out of the drought.




There are over eight people in this picture. You just can't see the rest of them because I had to frame the photo in a way that they'd all be behind Leslie.




This is the Cuycocha Lake, a volcanic laguna created when a snow-topped volcano imploded several thousand years ago before South America was inhabited by humans. The laguna is the result of all the snow falling into the resulting crater and being continually through the ages by the still active volcano below the water. The laguna is consistently ten to fifteen degrees (Fahrenheit) warmer than the outlying areas because of the heat produced by the volcano. Cuycocha means "Laguna of the Guinea Pigs" in Quichua, and there are several legends as to how this laguna received that name. Originally it was the Laguna of the Gods (don't remember the Quichua word from our boat tour), because all the peoples who lived here before the Spaniards believed it to be a holy place where people could communicate directly with the gods and make the most holy sacrifices.




Does this face look familiar? It's Rumiñawi. Legend has it that when the Spaniards attacked the Incas in order to conquer and enslave them and take all their gold back to Spain, Rumiñawi lead all of his people to Cuycocha to bury all their gold beneath the laguna, inside the volcano, so that the Spaniards could never steal it away from it's proper home in the Andes. He then lead them through life in the moutains, in places they could live without being disturbed (or conquered) by the Spaniards. After his death, the Incas following him came back to Cuycocha and carved Rumiñawi's face into a rock in the laguna to let him live among the gods. Apparently, the Incas used to joke about Rumiñawi that he had a gigantic nose. So this carving is exaggerated on purpose.
History books will tell you that Atahualpa was the leader of the Incas when the Spaniards arrived to South America. Almost all books aren't completely correct because the Inca Empire was split into factions at the time and the Spaniards only every interacted with those who still followed Atahualpa. The Incas who followed Rumiñawi at that time were lead deeper into the mountains to places like Cuycocha to continue their lifestyle without European interruption.




A cute photo of Leslie and me on our boat tour of Cuycocha.

Later I will also have a picture of everything we bought and give you a ballpark figure on how much we spent, thanks to my brilliant haggling skills :-P Right now, there are too many Christmas gifts in the pictures so it cannot be posted until January.

Thanksgiving in Cuenca

Right now, it's Sunday night and I'm up late in our hotel room (that's actually a cabin) just outside Otavalo where we've had a wonderful weekend that I'll write about in my next post. I'm nursing a fire that I've had to build with wet wood and I can't sleep because Leslie and I accidentally took naps this afternoon. So I figured I'd get out my laptop and write about our Thanksgiving experience in Cuenca.

There is no Thanksgiving in Cuenca. Most of the people in the city have never heard of it and almost none of them have ever experienced it. It's so far off the radar that not only did we have to work all of Thanksgiving week, there were parent-teacher conferences scheduled for Thanksgiving night and the American director of CEDEI told us that sometimes you've just gotta go without celebrating American holidays. Well fortunately, those parent-teacher conferences got rescheduled off of Thanksgiving and since Leslie wasn't going a full year without celebrating Thanksgiving we decided to host a Thanksgiving dinner party at the Coloma's house for the CEDEI School staff. All the other American teachers were really excited and all wanted to bring a dish or help out in some way and the Ecuadorian staff was excited as well although they had no idea what to expect. In fact, I don't think as many of them as came were planning to come until I started advertising the party by talking about how much time Leslie and I were spending cooking all the traditional dishes.

We started dry-goods shopping on Monday, Leslie having decided on the menu at least a week in advance. We were going to cook a turkey (15-lb. because those things are expensive down here, a couple varieties (four casserole dishes) of dressing, green-bean casserole (2 dishes), real macaroni and cheese (2 dishes), mashed potatoes (big serving bowl), sweet potato casserole (1 dish), biscuits (like a ton) and pumpkin pie (3 pies). And Livia made two incredible corn casseroles as well. Jen also came and made some Ecuadorian fruit juices and we invited people to bring wine or Coke if they felt the need, because dinner parties in Ecuador are almost always pot-luck parties. And after at least five shopping excursions, six hours of cooking on Wednesday night (because we had to work Wednesday) and five more hours on Thursday of cooking and getting the downstairs ready and the music together right up until the party started (because we had to work on Thanksgiving day as well), we had 21 people come to the party plus us two plus the Colomas who only got a chance to try the food before they left for their own party. They were very gracious about letting us use the house for our party (after all we are paying them to live in the house) and Nellie even helped us clean all the dishes after everyone had gone. Angel said that Leslie's cooking (because in all honesty she really did all the cooking) was so good that he couldn't appreciate the food they were served at the party they went to.

All-in-all, the party was an incredible success and definitely worth all the labor that went into it. Even cleaning until 1:30 in the morning on Thanksgiving night, because we couldn't leave the cleaning until Friday (because we had to go to work) and because there's no dish-washer in the Coloma's house. Fortunately, we used almost exclusively plastic plates, cups and utensils and all of our baking dishes were aluminum Reynolds-style disposables so we avoided a lot of cleaning that way. All the food was delicious, including the purple sweet potato casserole that ended up being purple only because that's the color sweet potatoes are in Ecuador. I hope to be able to post pictures from the party soon so that you can see how much fun everybody had; unfortunately I can't do it right now because I'm at our hotel in Otavalo that only has internet in the lobby and only when the internet feels like letting you connect. The pictures will be up soon.



Everybody enjoying the food.




Trying to pose for a picture.




A good group photo of most of the people who came for the party.




The more chill last-minute crowd. We just hung out, drank wine and listened to '70s rock music for a couple hours.