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.¨