Random Awesomeness

This weekend turned out to be a relaxed weekend without any plans, and it’s our last free weekend of the semester (not counting mountaineering or group travel). I’m still recovering from a sinus infection so it was definitely good taking things easy. But we were able to do some cool stuff this week as well.

I have been thinking a lot about what I still want to do here in Ecuador, and while skimming through a guide book I found a phone number for a paragliding school. Jenna and Kelsey wanted to go too and we were told over the phone that two pilots would be availiable to fly us on Sunday morning. But we found out the spot in South Quito is hard to get to by city bus. One of the pilots lived close to us so we were told to meet up with him. Our instructions: take a taxi to a nearby cross street and some dude named Carlos would be waiting for us in a VW van. (Now, that doesn’t have sketch written all over it…) He turned out to be really cool though, and he was a good pilot: he’d been flying for fifteen years and is training for the world championships in Columbia.


Above: A Great Day for Paragliding...

The park is a grassy field on a large hill and a really popular place for paragliding. There are lots of people who go there to watch during the weekends, and we saw a lot of other paragliders, including the inexperenced. (One took off uncontrollably in the wind and another sent the crowd running away from his landing.) It was a bummer though because Carlos was the only tandem pilot that went. He had the girls to go first because they were lighter and each of their flights lasted about fifteen minutes. However, they didn’t have organized transportation to get back and they had to find their own ways. He and Jenna found a truck (after landing in a field of thorns), but after Kelsey’s flight they had to wait a long time for a city bus. I ended up waiting five hours at the park but by the time it was my turn, it was too cloudy and the wind had died. I was disappointed but I’m glad the others had a good time. I guess I saved $60, but that is super cheap compared to tandem flights anywhere else.

Another thing that I had wanted to do here was puenting. This is usually translated as ‘bungee jumping’, but it’s more of a type of bridge swing. (Instead of a giant stretchy cord, a cable is attached to the top of the other side of the bridge; creating a giant swing after the initial freefall.) Earlier in the semester I found the company that does puenting in Quito, but learned that they only set dates for groups of five or more. After waiting a long time, they contacted me this week with an invite to join a group on Tuesday night. Jenna was down and Josué and Thad wanted to come along too so we could all eat somewhere else for dinner. (We ended up going back to that amazing Mexican restaurant, for the third time.)

When our taxi brought us to the bridge, two guys were getting everything ready and it was a pretty good set up: two harnesses, lots of locking carabeaners, and good rope. They’ve been operating for eight years without an accident, so this fact alone made the $15 price tag more assuring. The bridge was about 120 feet high and in the middle of the city, so the traffic and city lights created an intense atmosphere. I was the first one to go and had a lot of adrenaline flowing. The only scary part is looking off the bridge leading up the jump, but I went backwards and afterward wished I’d gone forwards. My lower harness wasn’t exactly comfortable but overall it was a good experience. Unfortunately, it was too dark, rainy, and cloudy to get good pictures or video, but here is a YouTube video of what we did:



Wednesday we had a field trip to a museum of colonial archives, and there were a lot of paintings, sculptures, maps, and plant species. It wasn’t like a traditional museum, it was more like something you would see in a National Treasure movie and there was a lot of great hidden stuff. Afterward we went to eat lunch a traditional restaurant that had some interesting food choices. I put together the weirdest meal I’ve ever eaten: roasted guinea pig, intestine soup, a side of dried blood, and Sierrian chicha (a fermented corn drink). I shared the cuy (guinea pig) and got a nearly meatless sections of the head, back, and arms; which were really good but I didn’t like the skin. Also I like fried intestines, but the soup was funky. I only made it halfway through and was glad to finish someone’s pork fritada instead. The dried blood had the texture of sun-dried tomatoes with barely any flavor, but the chicha was good and a lot smoother than the homemade stuff I had back in August.


Left: Our NILI Group. Right: My Interesting Lunch.

That night we went to another Liga soccer game in the South American cup quarterfinals. This time it was against “Newell’s Old Boys” from Argentina (so random that their name is in English) and the stadium was a lot more crazy. The first match in Argentina was a 0-0 tie, so both team’s hopes of a championship were riding on this game. It was scoreless and intense throughout, but finally the Liga pulled through with an emotional goal in the 79th minute. This was a great game and now they advance to the semifinals, but I doubt we'll have time to go to anymore games.

This afternoon Josué, Thad, and I decided to head back to Colonial Quito once again. Our main goal was to check out the Casa de Alabado, a new Precolumbian art museum, and that turned out to be really cool. We also found an awesome handmade candy store, enjoyed batido smoothies (avocado, carrot, and mango), and got ripped off by a volunteer worker in the San Francisco cathedral. (He offered us a private tour for a small donation and after a lame five-minute walkthrough he asked us for five bucks.)

Sorry my blogs have been getting long. I’ve been getting in the habit of only writing every week. Anyway, this is our big climbing weekend so I’ll make sure to post when we get back. Here’s a rough itenerary of what’s going on: Saturday morning we’ll climb Volcán Rumiñahui (15,459’), Sunday we’ll hike up to Cotopaxi’s second refuge (15,748’), and Monday is our summit attempt (19,347’) starting at 1 am! This will be fun and I'll try to take some good pictures. Anyway, hasta luego!

