Mushroom clouds mi culo: Volcanoes don´t scare us!

The rolling green mountains and rushing rivers have earned Baños the name pedazo de cielo, piece of heaven. What better place to recoup from our ayahuasca experience than a somewhere appropriately named ¨baths¨ or ¨bathroom¨, a spot we still visited frequently throughout the week?

An onslaught of internationals litters the city, creating a diverse ambiance that helps a traveller feel at home. With book exchange cafés, murals on corner shop walls and a variety of world foods to pick from, Baños felt like a little Eugene nestled in the mountains. Except the Baños equivalent of Spencer’s Butte, Volcan Tungurahua, shoots four mushroom clouds an hour that cover cars (and contact lenses) with ash. In case you hadn’t heard in the news, since the end of December, Tungurahua has been it’s most active since 2006, when the city of Baños was evacuated. This info didn’t faze us; we spent 5 full days hiking, cycling, waterfall-watching, grubbing on EXCELLENT comida, and bathing in the local hot springs. While mingling with locals in the neighboring town of Rio Verde, we picked up some custom-made jewellery…. And the volunteer opportunity we’d been hoping for.

What fell into our laps was the chance to teach English and Computers in a small school located 15 minutes by bus from Baños. Without such topics currently being taught, the children in Rio Verde are at an extreme disadvantage once they begin High School in Baños. Rather than paying the thousands of dollars volunteers have paid before to teach in Rio Verde through a foundation in Quito, we will be able to stay with a family for the month and receive food and board for a few hundred dollars. Looks like we’ll be extending the trip for at least a month, doing what we’d hoped we would once we made the right connections and found an ideal city to set up shop in….. a place close enough to paradise but out of the reach of lava flows, falling rocks, or anything else the volcano may spew in the next few weeks.

By the time we boarded a bus to Ambato, Baños´ tourist population had dropped significantly. With every rumble from the mouth of the volcano, we were happier to be on our way north. A night in Ambato with an amigo Ecuatoriano whom we met at the Gran Ritual, had us celebrating local-style. He helped us find a classical guitar to purchase, the one missing element of our trip up until now, and we strummed it in the woods with him and his band mates (yes, reggae DOES exist in the sierras of Ecuador), smoked hookah and stopped by a live hip-hop concert. Next month, Jorge is putting on an international music festival, in which his band, Pan de Agua, and many others will jam. We can’t wait.

The following day brought by bus through the clouds to a small town at 3854 m. (about 11,500 ft.) called Quilatoa. The pueblo`s population isn’t listed in Lonely Planet; it was created by an increasing number of tourists coming to the Laguna Quilatoa, Crater Lake’s rival which rests at the town’s edge. A 4 hour hike around the rim brought us to the conclusion that it wasn’t as big as Crater Lake, but equally as beautiful. The emerald green water reflected the steep, heavily vegetated slopes leading up to jagged peaks, which we struggled to climb at such an altitude. After a chilly night’s sleep, we returned to Quito to feast on sushi (that’s right, SALMON in Ecuador!!!) and rest up before heading to Mindo, a tiny, saturated town in the rainy cloud forest 2 ½ hours north of the capital. A high-altitude jungle, the cloud cover holds in heat and creates a tropical environment which keeps you moistly comfortable. It has rained non-stop since we got here, providing us hours of mud-stomping…errr…hiking through beautiful forests. It also hums us to sleep at night, along with the never-ending drown of birds and insects. We continue to rest our soggy bones here before heading back to Quito to stay in a house with some friends we met in Quilatoa, followed by two weeks returning to the Amazon to volunteer at Yachana with the FUNEDESIN Foundation.

The photos say it better than we can:

http://picasaweb.google.com/clapoma/BaOsLagunaQuilatoaAndMindo

Who´s Trail?

