Time Out: Part 1

I recently spent two weeks enjoying my vacation time in between semesters by traveling to several of the places in Ecuador I still hadn't visited. It started with a trip down south to get acquainted with Loja and some surrounding small cities followed by a short venture to the coast to visit a friend in the banana capital of the world, Machala.

Day Bus Blues

Traveling in Ecuador by bus is a great option because it is so inexpensive (roughly one dollar per hour). Additionally, due to the small size of the country, it is a viable option to get just about anywhere save the Galapagos Islands. One of the downsides of bus travel in Ecuador is that under certain circumstances it is incredibly dangerous.

Due to the mountainous terrain, the roads in Ecuador are winding and barely guarded by barriers to prevent vehicles from falling over the edge. Since I have been in Ecuador, I have heard of at least three horrific bus accidents that involved buses rolling off the edge of a mountain road, resulting in the death and injury of many of its passengers. Most of the accidents happen late at night in scenarios where the bus driver falls asleep at the wheel. Because of this, WorldTeach has prohibited any of its volunteers from taking buses at night (not that I would take them anyway) and our only option is to take buses during the day.

This is obviously a huge disadvantage because instead of getting on a bus at night with a bunch of quietly sleeping passengers and waking up in your destination city (without having to pay for a hostal that night, might I add), you end up spending half of your day and all of your daylight on a sun-heated people oven that either smells like a locker room or a gas station bathroom—depending on how many infants are sitting around you—and sounds like a wrestling match or salsa club—depending on whether the bus driver puts on a Van Damme movie or blasts the radio through the bus speakers.

I was traveling with my SECAP co-worker Caitlin, and we decided that Loja would be our first destination. With the drive clocking in at a whopping twelve hours, we agreed to make a stop in Cuenca for the night to make the trip more bearable. One of our WorldTeach friends lives in Cuenca and her host family runs a hostal, so we stayed at her place for a very reasonable $3.50 a night.

Before we left for Loja the next morning, we walked around one of Cuenca's parks. I remembered the park from the first time I was there because of the ridiculous statue it had of Ecuador's only Olympic champion, and Cuenca resident, Jefferson Perez. I say the statue is ridiculous because Perez won an Olympic medal for racewalking.

For the uninitiated, racewalking is a sport in which you move as quickly as you can without picking both feet off the ground at the same time and while keeping your leg straight while your foot is in contact with the ground. While the idea of walking as fast as you can sounds (and looks) ridiculous, good racewalkers actually move incredibly fast considering the restrictions on their movement.

To give you some perspective, the fastest racewalking mile time I could find online was 6:07. If you have no idea what that means, my freshman year of college I ran a 6:20. I guess the spirit of racewalking is kept alive in Cuenca by the statue of Perez because that morning we saw multiple groups of people racewalking around the park and looking absolutely foolish doing it.

A statue that captures all the excitement and awkward body movements of racewalking

(Aside: Every now and again I will mention an absurd internet video that I saw a long time ago to a friend of mine, only to question myself later when I am alone about whether or not I had actually seen the video or just fabricated it by mixing up old memories. One such video was a prank where they scared Jefferson Perez to see if he would racewalk or run to escape. I confirmed that the video in fact does exist, and it is funny to see him admit that he only runs a little bit faster than he walks.)

Loja

Loja is a city way in the south of Ecuador nearly at the border with Peru. It is a small city known for its live music, clean Spanish, and proud people. Loja was actually my first choice city when coming to Ecuador (the WorldTeach application doesn't have a section for city preferences, but that didn't stop me from listing mine). It turns out I had a pretty good taste in Ecuadorian cities before I got to Ecuador because I had a great time in Loja and could definitely see myself living there.

Plaza in Loja featuring a statue of a man who I assume is the most famous racewalker from that city

The city seemed small compared to Cuenca, but the streets were alive with people and there was a great energy everywhere we went. Even though it rained every day we were there, it didn't stop us from visiting the city's many attractive streets and plazas, and watching a live outdoor concert and dance performance.

The first afternoon we were in Loja we met a guy who was selling sucre, Ecuador's former currency before its dollarization and switch to U.S. currency, as souvenirs. I don't really know anything about how currency or economics work, but it was interesting to hear him talk about how bad the inflation was (Wikipedia tells me 25,000:1 at the time of dollarization). The guy had all other kinds of world money too, and it was incredibly frustrating to see how pretty much every country in the world has more fun looking money than the U.S. dollar.

Two other interesting sights from Loja that have no accompanying narrative are the following: a store called "Seven & Leven" and a place that sold pizza cones.

