TEST PHOTOGRAPH; FUTBOL MONDIALE 2006 ; SIGHTSEEING AROUND QUITO
Quito, Ecuador, Thursday, June 15, 2006

Test Photograph

This is another attempt to get photographs on this blogsite. We don't have a camera at present so these will have to be older pictures until we get a new waterproof!) camera. Enjoy!

This picture is of a booby that hitchhiked with Vilisar for a couple of days on the way to The galapagos



Futbol Mondiale 2006

It’s late morning. The whole of La Mariscal is cheering and tooting car horns for the 3:0 win by Ecuador over Costa Rico in the World Soccer Championships in Germany. I have had enough football for a while and decided that, after picking up some money from the ATM at the Banco de Guayaquil at Amazones and Colón, we would drop by Mango Tree Café, now our favourite cafe, and get just a cup of good coffee.

This has become part of our plan, too, to keep our day-to-day costs down: we had taken to eating a late breakfast and an early dinner, i.e. only two meals a day. When you are four people, eating out, even in Ecuador, where things are cheap by comparison, can become expensive. Instead of a full breakfast somewhere, therefore, that will end up costing four of us about $17 with taxes and tips, I now eat fruit and a P&J sandwich in our room and only look for a good cup of coffee outside.

Good coffee, I note in passing, is hard to come by in Ecuador. They may grow it here and in Columbia and Bolivia, but most people drink Nescafé. If it is upscale you will get it from a coffee dispenser behind the counter just like we had in our offices in Germany. More likely you will get a cup of lukewarm water or milk and a jar of Nescafé set in front of you. It’s a hot-- well, warm drink that tastes vaguely of coffee. But it is definitely not coffee. Mango Tree Café or The Magic Bean Café, on the other hand, have espresso machines and steam the milk if you want café con leche.

Despite the hour (0840), the bank is deserted and the streets are nearly empty of cars and pedestrians. Everyone is somewhere watching the game. Every pub and café is packed and the noise of rapid-fire football commentary in Spanish is everywhere in the air. (The Ecuadorian announcers describe the game as if it were being broadcast on radio, i.e. as if you cannot see anything for yourself. I assume therefore that the same commentary does in fact go to radio listeners.)

On the way back from the bank we spot a tiny panaderia cum cafeteria along the street and decide to try it out. Of course, they have not one but two TVs tuned to the Ecuador game. But we assume it might be cheaper than Mango Tree, and we decide to get a bun and a coffee there by way of trying it out for the future. The game is good and soon we are hooked. But the twenty-somethings watching the game are even more entertaining. Two young women there, for example, become so excited when Ecuador is closing on the Costa Rican goalie that they begin to shriek, jumping up and down, even knocking their chairs over backwards. Everyone in there but us is wearing a yellow Ecuador football tricot. Whenever a goal is actually scored, they and everyone else in there begins cheering hysterically, jumping up and down the while. The din is terrific in that tiny place. The people are so happy for their country and keep shouting, “Ecua! Ecuador!” At one point, one of the girls asks me where I am from. When I say Canada and Germany, they don’t know how to react: Germany is the next big, big hurtle for Ecuador’s Mondiale hopes. They have to been Germany to get to the next level. The game is on the 20th. With the game over, the people continue cheering and now pour out into the streets where the horns of the flagged cars start cruising up and down and the people join in a display of mass friendship and national unity. The people of this little country are so proud of their team and its presence at the world championships. They have now won both of their games at this level (versus Costa Rica and Poland).

Sightseeing around Quito

We have been active in investigating Quito’s attractions now that Antonia and William are here. In an earlier blog, I wrote a few days ago about visiting the St. Augustine Church and the Cathedral as well as Independence Square. Now the four of us take Tuesday to visit the Church and the Museum of St. Augustine (Augustinian Order of monks), La Merced Church and San Francisco Churches (Franciscans) and the Museo de Ciudad (City Museum). The churches are free. I want very much to visit the Society of Jesus Church (known locally as La Compaña). Although we have been told that the museums are all free on Tuesdays, only the City Museum actually adheres to this policy, it seems and they seemed a little surprised that we would ask them about it. However, Kathleen is the only one to pay the full adult price: the kids and I all get generously-reduced rates. In each case the museums were by no means heavily frequented while we were there and we had our own guides, which greatly enhanced our visits.

In the Augustin Museum’s golden chapel, where either Ecuador’s Declaration of Independence or its Constitution was signed in 1809 (the Cathedral makes the same claim, I seem to recall), and where some of the heroes of that movement are buried, we crawl down a narrow ladder through a one-metre by one-metre hole in the floor - somewhat creepy - into the crypt that opened up to one side into a whitewashed chapel about the size of our boat. On either side the wall have little arches. They were cemented closed, but are labelled with the names of the remains interred there. By contrast with Italian churches, where you are just as likely to encounter bones stacked up to the ceiling, once down the ladder here, the chapel is clean and white and well-lit.