Valuable excerpts from ¨The Gringo Trail¨ by Mark Mann, a book we found which seems to parallel our adventures. We highly recommend this book to any fellow traveler and anyone who would like to get an interesting and poetic description of a journey through South America. The author has also done his research, demonstrated by his thorough knowledge of colonial and indigenous history and extensive bibliography…

El Oriente (the rainforest of Ecuador)
¨For the next four days Delfin and Laureano showed us the jungle. They showed us trees. Trees as wide as a house. Hollow trees big enough to sleep inside. Parasitic trees that grew around other trees and eventually strangled their host. We swung Tarzan-like from gigantic hanging vines and swam in warm, muddy rivers full of dead branches and rotting leaves. We canoed down tiny streams, ducking under fallen tree-trunks, with vegetation arching over from the banks to create a living tunnel of plant life. On the ground, beneath the shady canopy of large trees, the forest floor was surprisingly open and easy to walk through. Finding your way was a different matter.
´Don´t you ever get lost?´ I asked Laureano, after we´d spent a morning following him through an endless maze of apparently indistinguishable trees.
´Yes, sometimes. But sooner or later, I always come to a tree that I recognize. Like that big one there. Just as you recognize buildings in the city. THEY all look the same to me.´¨

¨Electric-blue butterflies as big as my hand danced past. Shafts of sunlight filtered through the forest´s leafy ceiling like beams illuminating a Gothic Cathedral. Ants´ nests as big as cars sent out giant tentacles of busy leaf cutting workers; insect motorways that radiated from the central megalopolis of the nest, clearing paths through the tangled debris of fallen vegetation on the forest floor.¨

¨I felt as if we´d entered a vast lung; warm, damp and organic, pulsating with life.
´This is the world center of biodiversity´ Mark enthused. ´There could be a million different life-forms within a mile of us – all fighting, competing, living off of each other, living in symbiosis with others. You name it, and it´s probably out there somewhere, close by. Every conceivable evolutionary strategy – there´s a plant or animal or insect doing it around us now.
´Imagine the world mapped according to consciousness. Every life source registers a point, brighter or weaker depending on how complex it is. People, animals, insects. Even a plant is conscious, in a sense. It reacts to its environment, and that´s all consciousness is, at a basic level. The capacity to absorb and respond to stimuli. All around us – millions of little points of consciousness. There can hardly be a single spot on the planet more conscious than here.
´So this, ´ he concluded with a flourish, ´is the center of life on earth.¨

Quito
¨Quito stretches like a finger along the central valley of the Andes- what Alexander Von Humboldt called the ´Avenue of the Volcanoes´. About 12km long, it’s rarely more than two wide… In dimly lit side chapels, poor Indians knelt in silent supplication before impassive, blue-eyed portraits of Jesus, Mary and various saints, all drawn in the image of the people who had enslaved them.
The Old Town was full of Quechua faces. Short Indian men in felt hats and woollen ponchos struggled uphill, bent beneath the weight of huge sacks. Indian women in their voluminous woollen skirts and pork-pie hats tended little pavement stalls.¨

Sierra
¨The town´s buildings were mainly the plain concrete boxes, typical of Ecuadorian Andes. Steel supports protruded from flat roofs in anticipation of imaginary stories to come.¨

Bus Travel
¨[The bus] was another battered crate with no air-conditioning and windows that either didn´t open or didn´t close. The seats had been unscrewed and moved closer to allow extra rows to be inserted and more passengers crammed in. To young boys rode shotgun, hanging out of the door and touting for passengers at every stop.

¨Women held babies clamped to one, or both, nipples. Chickens poked their heads forlornly through holes in cardboard boxes. A piglet curled up in a basket under one seat. The roof and the isle and the gaps under the seats and the luggage racks and every other available space was stuffed with bags and boxes and colored bundles of food. Children wailed and a criollo pop cassette blared out. The back window was covered by a lurid life-sized transfer of the Virgin Mary. A glittering silver strip on the windscreen above the driver read ´God is my co-pilot.´
´So that´s God¨, then, ´I said, pointing to the slumped form of the fat co-driver, who was snoring loudly in the front passenger seat. ´I somehow imagined someone a bit more impressive.´
´Wouldn´t it be safer to let Him do the actual driving,´ Mark mused. God groaned and farted in his sleep. The driver crossed himself and muttered a prayer. The ignition made a few painful, chalk-on-blackboard screeches and sputtered into life. Diesel smoke billowed behind us. We were off.¨

¨Another night bus, this time from Potosi to La Paz. The bus rattles along, shuddering over the bumpy surface. These night journeys are merging into one continuous, interrupted dream. Always the same. Waking and dozing in fitfull sleep, ambient techno music on my walkman, legs jammed against the seat in front. Everyone twisting and turning to get comfortable, contorted bodies in rows of seats, always a crying baby somewhere. Outside, shadows of dark hills, more sensed than seen. Isolated buildings, solitary lights - how lonely they feel in the cold black of the altiplano.¨