They had great Slerr-P's

Around Loja

While we were staying in Loja we visited a few nearby cities of interest. The first one we visited was Vilcabamba, a town that became famous because of rumors that the people there regularly live to be over 100 years old. We went horse riding in town, and my guide told me that the oldest confirmed person from Vilcabamba is 115 years old since they only started officially recording birthdays 115 years ago.

Vilcabamba was tiny and filled with gringos. We met an interesting character from Virginia called Charlito, who referred to his eponymous restaurant as "conspiracy theory headquarters" because it is where the crazy local expats gather to talk about all the illegal things they think governments are doing.

After starting up a conversation with us, Charlito told us more about his life and how he ended up in Vilcabamba. Apparently he got fed up with the lack of freedom in the United States ("You can't even put a dog in the back of a pickup truck anymore!") so he sought* out a place where he would be free to carry as many animals outside the cabin of his moving vehicle as he wanted. He claimed that he settled in Vilcabamba because the weather there is the best in the world, which was hard for us to believe because it rained the entire time we were there. As we were leaving he encouraged us all to consider moving to Ecuador to start an English school because it is impossible to not make money since there is no real business competition here. I'm not too sure about that, but "Krishito's" does have a ring to it...

After Vilcabamba, we checked out two other little towns called Saraguro and Zaruma, known for their jewelry and gold mine respectively, that had nothing worth writing about.

Except for this 7 Eleven in Zaruma I guess

*I tried to type "seeked" and just learned that it is not a word.

Machala

The last stop we made on the first leg of our trip was to a city on the coast called Machala. Machala is the fourth largest city in Ecuador (behind Guayaquil, Quito, and Cuenca) and since I live in the fifth largest city (Ambato), I have now visited the five largest cities in Ecuador, which I feel like is some sort of accomplishment.

Machala is not known for being a tourist spot since there is really not much there except for ports where bananas are shipped to different parts of the world. Still, it's neat to look out the window on the bus to Machala and see miles of banana trees on both sides.

Interestingly enough, although there are a ton of bananas in Machala, people don't really ever eat them plain like we do in the U.S. Instead, they have several different varieties of cooked, mashed bananas that show up in many of their typical dishes. From the first minute I stepped off the bus in Machala I started looking for a banana to eat, but it wasn't until two days later as I was about to get on a bus home that I finally stumbled across a restaurant with bananas on the tables and the owner let me buy one from him.

The whole trip to Machala was basically just an excuse to see our friend Amy who lives there, so we spent a lot of time hanging out with her and we were even invited to spend the night at her place by her gracious host family, which was nice since the hotels in Machala are pricey.

We ate a lot during this trip; I recall eating one too many banana things during this dinner and almost throwing up afterward.

Outside of seeing our friend, Machala was really no different than any other area of the coast I have been to. The Spanish was nearly unintelligible, I was sweating the entire time, and I had tasty seafood.

Caitlin and I considered continuing to travel up the coast on our way back to Ambato, but my impacted wisdom tooth thought otherwise and I ran home crying so I could see a dentist and hopefully get my tooth pulled before we headed out east to the jungle town of Tena for part two of our vacation.

There's No Crying in Ecuador

After my last trip outside of Ambato to Quilotoa, I was reminded of how many cool things there are pretty close to where I live that I still haven't visited yet. This past weekend I asked around to find out what there was to do in a day trip and I learned about an intriguing train that runs through a nearby city. This past week also marked the end of my second semester at SECAP as I look forward to two weeks of vacation before starting my final semester here in Ecuador.


A Series of Unfortunate Events

Right behind my house in Ambato there is a set of unused train tracks that are beat up and overgrown with grass and weeds. My host brother told me a couple of weeks ago that a train used to pass through a large portion of Ecuador, and the now defunct tracks out back were once a part of that line. He said that since the trains didn't pass very often, when one came through Ambato all the kids in the neighborhood would hear it rumbling by and run to the tracks to wave at the passengers looking out. At some point during that conversation he mentioned that there are still some parts of the line functioning, and the most visited section leaves from the nearby city of Riobamba.

I did more research about the train and learned that the Riobamba section runs for several hours and culminates in an interesting stretch of track known as La Nariz del Diablo (the devil's nose). La Nariz del Diablo is a section of track which requires the train to reverse directions several times to zig-zag down a particularly steep section of a mountain. Additionally, I read from various sources that the train that leaves from Riobamba is famous because passengers are permitted to sit on top of the train for the duration of the ride as it passes through beautiful mountain scenery that includes great views of some of the area's prominent volcanoes. Some of the words I saw associated with the train ride included: exhilarating, hair-raising, and thrilling (remember these adjectives, because they will be necessary to contrast with reality to understand the extent of my disappointment later in the story).

