New Year's in Drag

I had a long, one-month break after my first semester of teaching English at SECAP, so I met up with my friend who teaches with me, Caitlin, and her visiting friend from home to travel around Ecuador a bit.

Mindo

Our first stop was a town called Mindo. It is a very small place in the cloud forest, about two hours outside of Quito, where visitors go to enjoy nature (birdwatching, hiking, butterfly farm) and do extreme sports (rafting, zip-lining, bungee jumping). I was fortunate to have been able to experience both the natural and extreme aspects of Mindo during the one day we spent there.

We got to Mindo late at night, so we went right to sleep and starting exploring early the next morning. The first thing we did was visit the butterfly farm in Mindo. It is essentially a big room with with net walls and butterflies everywhere. There were so many flying around that it was hard to walk anywhere without bumping into them constantly, and they occasionally land on visitors' bodies and hang out.

The pattern on these guys is supposed to look like the head of a snake, although I don't see it anymore.

I'm not a huge fan of butterflies in general because they still freak me out like any other bug. However, it was cool seeing so many of them in one place and there were some massive butterflies the size of my open palm, the likes of which I had never seen before.

After enjoying the serenity of the butterfly farm, we all decided to get radical and head off to do zip-lining. A zip-line consists of a cable connected to two distant points that slopes downward. The user gets into a harness and attaches a (pardon my technical jargon) spinning thing to the cable and slides down, fast. The attraction of the zip-lines in Mindo is that since it is in the could forest, the views from up on the cable are great.

In addition to sliding down the cable in a seated position in the harness, we also had the option of two other positions called superman and butterfly. Superman puts your body horizontally so it is like you are flying through the forest like a superhero, and butterfly situates you upside down so the harness painfully digs into your hips and makes you wonder why you chose to do it over the other two perfectly enjoyable options. I hate extreme sports and won't usually even ride a roller coaster, but I was feeling particularly brave that day and tried out all the positions. The pictures were taken on my friend's camera, so I will put them up on the Photos page when I get a hold of them.

Ambiguous advertising

Before I go on to describe what I did next, it will be necessary to go back to earlier that morning when I bought tickets to the zip-line. After I had purchased a pass to do the normal zip-lines, the girl at the desk brought a new attraction to my attention: Tarzan Swing. The poster advertising the attraction provided absolutely zero information about what it was, except that it would be extreme with a capital "X". The girl trying to sell me the ticket mimed something that resembled a zip-line on a long cord that swings back and forth. She was talking really fast when she was describing it to me, but I didn't ask her to say it again because she was cute and I didn't want to embarrass myself by admitting that I didn't understand. The only utterance from her I completely understood was "It's really cool." "I'm really cool too"—I thought to myself—and a ticket for Tarzan Swing was bought.

Now back to the cloud forest. After I had completed zip-lining, our guide started fitting me into a new harness for the Tarzan Swing. I still had in my head that it would be a modified zip line in which my body would swing from side to side while I went down the cable. We walked up to a platform over a huge pit, and the only thing I could see overhead was a series of cables coming from several directions meeting at a common point far off from the platform.

I started to use my imagination to figure out what I was going to connect my harness to and where I was going to slide since all the cables led to the same point. The stupidity of what I signed myself up for didn't click until I asked the guide what was actually going to happen. Words weren't necessary in this case, and all it took was one casual wave of the guide's hand to reveal that Tarzan Swing was simply a free fall off the platform.

Like I said before, I am not much of an adrenaline junkie, so I ran as fast as I could away from the edge of the platform and refused to do it until I saw someone else do it first. Thirty minutes and three Tarzan Swings by other tourists later, I figured since I already paid for the thing I might as well do it so I sacked up and strapped in. One of the scariest parts of the Tarzan Swing was that it took four guys about five minutes to hook up all the necessary cables to me. Wires and pulleys were flying all around my body, and I could imagine how easy it would be to get them tangled up or miss a buckle.