Many of the Order’s treasures are in the museum instead of in the church where the climate unfortunately plays havoc with them. Our guide insists, however, that the climate is much drier and less dirty here in Quito than, say, in Guayaquil where salt and humidity are much more intensely present. She is also very good at pointing out significant style differences amongst the various epochs of local history and the differences between Spanish and local art. While the basic baroque and rococo styles are similar, locally they made much more frequent use of flowers and grapes or other fruits and less use of putti and angels, for example. Earlier Christs, Marias or St. Augustines were carved cedar and then painted. They came from either the Quito School or from Peru and Bolivia, where there were also thriving schools of artists. As Colonial Latin America became richer and richer on silver, gold, textiles and agricultural products in the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries, the demand for religious sculptures outran supply. Later figures were basically tailors’ dummies with painted wooden heads and hands. The bodies were covered with richly embroidered robes only. Baroque and rococo figures showed more flesh (legs, arms, necks and heads) and had glass eyes. By the 19th Century, the figures were completely cloaked (like what nuns wear) and often had their eyes either painted or closed in a stunned or ecstatic look, depending how you see them.

One day, while William chooses to take a day off from sightseeing, Kathleen Antonia and I take a bus trip out to Calderon, a small town to the northeast, where a tradition of marzipan figures introduced by a Belgian monk centuries ago is continued to this day. Of course, marzipan (almond paste) is no longer used, only flour, glue and water. We hang around in one workshop where young women are painting figures in the back of the store. None of the figures are large and most are small, tiny even. They use a toothpick, for example, to paint the facial features of some Christmas nativity scenes that fit into a walnut shell. Antonia satisfies her souvenir and Mitbringsel needs for a few dollars and Kathleen and I buy an 8-inch high representation of an indigenous woman in colourful garb to hang on the bulkhead of Vilisar’s main cabin. We intend as well to get some colourful textile hangings in Otavalo in a few weeks.

Yesterday after breakfast, we all catch a taxi up to the lower station of the Teleférico, the Swiss-built cable-car that travels part-way up Mount Pichincha, Quito’s Hausberg and an active volcano. The city centre is about 2800 metres high; the Bergstation is 5100 metros de altura. We had been told that we could either walk from there to the peak in a five or six-hour march or hire horses for $2 each and ride up. Maybe on the weekends there are horses, but there are none today. We decide that storming the peak is not quite our thing and settle for a walk partway up the mountain. We are above the tree-line and everything is covered with lush grass which gets rain almost every afternoon. Like the mountains we saw coming up in the bus from the coast, there are paths and roads cut across the mountains.

The view down over Quito from the cable car is fabulous. The air in the morning is clear and the city, strung out north-south for miles is clearly visible. In the distance to the northeast a snow-covered mountain peeks out from its headdress of white, billowy cloud. It is the active volcano Cayamba, about fifty miles away, one of several including Pichingcha.

Bizarrely, on the way down in the quiet and fast Gondola, we get a call on the cellphone from Kathleen’s sister in Los Angeles, California; bizarre because here we are hanging in midair in the Andes of South America and talking with smoggy old LA.

Today is a quiet day of hanging around town, drinking coffee, writing up our blogs, checking emails and the like. William is watching football at Hostal New Bask, hanging out with the backpackers. Kathleen has been really busy in recent days with her proofreading. I wait in vain for some translating work.

After breakfast at one café, we move back over to Mango Tree to write and chat. It’s a good place to meet people. We run into Jenial (spelling?) from California, who has been a big help at steering us to good eating spots and, as it turns out, to rural volunteer opportunities that we have been giving some thought to recently. I also meet Sebastian, a Frenchman and a PhD in anthropology, who lived for his doctoral thesis with a warlike tribe in Papua- New Guinea. (He says Mandant on the north coast is like paradise but to avoid Port Moresby on the south like the plague because it is very dangerous, dirty and ugly). His family has hotels and he is building a five-bungalow up-market hotel in Oriente Province near the Amazon. I also meet an Australian named Jacob who has been around South America for quite a while.

Between breakfast (and the Ecuador-Costa Rica game), I drop into the office of Volunteer Abroad Canada to enquire. It turns out that this is a commercial enterprise based in Canada. Their main clients are well-heeled parents of university students who want their children to have an overseas and volunteering experience but do not want to just let them wander off by themselves. The parents pay around $3,000 for the children to volunteer. VAC baby-sits, i.e. picks them up at the airport, has dorms for them, gets them Spanish tuition and places them at one of the projects they are linked with. The “marketing” is done by Travel Cuts, a travel agency in Canada. I would have to deal directly with Travel Cuts or the head office in Canada and pay a lot to work through VAC.

In fact, volunteering is not so easy. You would think that, if you are volunteering and perhaps even paying your own way to Ecuador, you would at least receive room and board. Not so. There are very few volunteer opportunities where you do not have to pay also for your room and board. In Ecuador, for example, it is normally about US$ 250 and upwards. The volunteer work can be quite varied but most of it appears to be teaching English to children, though there are also projects involving building latrines or organic farming.

Through Jenial, we learned of two volunteer opportunities that do not expect us to pay cash. One is in the Oriente Province and is called Yarini Lodge. It is 60 miles up a tropical tributary of the Amazon. The other we knew about already because they have a storefront office in Bahia de Caráquez. It is a tropical organic farm called Rio Machacho. In Canoa, about fifteen miles from Bahia, volunteers live in tree houses and work around the farm or village teaching English. Jenial was really enthusiastic about Rio Machacho. It would mean travelling back down to Bahia de Caráquez, which of course has cost implications and would mean bringing the kids back up to Quito to fly out again (William flies a few weeks before Antonia.) But we could check on the boat and perhaps do the bottom painting.

All will depend upon Kathleen’s schedule for conducting workshops. The first one will likely take place in Quito two weeks from now and last probably fourteen days. Trying to work other things into this programme is problematical. But things generally work out. Watch and pray!