When I found myself with nothing to do last Saturday, I remembered the train and convinced some of my friends to go to Riobamba with me and spend the night so we could buy tickets to get a good seat on top of the train that would be leaving the next morning at 7am.

(Aside: I've said many times that Ambato is a great place to live and I am very happy I ended up working here. With that being said, Ambato is the ugliest real city I have seen in Ecuador yet. Since Riobamba is only an hour away, I expected it to be a smaller and less impressive version of Ambato. It was small like I expected, but when we walked around I was surprised to see that the streets were very alive and the buildings were noticeably nicer than what we typically see here in Ambato.)

When we got off the bus and headed to our hotel, I walked into what appeared to be the train station (judging by the tracks leading out of the building) to try to buy tickets. It was there that our expectations for the trip started their sharp spiral downward into disappointment. I asked a guy who worked there where we buy tickets and he said a word I didn't understand. He repeated it and what I took away from the conversation was that we needed to buy tickets at "Alausí" and something about a bus. I assumed that the bus station in Riobamba was called Alausí and that the train now left from there instead of the old station.

I went to the reception desk at the hotel we were staying at to find out where exactly in Riobamba the Alausí station was and how we could get there. She was visibly stunned by how misinformed my question was and then set me straight. She told me that Alausí is the name of a city an hour and a half away from Riobamba, and we had to go there to get the train now. I looked on a map in the lobby, and it turned out Alausí was pretty much the end of the line and the train ride would only be about an hour descent and return through La Nariz del Diablo instead of a four hour journey through the mountains.

Alausí: Quichua for "not a bus terminal in Riobamba"

I thought, whatever, as long as we get to ride on top of a train down a mountain named after a body part of the devil I'll feel like I got the experience I set out for. Unfortunately, even that small desire was crushed when I asked the woman what time we would need to get to Alausí to get tickets to ride on top, and she told me that they no longer let passengers ride on top. The reason? Two years ago a cable came too close to the top of the train and decapitated two Japanese tourists. Yikes.

When traveling, things don't always go according to plan. What separates the traveling babies from the traveling pros is being able to make the best of whatever you've got to work with. After breaking the very disappointing news to my friends who I had convinced to come with me, I was very pleased to see that no one made as much as a disappointed groan; everyone agreed we should continue with the modified trip. That's what I'm talking about.

I was further impressed with two of my American friends who met us in Riobamba much later because they missed their bus stop at Riobamba and ended up stranded at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, and my Ecuadorian friend who couldn't stay the night in Riobamba so she took a bus at 4:00am to meet us on the bus to Alausí for our compromised trip. Uh, can you say "Champ Wagon"?

Ari was not pleased

The next day we took the bus to Alausí and walked to the train station only to find out that (I can't make this stuff up) tickets for the train had already been sold out. At that point the group got really upset and we tried to get on the train anyway. We argued in English, Spanish, and even resorted to more childish methods such as pulling papers out of the "pick a number" distributor in the office, all to no avail.

After a few minutes of moping, our group pulled it together and yet again made the best out of the situation. We couldn't ride the train down the tracks, but there was no reason why we couldn't just walk down them, so that's exactly what we did. We got to see all the same scenery as the people on the train and we were outside already so we could take as many pictures as we wanted. The only slightly scary part was hopping off the tracks when we heard a train coming.

If I keep botching transportation on trips like Quilotoa and Alausí every weekend, my quads are gonna get huge.

At the end of the tracks we ate lunch then started working on how to get back up to Alausí. We ended up hiring some guy with a pickup truck to bring us to a major road where we could catch a bus back to Ambato.

When the truck arrived there was already an unfriendly dog in the back where we were going to sit. We fed it some bread and it calmed down, but I still sat as far away from it as I could in the back of the bed. That was a good idea until we started bumping around and I realized that the car was beat up and the door latch probably wasn't in good enough condition to handle someone's full body weight slamming against the door.  For safety, I latched onto an unwilling Ariana's arm. If that door opened I was either being saved or bringing someone down with me.

Me, Ari, Lis, and Will. You can't see in this picture, but we were in fact riding in the back of a truck.