The way it works is that they tie the rope to your harness very tightly and hold you back until the gate is opened, so that instead of having to jump off they just let go and the rope pulls you off. When I was all hooked up and ready to go, I had a few final questions for my guide.

- How do I fall?
- Upright.
- Do I hold on to this?
- Yes.
- Will I faint?
- No. Worst case scenario you shit your pants.

With those words of encouragement I was off, and as I was swinging back and forth I screamed every Spanish language expletive I could come up with. The guides all got a kick out of it, and I'm glad they did because I annoyed them enough by pacing around the platform for thirty minutes before finally deciding to go.



New Year's

After Mindo I headed back to Ambato so I could be home in time for the New Year's celebrations. I got ready to go out with some friends in a popular neighborhood of Ambato called Ficoa. As I was leaving, my host father warned me that it would be difficult to find a cab, and he was right because it took me fifty minutes to get one (an absurd amount of time in Ambato) and I had to pay twice as much. I was reluctant to give the guy so much money for a ride, but when we were driving and I saw how difficult it was that night, I started thinking that three dollars wasn't enough for what he had to go through.

On New Year's Eve in Ambato (and I think in other parts of the country as well), men dress up like women and take to the streets to molester passing cars. The get in the way of traffic and don't move until the drivers hand them some change. It was incredibly bizarre, but even more annoying because the cab had to stop two or three times every block to give the cross dressers money.

A more understandable New Year's tradition in Ecuador is the burning of big paper figures called "old years." These were displayed all over the place and they sometimes took creative and funny shapes, like one of president Correa in a gas mask and wheelchair from the police protest a few months ago. At midnight, people light their huge paper dolls on fire in the streets. A couple of minute after midnight, dolls were in flames everywhere, people were launching fireworks, and Ficoa straight looked like a war zone.

If you're looking at this picture right now going "Wow that looks kind of creepy", it's because it was.

Montañita

My month-long break between semesters ended with a trip to a popular beach town in Ecuador called Montañita. It was a long ~eight hours of bus travel to make it to the coast, but it felt really nice to breathe warm air and swim in the ocean.

It seems to be a common misconception that all of Ecuador is some kind of tropical paradise and that there is always hot weather here. On the coast that is certainly the case, but where I live in the mountains the weather is much cooler. We are on the equator, so the sun is still incredibly strong when it is out. However, because we are at such a high altitude the weather is much cooler here and I wear a jacket out at night. Not that I'm complaining (I actually prefer the weather here in the mountains) but I just thought I would give some justification for the long bus ride to anyone at home who was unaware of Ecuador's climate diversity.

While I was in Montañita, I gave surfing another try after a two-year hiatus. The lesson I took was a half-hour of "surf theory" on land followed by an hour and a half of water practice. I understand the utility of the land practice since a lot of getting up on a surfboard is having trained muscle memory so you can get into position fast enough to catch a wave, but I could not stop laughing at how ridiculous I felt paddling in the sand and bouncing up and down on my board to simulate riding a wave.

I am happy to say that for my second time surfing I am pretty awesome. I got up more times than I didn't, and my instructor was thoroughly impressed (I didn't tell him it wasn't my first time, but he never asked). If I keep up this pace of taking a surfing lesson for an hour and a half every two years, I should be able to go out on my own by the time I'm 73.

Back to School

This week I start my second semester of classes. Now that I have a few months of teaching experience, I feel incredibly optimistic about this semester. It was a strange feeling the first few days of classes being in front of a room full of students when my entire life I had always been one of the people sitting in a desk. I have come a long way to the point of actually feeling like a teacher and being comfortable managing 20+ students for two and a half hours at a time. I also recently bought a new sportcoat that I look great in, and everyone knows that nothing commands respect like well-fitting, smart-casual outerwear.

I talked to my parents this past week and they both asked me "When does school start?" They've asked me that plenty of times throughout my life, but it was very weird hearing that when they really meant to ask "When do you start work again?"