Long time no blog

Well, not THAT long, but we´ve done a lot in a little time.

Last friday we took off with our spanish school to a town called Otavalo (I can´t remember if I´ve already blogged this, but this internet is too slow for me to waste time checking). We spent the night there and had a great dinner... there were 14 of us from the school and, though we were from all corners of the world, we all stood out as Gringos (latin american term for white foreigners). It gave some insight into the hordes of asian tourists that clump together in downtown Victoria. Even though you want to experience the local culture to the fullest, it´s just so easy to travel in groups of english-speakers. I´ve also come to greatly appreciate the language skills of so many european travellers. So many people we have met have a native language like french or german, and then they learn english, and THEN they try to learn spanish. It´s very impressive, there was one fellow we really liked who was from France, would speak to us in fluent english, and was quite good with spanish. Whereas I have done my best to forget the little bit of french I know so as not to confuse it with spanish. Very impressive.

Alright, back to Otavalo. It was amazing to wander around the empty streets on friday night and then at 8am the next morning the whole town was absolutely PACKED with venders of all varieties. The indigenous people (who often speak Quechua... probably spelled wrong... as opposed to spanish) come out of the mountains into this town with all their goods on their backs. This can be huge sacks of potatoes, dead (or sometimes still living) pigs, vast quantities of hand-made clothes and linens, or sometimes fashionable clothes imported from China. It was amazing, and I spent all the money I had for the whole day within the first 2 hours, it was impossible to resist. Clay and I both got great alpaca sweaters, plus a few other little things. Most of us took the afternoon to go on a hike to a nearby waterfall. It was great, we had to hike through the outer edges of Otavalo and into a neighbooring indigenous community. It was our first real look at the poor indigenous people, and despite their poverty obviously being quite extreme, they were incredibly pleasant. Everyone wanted to say hello and ask where we were from (which is a complicated answer when you´re travelling with people from so many different places). The waterfall tourists were obviously the only form of income for the community, aside from the market which occurs 2 times a week. It´s quite a culture shock, to say the least.

Sunday we went to Mitad del Mundo, which is a town on the equator. Apparently there was this french convention ages ago that wanted to study effects at the equator, and they divided the world into four quarters. At each 90 degrees there was water, except for in ecuador. So there´s a big monument where the French put the equator. However, they were a little bit off (like 200m) so there´s a tiny little tourist trap at the real equator, where they do demonstrations. The water truly does swirl a different direction when it´s a meter left or right of the line. And it doesn´t swirl at all when it´s right on top, it just goes straight down. There was another wierd effect where it was harder to resist someone pulling down your arms or pulling your fingers apart when you were on the line, and the effect definetly exists, but neither clay nor I can explain it... it´s actually been bothering us for a while.

We then had THE WORST meal of my entire life. I swear to you, I could think of nothing but the fact that every other meal I had ever had was better than this one. It was a soup of chicken organs, I kid you not, it was revolting. I swear there was the inside of a stomach in there. Even though it´s interesting anatomically, I didn´t want that in my freaking soup. Oh and there was this blood pudding on the side that you were supposed to add. Needless to say, I went a little hungry that day. In general the food has been pretty good, but that was terrifying. I´ve now learned to only order things if I know what they mean, or at least can make an educated guess.

Then we went to Mindo, which is a town in the middle of the cloud forest (it´s what I picture when I think of the amazon jungle, with huge palms everywhere, bamboo, BIG spiders, etc... but I guess I still have to learn what the amazon jungle truly is, as this is on the westerly side of the mountains). I had a bit of a breakdown on the bus... as hard as I try to speak spanish correctly, there are some sounds I may never be able to make correctly, and some people are very rude about this. However, there was a great guy sitting behind us who explained to me at which random dirt road I wanted to get off, and helped us hitch a ride into town. We stayed at his family´s hotel, which was very remote but still en route to most important attractions. It was a beautiful place with little ponds, hammocks, many many different palm trees, and we celebrated clay´s birthday with a bottle of wine, a couple beers, and a good dinner. The next day we went for a huge walk to butterfly gardens (which was a bit expensive for what it was, but it was neat to see all the local butterflys, which can get really huge, in one place). We also spent a fair bit of time on the river, swimming and hiking. Though the greenery was different, the river was about the size of the Cowichan and it made me feel a bit at home. We had a very relaxing time in the evening, lazing about in hammocks and reading our books (ah! Where will we find more english books?)

Clay had a really terrible stomach flu that night and had to get up about every hour during the night. He said it ran a close second to the Norwalk virus. In any case, we laid low the next morning and went up to the canopy for a few zip lines through the trees in the afternoon. This wasn´t great for the stomach, but we had to do them before we left. In any case, he was all better by the evening. The next day (yesterday) we hopped a bus to Santo Domingo, which is an ugly city with (in my extremely limited opinion) rude and lazy people, that is only visited by anyone for it´s bus depot. Within a couple hours we caught another bus to Bahia de Caraquez, where we are now. A grand total of 10 hours on a bus, for $10 each. Bahia is beautiful, it´s on the ocean, it´s quiet, it´s wonderfully underdeveloped, and I love it. There´s so much to be said for the ocean, I had no idea how wonderful I would feel, how much it would seem like home, when I saw it again. It´s really like the language doesn´t matter at all now, because there´s one big thing that really feels like home. I think there needs to be some stability in a traveller, something that makes them feel comfortable even when they´re in the most bizarre places. I have so much respect now for people who travel alone, I don´t know how they do it, but I´m sure there must be some very difficult days.

Last night a bilingual guy we met on the bus chatted with our biker (think kabuki cab... a guy bikes you around on a little platform) and sent us to his family´s hotel even though I asked the biker to take us to a recommended hostel. It was a really nice ride, you could just make out the waves in the dark, but the hotel was too swanky for us. We walked a little ways but didn´t want to go too far with our big packs on (though it seems to be a safe little place) so we ended up with a quasi nice place for $10 each, which is pretty expensive, but it´s enjoyable with a nice restaurant and it´s right on the beach. We´ve decided to be a little fancy for 2 days (though a little fancy doesn´t include hot water... oh well, it´s not a necessity). I love it here so, even though there´s not a lot to do, we´re going to stay put for a day, sit on the beach, study our spanish, and chill out. And update the blog like mad.

So I´m sorry there´s no pictures, I´m in a little internet store so we don´t have our camera cord with us. As soon as we get to a hostel with internet I´ll put a bunch of good pictures up. And sorry about the long blog! It´s HUGE! But those of you who are reading from work will appreciate it.

Lots of hugs to all, thanks for checking the blog, we miss everyone. Pictures soon, I promise!

-Dawn