Alex's travel blog

Lima

Well, I'm now in Peru. I was meant to be here a day earlier (Sunday), but I got to the airport too late to take my flight! Luckily I was able to take the flight at the same time on Monday, for no extra cost.

So, about...hmmm...2 weeks ago I was in Cuenca, a city in the south of Ecuador. I really liked the city and enjoyed staying there. I had a walk along the river on the first morning and the thing that immediately struck me was the vivid green colour of the grass - it looked like it could be a European city. The streets are all narrow and cobbled and there's lots of nice colonial architecture. I spent 4 full days there - Thursday to Sunday - 2 faffing and 2 doing excursions.

One excursion was to 'Incapirca', the best preserved Inca ruins in Ecuador. They weren't that amazing to be honest: it was mainly just the very bottoms of walls that were left. I think people came and stole all the bricks, before it got protected status. There was a cool temple in the middle, though, which was well preserved. While I was looking at that, a photographer asked to take some photos of me. He wanted me to pose with my camera, pretending to take a picture of the temple. He said the pictures were for 'El Comercio', the main national newspaper, and would be in the paper on Monday. That's what I understood from the Spanish, anyway. On the Monday, infuriatingly, I didn't get a chance to buy the paper! But I think someone said they checked it and didn't see me. The other excursion was to a national park in the highlands west of the city, where we did a bit of walking around. It was a pretty beautiful place, in a barren, desolate kind of way.

Other points of note: I saw a hummingbird in one of the Plazas in the city! And one day I managed to get breakfast for 18c and lunch for 19c! (it wassn't that impressive though, they were just bread roll type things). I've been desperately trying to keep to a budget of $20 per day but have rarely managed it. Another good thing about Cuenca was that people I knew kept turning up at my hostel! On my first day I bumped into a Danish guy called Hans who had been volunteering at Jatun Sacha at the same time as me. On the second day I met up with another friend from Jatun Sacha, Suzannah, who was there with her friend, so I went out with them on 2 nights. On one of the nights I ate cheese in a restaurant, a blissful experience. It was only about the strength of mild cheddar, but tasted so good because I'd got used to the white rubbery shit you get here. Then, on the 4th night, Catherine, who I knew through i-to-i, turned up! (i-to-i is the company I arranged the volunteering with).

I'm falling asleep now, so I'll try to get up to date next time.

Cuenca, Ecuador

*PHYSICS UPDATE*

I spoke to someone last night who´d also been to Mitad del Mundo (the equator place). She´d also been surprised by the experiments so had looked the place up on the internet....and apparently it´s all crap. I´d suspected this, but more shockingly the water swirling down the sink in opposite directions is also crap. They make it do this by subtley turning the basin. Apparently, the coriolis force is nowhere near strong enough to produce an effect at this range. I was devistated by this news, because I´d been so excited when I saw it. Quite frankly, I feel cheated.

Right, I want to test it out again now, so would someone in the northern hemisphere be good enough to drain a sink and see which way the water swirls, and let me know? Thanks.

Cuenca, Ecuador

After finishing my volunteer placement on Friday, I returned to Quito. Saturday was a day of admin, the highlight being getting all my clothes washed and dried. That was so good. However, by the end of the day I was already bored, not liking being on my own and missing the company at Jatun Sacha.

On Sunday morning I met two ladies from Hong Kong at breakfast at the hotel. When they heard I was going to Hong Kong later on the trip, they immediately said I should contact them when I got there, and gave me their contact details. This was even before we´d exchanged names! I found this quite surprising...but maybe this sort of hospitality is totally standard in other countries.

The loneliness is the down side of travelling on your own, but on Sunday I enjoyed one of the advantages - the freedom. I had intended to relax for a few days in Quito, but I was bored so on impulse decided to head south. This will be boring if you don´t have a map, but I´ll write it anyway: I went to Ambato, then Baños to collect something I´d left in a hostel safe, then back to Ambato, then to Guaranda. The journey to Guaranda was fantastic: we went up into the mountains and right past a volcano which looked something like this


I´d read that you could get cheese in Guaranda, but the woman was really grumpy in the only place that sold cheese, so I didn´t bother. This was a shame, because the views on the journey and the cheese were the only reasons I´d gone to Guaranda. There wasn´t much else to do there. On Monday I left and went to Riobamba. On the journey there, a local English student sat next to me and asked me to look at some stuff she´d written and correct it for her. We talked a bit so she could practice her English, but I was a bit concerned when she told me I had beautiful eyes! She also made me give her my email address so she can write to me in English.