Amanda fears nothing

I have been in Ecuador long enough now that catching rides in the back of a stranger's truck is no longer a novelty. However, this particular truck ride took a turn for the ridiculous when two kids jumped on the back of the truck with live crabs in their hands. Dead crabs freak me out enough, so I was very uncomfortable the entire time they were waving crustaceans in my face. Soon after they jumped on the truck and we started moving again, the dog fell off and it was the funniest thing I had seen in months. Everyone started screaming that the dog had fallen off to alert the driver to stop the car, and one of the kids grabbed the dog and threw it on top of my legs. The dog was flipping out a little when one of the kids dropped a crab on me, then I started freaking out and laughing hysterically at the absurdity of the situation. It was a new twist on the usual Ecuadorian truck bed ride for me.

The zig-zag in the mountain is La Nariz del Diablo. (Not pictured: El Codo del Diablo)

Another funny thing that kept happening throughout the trip was people asking my Ecuadorian friend Lis what tour company she was with, because that's really the only plausible explanation for one Ecua rolling with a group of six gringos.

Even though nothing went according to plan on this trip, we still had fun footing it and it turned out to be a memorable weekend for other reasons. Since the trip was my idea, I'm crossing my fingers that the numerous malfunctions we experienced will exempt me from having to plan any more group trips in the future.

School's Out

This Thursday was the end of my second semester teaching English at SECAP. I can say with confidence that this semester I was much more organized and I was better in front of my classes than I was last semester. This semester I had about half as many students as I had last time, and I was surprised by how different it is teaching a group of 11 students compared to a group of 24. Having fewer students means they are easier to handle as a group and everyone gets more chances to talk and participate in class, but it also means that there is much less energy in the room to begin with. The first semester my goal was getting everyone to focus their energy on the task at hand, whereas this past semester I found myself needing to get the class riled up at the start so they were awake and willing to participate.

This semester I was also much stricter about attendance, something that was a problem my last module. Round two I made two tardies equal one absence, and eight absences an automatic fail. I felt like kind of a jerk on Thursday failing two students with passing grades in the class because they missed too many classes, but I have learned that leeway on things that sometimes seem trivial (like being a minute late to class) shows students that they can do whatever they want. If you want to teach English like a boss, sometimes you've got to lay down the law.

Another thing I am learning the more I teach is that teaching a foreign language is much more than teaching students how to translate their ideas into English. Someone's ability to be good at using a foreign language (particularly writing) is dependent on their ability to use their own language. For instance, writing is not something that is intuitive by any means. Good writing is hard work even in the writer's mother tongue, so when a student doesn't understand the principles of adequate writing in his own language, he has incredible difficulty writing acceptable English. This is particularly frustrating in regards to punctuation. The majority of my students don't know how to put together sentences, and their essays usually end up looking more like long lists of sentence fragments or a page of loosely connected ideas strung together with commas. Of course, that is not to say that bad writing is exclusive to Spanish speakers; it is mostly due to the terrible writing I have seen in the English language that makes me believe that I could be a writer back home if I don't ever get into med school.

Butter Me Up

I have seen students in the States try to butter their teachers up with the hope of getting something in return—usually a grade—but they always try to be subtle about it so that the teacher doesn't realize what is happening (because no Embryology professor wants to believe that she gave a student a better grade because he gave her a disc with a fetus design on it). My students try to win brownie points from me sometimes, but it is never even close to subtle and it is always embarrassingly shameless.

In one of my classes this past week a student came in early and handed me a box of cookies. When I was three cookies in, she jumped to the point and asked me if she could leave because she had to do something with her family. I felt like I had been used, but the cookies were so delicious that I let her go and finished the box in disgrace at being so easily manipulated.

Another student who had cooked dinner for the entire class one night failed due to absences. On Thursday when I was giving out the grades the entire class was essentially staging a protest in the classroom trying to convince me to pass her, and she tried to make me feel guilty by saying, "But teacher, I cooked you dinner!" I'm proud to say that I didn't let that one go, but it was ridiculous to see a 26 year old woman trying to argue that point.

A funny student of mine had seen somewhere on T.V. that students in the States give apples to their teachers. He was failing at one point late in the semester, and I heard him joke to his classmates that he was going to bring the teacher a watermelon to save his grade (bigger fruit means bigger points, right?). Since he passed the class he never did bring me that watermelon, but next semester I might trick him into thinking he is failing to see if he actually does it.

Break

I have two weeks off now before I begin my third and final semester teaching here in Ecuador. I am planning to visit the last parts of Ecuador that I am interested in seeing before I return to the States, namely cities in the south like Loja, Vilcabamba, and Machala. Ecuador is a small country, but there are certainly a lot of cool little places to see. I can't say that teaching is my calling in life, but I also can't complain about the vacation time.

Teacher Traveler

I recently wrote an article for a teaching traveling website called teachingtraveling.com. If you are at all interested in teaching abroad there are a lot of interesting articles on the site, and you can check out my piece here.