As you may recall, we happily quit Panama two months ago and boarded a plane bent for the South American equatorial nation - hop-skipping right over overly castigated Colombia. Flying that distance on a road trip feels like cheating, but the road doesn't go through. We could have shipped El Cuervo to Colombia, but people and the State Department advise against gringos driving American-tagged cars there, so we didn't. I regret it. We've learned on this trip that people love issuing their own informal warnings - generally about the country next door. The Mexicans warn about Guatemala. The Guatemalans warn about El Salvador. And the Costa Ricans and the Nicaraguans fight (literally) over whose Gallo Pinto rice and beans dish is better.
But Ecuador! No surprise that no one issued a warning about that country, so balanced it can't even wholly commit to a hemisphere. So friendly and welcoming are the Ecuadorians, they even let you use your own currency so you won't be burdened with conversion rate calculations. Actually, a terrible run of hyperinflation in 2000 left the country adopting the US dollar as its official currency. (Panama's "Balboa," too, is officially the US greenback, and just about every country we've been to will gladly do trade in American bucks.) Currency aside, Panama City to Quito - an ascent of nearly 3,000 meters in altitude - requires some acclimation. We did this by lazing around the city in the shadows of Guagua Pichincha volcano for a couple of days and then jumping on a flight to Ecuador's sea-level port city of Guayaquil. Here I spent two days - including the 4th of July - navigating the seaport, and I honored the spirit of revolution by fighting for El Cuervo's independence from the tyranny of Ecuadorian Customs.
Letting freedom ring, El Cuervo happily motored us up into the Ecuadorian Andes to re-acclimate in Baños, a great little spa town so laid back you'd never guess that just over the town's valley ridge another active volcano is preparing to vent its repressed anger at any moment. Hints of Volcán Tungurahua's pent up pressures are template-painted on every Baños street as small yellow volcano icons and arrows pointing the direction of a clearly futile evacuation route. While Big T has his issues, and landslides trap the community with regularity, the people of Baños are in purposeful denial, going about their booming, tourism-based business with aplomb while volcano experts insist that the Big Guy's going to crack imminently. So road-hardened and blasé had we become that we blithely motored up the side of Tungurahua to the Luna Rutun Spa, where we enjoyed a facial, mani/pedi, massages, cliff-edge hot tubs, and a luxurious session of volcano denial.
Though we avoided flying rocks in Baños, we didn't avoid the stationary kind. We rented a very fun looking Honda 250 motorcycle, we motored down the valley highway toward the Amazon basin, and in my denial-bliss I shot us into a very dark one-lane tunnel with the headlight off. Don't try this at home, but, wow, its easy to lose your equilibrium in a pitch-dark tunnel on a Honda 250. We hit the rock wall, and I beared the brunt of impact with my right arm. The arm has since scarred over; not yet my ego.
We did a few safe things in Ecuador - a multi-faceted jewel of a country, minus Customs and dark tunnels - and the highlight was the Galápagos archipelago which we enjoyed for five days with Emese's father, Jozsef, and his wife, Ili. Cruising the islands on a beautiful liner, we were woken daily for an amazing breakfast spread and the morning's landing. You probably imagine lots of birds and coastal wildlife on rocky shores, of which this place is definitely chock full. Until you've seen them, though, you can't believe the "attitude" of the endemic land and marine animals - without exception, totally and eerily unfazed by human presence. You want to shout at them, "Run, fly, or crawl quickly for your lives! We're called 'people' and we're really bad news!" But the beauty and animal spirit of the place falls over you, and you feel like relations are still salvageable and you can really do some cross-species ambassadorial good. That probably translates to just going away, but were in the Galápagos! So we marveled and enjoyed the trademark blue-footed boobies, land and marine iguanas, frigate birds, sea turtles, and giant tortoises up close and personal. And we said, "We know you were on this earth before us, and we hope we're all here a lot longer." Probably not fully understood, but there it was. We took a lot of pictures too, but inadvertently sent them home with our Inca Trail compadre, Monika.
Wish you could go to the moon? Want a practical proxy? Go to Peru. The coastal plain of the country is nearly 1,300 kilometers of moonscape, and it is scary-beautiful. We covered the northwest-southeast length of the sand strewn desert country in El Cuervo, including a run from the Ecuadorian border to Lima with stops at Máncora and Puerto Chicama, and a southern run from Lima to Nazca and Arequipa to Bolivia, outrunning by 26 hours the devastating, 8.1 magnitude earthquake on August 15. I kid you not. Scary without the beautiful.
Our friend Monika jumped on a plane from San Francisco to join us for a set of Peruvian adventures, including Cusco, the Inca's Sacred Valley, some time in the islands of Lake Titicaca, and a four-day 46-kilometer Inca Trail trek to Machu Picchu. Some say the classic Inca Trail trek is overcrowded and overblown. There are alternative routes, and there is no shortage of impressively intact Inca ruins along all of them. About 500 years ago, the Incas had unquenchable thirst for knowledge and dominance, and they were prolific master craftsmen, absorbing the best talents of indigenous groups from modern day Columbia to northern Argentina as they conquered their way north and south. Reaching their zenith of geographic reach and power, they imploded - falling into a brother-on-brother civil war just as the Spanish arrived to take advantage of the timely rift in domestic tranquility. But the Inca Trail we saw was pulsing with history and beauty - in time with our pounding, altitude-taxed hearts. Overpopulation aside, Machu Picchu is a gotta-see - up close, but also from the perspective of Putucusi, a peak that rises from the base town of Aguas Calientes and the Rio Urubamba. A one-hour hike and climb up tethered-log ladders hurts legs that have been pummeled for four days, but the view from this summit and a post-descent burger in town is a fine way to cap it all off.