Today was exciting: I did this touristy train ride. It quite literally goes down a sheer cliff face. Unfortunately, it doesn´t go straight down - which would be cool - rather it goes along, cut into the wall of the cliff, then the train has to change direction and the track goes along and down in the other direction. It was built in the 19th centuary and is very impressive. Also, you get to ride on the roof!

After that, I came to Cuenca, where I´ll be staying for a few days. Up till today I´ve just stayed in single rooms, so I decided to stay in a dorm in the town´s party hostel. This hostel incorporates a busy café/drinks bar, which is cool, but I couldn´t believe it when I was shown my dorm. It actually opens straight onto the café and the only windows look onto the café! So not somewhere I can walk to the shower in a towel, unfortunately.

Riobamba, Ecuador

Well, I left Jatun Sacha a few days ago and am now somewhere in the middle of Ecuador. However, I want to write more about Jatun Sacha before I forget.

I should describe where I lived. It was a wooden hut shared with one other person (an Amercan, Greg) and looked something like this:

Actually, there´s 3 rooms in each hut, with 2 people in each room...that´s what I meant. There´s a separate washblock. There´s something depressing about waking up, needing the toilet, and having to walk to a washblock in the rain. (There´s an effect in the rainforest that when you need to go, the urge is surprisingly and overwhelmingly strong. Many of the other volunteers experienced this as well). Also, the washblock - toilets, showers and all - was invariably filled by an interesting variety of insects. I was quite put off by this in my first week or so, but by the end didn´t even notice it.

I must also mention the bar - it´s the coolest place! The building is a large oval, rasied up slightly on stilts, open at the sides but with a thatched roof. It´s just one large space inside, with a few tables round the edge. My life became reminiscent of the second year at Jesus College: bar every night, often with us being the only people there. In fact, there was only one night when it was what you´d call busy and only a few occasions when there were any non-volunteers there.

As for the surrounding area. Naturally, I mainly saw the area around the road (it would probably be described as a track in England). The area along the road was heavily developed...'heavily' in terms of what you´d expect in a rainforet, anyway. The people that live there speak a language called Quechua; most speak Spanish as a second language. I suppose you´d describe them as indigenous (although to me that brings to mind tribal people wearing nothing but leaves). The people all live in huts that look something like this

and the huts are grouped together in ´communities´. There's chickens and dogs running about everywhere. Another thing the communities have in common is the Coca Cola logo...it´s everywhere. If somewhere sells drinks, it won´t bother with a sign saying ´shop´ or ´café´, it will just stick the Coca Cola logo outside. In fact, this happens in the towns as well, and even a reasonably nice restaurant will have a sign containing it´s name next to the Coke logo. I guess Coke must make the signs for free, or maybe even pay the shops/restaurants. I never understood how a company that just sells drinks could be considered one of the biggest companies in the world...but now I see. Everyone drinks it, everywhere.

Anyway, I don´t know whether I should be annoyed with these people for destroying the forest, or whether they´ve always lived there. It made me thankful for the huge area that Jatun Sacha protects, anyway. To be honest, the volunteer work I did didn´t seem directly useful, but I was pleased that my money was going to the foundation.

So, my last week at Jatun Sacha. I arrived back from Baños on Sunday (5th Feb) and was immediately recruited to a trip some of the other volunteers had planned to Coca, leaving on Monday. Coca is much further east, into the forest, and we got there by canoe along the Rio Napo, which was cool. We stayed the night at Coca, then on Tuesday we took another canoe for another few hours down the river to a biological reserve, Pañacocha. The Rio Napo is incredible...it' more like an estuary. Just look at the size of it!

Now look at a map and notice how far to the west of South America this is...it's merely the tip of the Amazon river system. I actually can´t comprehend how big the Amazon river itself must be. At Pañacocha we looked around for wildlife, with varying degrees of success. We did manage to see some pink fresh-water dolphins, which made the trip for me. They occasionally surfaced and you could just see their backs, but it was still pretty special.

