Hiking in the Andes

Left: On the rim of Pasochoa's crater. Right: The descent.

We’ve been in the city a lot and Thad (another NILI) and I have yearned to see more of the outdoors. This was our first free weekend so yesterday we decided to start by hiking Volcán Pasochoa (13,778 ft). We didn’t realize how long it would actually take to get to get there, and we left later in the morning after his roommate, Victor decided to come. Even though the mountain is only 20 miles south of Quito, it still took us three buses and a 4x4, about three hours each way. This is because we live in the north part of the oblong city. The park entrance fee was $2 for locals and $10 for foreigners, and this seemed ridiculous! Thad and I pulled out our censos (Ecuadorian ID Cards) and told the lady that we were living in Quito, and luckily she only charged us the local price. Score!

Summit Post (the mountaineering website) lists Pasochoa as a five-hour hike with 2,700’ elevation gain, but the bus dropped us off near the lower park entrance and we ended up on the eight-hour trail that was 4,800’ to the top. We didn’t have time to summit before dark, but we still had an awesome five-hour hike and made it to 12,400’ (about 3,500' up), and we hiked along the crater rim and final stretch of the mountain. The Andes are really beautiful and there is a lot of vegetation on the volcanoes. We want to do a lot more hiking here, but now know that we have to leave a lot earlier in the day. It would be a lot easier to have a car, but we both agreed that it would be too scary to drive here. The trip home was interesting though. We had hired a pickup truck to drive us four miles down a dirt/stone road to the park entrance but there were no vehicles waiting for us when we got back. We hiked about two miles (partly uphill) before we saw a passing truck and hitchhiked. We were so glad to get a ride because it got dark as soon as we made it back to the main road.

The first bus from Amaguaña to La Marín (South Quito terminal) was very strange. I was joined by a drunk guy who repeatedly introduced himself (five or six times) and asked me my name and a lot of other questions. Whenever there was a break in the conversation he held out his hand asking if we were friends and I would say yes just to humor him. In a drunken moment he thought Thad was my girlfriend and tried to climb across me (awkwardly grabbing my leg) to kiss him on the cheek, a traditional Ecuadorian greeting. After being rejected, he asked if Thad was Chinese and introduced himself again. A woman with a baby got on the bus and he got up to give her his seat, but that wasn’t much better. With the baby partly on my lap she began to breastfeed and I had no choice but to stare ahead at my drunk friend who was dancing to the salsa music.

When she left, he reclaimed his seat and began the whole process again. I decided to become more of a clueless gringo and “couldn’t” understand a lot of what he said. He got frustrated a few times and rattled on about how he wished he could speak to me in English. The only word he could say was “goodbye,” which was sweet to hear after we arrived in his neighborhood. Afterward a few kids sat next to me and started asking each other how to say things to me in English, and they quizzed each other on what the US was like. When I couldn’t keep a straight face any longer I told them they could just ask me, and I was flooded with questions. We finally arrived at the transfer station and boarded a trolley bus that was a lot more normal. The third bus, however, included a pissed off old man who started yelling at the driver after he stalled the bus on a hill. Soon he was yelling again and the driver stopped the bus to storm back and get in his face. Other passengers were yelling at the old guy but I couldn’t understand what they were all saying. Reluctantly, he sat down and we continued on as if nothing happened. Finally, a fourth bus home was our lucky number seven for the day. It was so good to finally get back to the campus!

Here are a couple other things that happened this week:

On Wednesday we had a field trip to the Ballet Jacchigua, a cultural interpretive dance. Before entering we had to have a Latino buy all of our tickets so we wouldn’t be charged a lot as foreigners. (They can really make money off us…) It was a big production, with live Andean folk music, 90 dancers, and over 6,000 lbs of costumes and props, but it was a small atmosphere of less than a hundred people. Beforehand I thought it would be boring, but it was really an interesting expression of their society. It’s funny because a lot of them were foreigners and after spending a month with only Latinos, I get culture shock from seeing other white people. When I told my teacher this she mentioned that I haven't visited Gringolandia, the local name for La Mariscal, Quito's tourist-filled district.

On Tuesday we began our weekly service project, working with children at the local dump. Many families lived there before the government deemed it unsafe, and now there is a daycare for children of employees that is run by volunteers. The kids (aged 4-10) were definitely a challenge, and you can tell they have harder lives at home. The boys didn’t talk at all, even when we asked them questions like their names. For the most part I played Lincoln Logs with a group of them, and a kid fully dressed as Spiderman kept jacking my house segments and adding them onto his. Another kid whacked me on the head with a giant log and I did my best to scold him, but that was difficult in Spanish. We played with them for a couple hours and learned that it will be an interesting work experience. It will definitely be good to put on my teaching resume though.

Well, that's all for this week. Hasta Luego!