Prior to the trek, we opted to spend a day and night in the village of one of our trek porters. The porters are Herculean, carrying sometimes 30 kilos (66 pounds) over the whole trek with a smile. We ate meals with our porters in a mud brick hut, learned how to dry harvested grain by repeatedly tossing it to the wind, and nearly asphyxiated in a game of high altitude fútbol with the porters and local kids.
Thanks to the fourth of our trek party, Christopher, a high school teacher from England, we also visited a school near the village, where we delivered books and short English lessons and were treated to a mob of elementary schoolers who craved the camera like pop idols.
One oft-repeated rule of the Latin American road: Don't drive at night. We usually heeded this, but occasionally we just had to get where we were going. One 13-hour travel day took us from Arequipa Peru over the Andes to the trip's highest point of 4,550 meters (15,000 feet) and across the border to La Paz, Bolivia. La Paz, meaning "peace," is a monumental misnomer. Navigating La Paz is like navigating a tornado. The movement of humanity in the streets is a vortex of chaos. Markets spill well into every street. Traffic lights are decoration - if you habitually stop at one that is, say, red, the blast of horns behind you will blow your hair forward. I'll chime in a say: don't drive in La Paz at night. Acutally, don't drive in La Paz. We finally collapsed at the faded five-star Hotel Presidente at about midnight. The city, on foot, was bizarre and wonderful. Emese loved the witch doctors' market.
Having regained strength, sleep, and nerves, in La Paz, we took a deep breath and steered El Cuervo again southward, toward Potosí, Bolivia. This was once the richest city in the world, when the Spanish were squeezing the rocky Andean landscape of its mineral wealth. It is said that the Spanish extracted enough silver from the mines here on the backs, lungs, and lives of indigenous slaves that they could have built a shiny bridge of the stuff all the way back to Sevilla. Now the bone-dry Cerro Rico (the "rich hill"), looming at 4,824 meters above Potosí, produces primarily zinc with some lead and tin, and it is mined by worker cooperatives. These miner owners, some of whose forebears mined under the Spanish thumb, barely eke out an existence and their work is intense, at times lasting unbroken 24-hour workdays deep in the earth. We saw this first-hand on one of the strangest, most intense tourism experiences we've had. We went three levels down into the mines - no elevators, and still at 4000 meters altitude - crawling at times on hands and knees through dust and rock, and scaling nearly vertical holes in the mountain to watch the miners at work in the core of the Cerro. Amazing!
Learning new customs is fun. For example, what do you give that special someone in Bolivia? The answer is tea leaves, orange soda, and dynamite. At the suggestion of our guide, we stopped at a Potosí street market to buy gifts for the miners we would encounter in the dark tunnels. The gifts en vogue in the mines these days? Coca leaves (for chewing - and for energy and hunger control), huge bottles of room-temperature sweet orange soda (for a sugar fix and quenching a dust-layered thirst), and a stick of dynamite (for blowing zinc out of the mountain). Yes, you can buy dynamite on the street corner in Potosí. And the tour guides will demonstrate its blast power at the tail end of the tour. They'll also insist you pose for pictures with the stick in your hand, fuse lit.
How to unwind after a day in subterranean purgatory? Go to the frigid Palacio de Sal, on the Salar de Uyuni. Bolivia's Salar, or salt flat, is an endless, otherworldly expanse of flat earth covered in a layer of salt. It's creepy and gorgeous. The Palacio is a much-touted hotel, built on the edge of the Salar almost entirely of salt blocks carved from the floor of the desert - creepier, by far, than its surrounding Salar. A day's drive on plowed earth will get you there from Potosí. The hotel is run by a kind, young gentleman who lives in the hotel with his wife and three-year-old son. Think "The Shining" with a more kindly, less homicidal, Bolivian Jack Nicholson, and you get the picture. In this 25-room, salty, and Arctic-cold lodging establishment there was no other staff, and, save a nice young Spanish couple, no other guests. As we wandered this abandoned novelty, the table-salt floor was being shoveled around us to make room for new, clean salt, so we wandered out onto the Salar. On the snow-white expanse, local workers pile the salt into mounds to dry in the sun. Later they haul it away for its purifying process and for export to the world's dinner tables. The scene makes for great pictures.
Lastly, for now - I am a humanitarian - Tupiza, Bolivia. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid lived, stole, and met their violent end in this arid, element-sculpted, corner of the world. To get here required our truest test of road traveler's stamina. Another grueling day's journey across nowhere on a painfully rutted, non-road with no one around would have been tough enough. But we got a flat about 70 kilometers into nowhere and had only one spare. We bolted on the spare, crossed our fingers tightly, and motored on, putting blind faith in El Cuervo. Many wrong turns, bridge-less river crossings, second guessing, and arguments later, we arrived in this serene Old West town.
Here we met sixteen-year-old Rodrigo Roman, our guide on a horse tour of the Tupizan arroyos (canyons). This kid is unshakably positive, outgoing, engaging, and endlessly knowledgeable about his town and its setting and history. He lost his father when he was four to a mining accident. He lost his mother four months ago to a car accident while she sold vegetables roadside. He now lives with his aunt. He's a great horseman and guide, but a three-hour horse tour puts five Bolivianos (50 cents) in his pocket. If the tour guilding doesn't cut it, he could be destined for the mines his father died in. We spent a whole day with Rodrigo, wandering the arroyos, and talking and joking in Spanish. He showed us his nascent but impressive dirt-road driving skills behind the wheel of El Cuervo. We tipped him well, and we asked for a promise that he stays with guiding. We promised, in return, that we would stay in touch and that we would send him books to learn English, a key to his future as a guide.
The following day, with some sadness, we turned toward Argentina and we made our trip's last border crossing.