Thursday was my last day of volunteering (we did something else pointless like construct a shelter in the organic garden, then dig up the tomatoes underneath it that had been planted a few weeks ago). In the evening most of the volunteers went to the bar and got suitably drunk. We played this drinking game which I´ve never come across before, where you have two glasses, and you have to bounce a 25 cent piece, or 'quarter', into the glass before you can move it on. Anyone heard of it? A nice ending to my stay was climbing up the observation tower (30 metres I´m told) on Thursday and again on Friday morning. It´s just a narrow, triangular, steel framework and you have to climb up the outside, using climbing gear if you´ve got any sense. It was absolutely petrifying, but definitely worth it for the view. On Friday afternoon I travelled back to Quito.

I think, without realising it, I began to really enjoy being at Jatun Sacha. Not just the excursions, but also just staying and working there. I´ll definitely miss it and the thing I´ll miss the most (and am missing) is the people and the company. I became good friends with some of the volunteers by the end, and might even stay in touch with them. I´m now entered the daunting 'on my own' phase. Find out how I´m faring in the next exciting installment...

to be continued

OK, I´m loving this photo uploading thing, so here´s a good one of me at AmaZOOnica, as described previously.

Baños I´ve done some fun things since the last blog entry - in fact I probably had my 3 most enjoyable days so far. They were: Saturday. All the volunteers went for a walk in the forest and went in a bat cave! Well, it wasn´t strictly a cave, more like a ravine or fissure in the rock. To get in one had to crawl on hands and knees through a really muddy pool, then squeeze along between the rock faces. This bit was so narrow that even I could only just get through. There were hundreds of bats inside, and with all the screaming (not due to me) they were flying around and coming so close they brushed against our heads! Sunday. Five of us went white water rafting. It was amazing! I´m proud to say that I sort of didn´t fall in. Well, I didn´t get thrown in by the water, but did get pushed in by our guide many times. He did evil things like when a person leaned out to pull someone back into the boat, he pushed that person in as well! After having this sort of thing for a couple of hours, we really shouldn´t have fell for any more tricks, but of course we did. For example, he got us to all stand round the edge of the raft linking hands, then leaning in and out. Of course, on one of the leanings out, he let go of our hands. We also did some crazy stuff like deliberately tipping the raft over and putting one raft on top of the other. Wednesday. I went to somewhere called AmaZOOnico. Despite the cheesy name, it´s not really a zoo, more an amimal rehabilitation centre. It takes in animals from the police, who´ve seized them from illegal poachers, and also from local tribes, who´ve killed some animals and left their babies defenceless. About 10% die in the first week, about a quarter can be released back into the wild and the rest are either too ill, or too used to humans to be released, so they´re kept. I saw loads of cool things: toucans, parrots, turtles, wildcats and snakes. There were loads of tame monkeys running around the place, some of which try to jump on you. The best things were these enourmous rodents - the biggest species in the world - which looked like a giant rat/guinea pig and were about the size of a pig. The whole experience was made more exciting by the fact we needed to take a canoe down the river to get there. As well as all this, I achieved my dream of planting some trees on Monday. It wasn´t really what you´d call reforestation, unfortunately, more just planting a line of trees around a school. And inexplicably, quite a few trees were cut down to make way for the new ones. There was a net gain in the number of trees, though. On Tuesday I did one of the most disgusting things I´ve ever done: mixing up the compost. The smell was absolutely unbearable and impossible to describe in words...but to get an idea, imagine all the food waste that would get thrown out from a kitchen, and imagine the smell after it´s been decomposing for a few months. I´ve taking Friday, Saturday and Sunday off this weekend and am visiting Baños. It´s a small town in the foothills of the Andes. It´s very beautiful - surrounded by wooded mountains, with a waterfall cascading down one of the hills. Yesterday we did this cool downhill bike ride with great views (which was a bit slower than it might have been - some of our group clearly didn´t know how to ride a bike). Today we bathed in the baths fed by hot springs, which the town is named after (Baños means Baths in Spanish...I think). The best thing, however, has been the hot showers! You don´t know how good they are unless you´ve been taking cold showers or weeks. It´s also been great escaping the insect bites and the humidity...and yet I´m looking forward to getting back to Jatun Sacha later today...I guess it´s started to feel like home for me.