Jungle Fever

Where to begin? With dark tribal paint still tattooed on our faces, we’ve emerged from three days in the el oriente (Amazon Rainforest) near the jungle town of Puyo. After taking a course on shamanism during Claire’s last term at the UO, we received an email from her Chilean professor with an invitation to attend the Gran Ritual, an annual purification ceremony performed by the Mura Shuar de Yawints community of the Ecuadorian Amazon. All who wished to find new energy, dreams and family were welcome to attend. We needed no convincing. Two full days of travel brought us to the tiny town of 16 de agosto, only accessible by loading the bus onto a makeshift ferry and floating it over a raging river.

Setting out with loaded bags, we hiked an hour through thick rainforest until we arrived at the Montaña Sagrada, an ancient burial of the only South American tribe remaining unscathed after the Spanish conquest. A small but strong community, the Shuar teaches its children to be fearless. And it shows. The second smallest children carry infants on their backs, wrapped tightly in shawls, and climb tall trees with gusto. Tzamerinda, the Shuar master of ceremonies and second chief, greeted us warmly: ¨Aqui estan en casa, hermanos (here you’re at home, brothers and sisters).¨After waging war with Peru on and off until 1995, the indigenous communities decided to begin coexisting peacefully; there is enough war and sickness in the world to fight between brothers, Tzamerinda said often.

He continued by describing the history of the Shuar community, only visited for the first time in 1999 by outsiders (Ecuadorians and internationals) after he dreamt during an ayahuaska session about his culture becoming archaeology. He was proud that it was still very much alive and became motivated to share it with other ¨brothers and sisters¨ of the globe. His vision included flying high above the earth, signifying a future full of travel; he has since visited over 50 countries in eight years with only $50 in his pocket. The way he articulated the need for peace, understanding and equality among us all was his ticket to these destinations, and for this reason he opened his doors for us to participate in the ancient cleansing ceremony.

Our experience atop the Montaña Sagrada was shared with only 15 other non-Shuar (both international and Ecuadorian) and an equal number of Shuar community members. We awoke the first morning at 4am after sleeping below baseball-sized spiders in a thatched-roof hut, to trek down a slippery trail to the river for a dip. This sacred bath began a day of fasting, music, dancing and traditional games (tug of war, a barefoot run through the forest complete with vine climb, spear battle and throwing contest) in order to prepare our cuerpos y mentes (bodies and minds) for the ayahuaska session at sundown. Sweating hard under a blazing sun surrounded by the humid Amazon, we wondered how we’d find the stamina to keep ourselves going all day and night. Tzamerinda assured us the weaker our bodies, the stronger our spirits and hearts; we were opening our minds up to the purifying experience to follow. Ryan was declared Campion (champion) and dominated the ancestral-style tug of war and spear throwing contests against Shuar men and other competitors. He was rewarded by a dance with the youthful 97-year-old Shuar abuelita without a grey hair on her head (note photos).

We were given names in Shuar (Claire was Ipyak, sacred plant signifying the life blood between all brothers, and Ryan, Iumpum, man of the universe), a final dose of many tobacco snortings and more chicha (a brew of fermented yuka masticated by the elder women of the community… apparently full of vitamins and energy….we were thirsty and it tasted delicious).

The moment of truth arrived when stood in line and chugged bowl after bowl of steaming ayahuaska brew. We downed six each before the caldron was empty, vomiting profusely after each dose. We then sat down in the darkness and were left in silence to dream. The sacred circle held us together; we could feel each others energy, but were instructed not to communicate, as the experience was our own, yo, and no one else’s.

Next thing we knew we were waking up again at 4am to the Shuar calls for our final cleansing in the chilly river. Much reflection during consultations with tribal elders about our sueños (dreams) ensued, followed by many thanks, dances and gifts. What an experience!!! We have been on recoup mode since yesterday. Slept for 15 hours last night, with frequent trips to the bathroom, ridding our bodies of the last of the green liquid (and anything else left). The goodbye was tough, as we felt we had found family in only 3 short days. You were all in our dreams that night, as we reflected over the year and made goals for the future. Thanks for the unconditional love and support. Can’t wait to see you in a few months.

We have arrived in Baños for a week or more of hiking among sublime peaks and active volcanoes. More to come soon. For photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/clapoma/XmasAndAONuevoInBahiaOrienteWithShuar