Mindo

Wow, I have been getting behind on writing! I still haven’t written about the weekend yet, and there’s already other stuff happening. Anyway, I’ll try to catch up and I’ll start off with our trip to Mindo. Josué, Thad, and I wanted to do something fun this weekend, so we decided to return to the small touristy town, which is about two hours out of Quito. We had a brief stop there after our Santo Domingo trip and this was where we visited the amazing chocolate factory. There are a lot of outdoor things to do in Mindo and it is world famous for bird watching.

After class on Friday we packed our stuff and headed out. I’ve never been much of an ultra light packer, but in my 1000 cm3 Camelbak, I managed to fit a weekend’s worth of clothes and toiletries, along with my water filter, two liters of water, three oranges, and a jar of peanut butter (the only food I had left in my room). I was definitely proud of this packing job and the peanut butter turned out to be a good idea.

Every source on the internet said there was only one bus company direct to Mindo, but all of the locals told us otherwise. They said we could catch a bus every thirty minutes from the nearby terminal and this sounded good. However, we realized that these buses weren’t direct when we were dropped off in the dark at the crossroads about 5 miles out of town. A couple of locals told us to wait for a ride, and soon enough a small pickup truck with blasting salsa music turned at the intersection and offered us one. We hopped in the back and realized we picked the craziest driver. He sped down the winding road recklessly, passing other cars while we huddled in the back against our backpacks. Everyone in the cab was chain smoking and halfway down the hill the truck stopped so everyone could light up again. We were relieved when we finally pulled into town.

Finally we got to our lodging, which was at the chocolate factory, El Quetzal. The place is also a café and hostel and this turned out to be one of the best ideas ever. Our room had great beds and hot showers, and the whole place smelled like chocolate. That night we grabbed dinner in town (huge plates of food for $4) and we returned to relax with a brownie afterward. They were the best brownies I’ve ever had and our teacher always refers to them as the best in the world. Everyone raved about them in the guestbook and they are unexplainably amazing. We ended the night on a sugar high and had some good guy time. Haha, what happens in Mindo stays in Mindo.

Saturday morning we woke up and enjoyed an amazing free breakfast. My pancakes came with ginger syrup and tasted like donuts, and I also had a plate of fresh fruit and a batido de papaya, a fruit drink mixed with milk. Afterward we hit the town and found a travel guide to give us suggestions. There we hired a ride up to the hiking trails and were able to enjoy the outdoors with a variety of activities. We descended a steep slope, hiked along the river, saw some cool plants and wildlife, and went swimming under a waterfall. There was even a concrete waterslide in the middle of the jungle, and whoever had the idea to build that was a genius. But there was a sign in Spanish that instructed people to grab their feet and that confused me. I soon realized why when the slide went fast and momentum brought me on my back during the ten-foot fall into the river.



Top Left: Jungle Waterslide. Right: Our swimming spot.
Bottom Left: Leap of faith! Right: Josué going for it.

My favorite part of the day though was ziplining (in Spanish they use the English word ‘canopy’). There are huge canopy outfits in Mindo, but they are packed full of tourists and for this reason we decided not to do them. However we were lucky to find a privately run canopy in the middle of the jungle, which only charged $3 per run. It included a running leap of faith over a cliff that was super awesome, and the lines took us back and forth across a valley. I ended up doing it three times and the guy running it was super cool and didn’t charge me for the last one. The equipment was a lot less professional than ziplining outfits, but was still really safe to use. I think most ziplines go way overboard in safety measures for insurance purposes.

Afterward we each bought $1 chicken kebobs and fresh squeezed orange juice from a vendor at the trailhead. We were going to go tubing in the river, but once it started to rain we returned back to the hotel. There we split another brownie and found some more cheap food in town. We decided to relax and found a spa to get massages. Josué and I split an hour for $15 each and that turned out to be great. I was so relaxed I almost left without paying. (The masseuse was an American from Washington and I was surprised when I found out that her boyfriend’s family lives on my island and she travels there all the time. What a small world!) That night we each got another brownie with ice cream and mixed them with the peanut butter I brought. That was seriously the best dessert I’ve ever had! Pretty much in a nutshell our trip consisted of adrenaline and sugar highs.


Left: El Quetzal. Middle & Right: Enjoying Amazing Dessert!

Sunday we woke up and went tubing early in the morning. The cost was only $6 each and this included transportation to the top of the river. The tubes were tied together in a honeycomb shape and included two guides who rode with us and steered our makeshift raft. I was surprised how many huge rocks there were in the river, but we still were able to go through some class II and III rapids on our way down. A couple times we got stuck and the guides jumped out to move us.

Afterward we relaxed for the rest of the day and bought our return bus tickets, which was a good thing because we were running low on money. After paying the hotel for our room and brownie tab, we were left with about $8 combined. In our quest to find the cheapest lunch, we found a section of town that served cheap lunches to locals, and for $2.25 we each got a bowl of cow’s hoof soup, a plate of rice and meat, and a glass of juice. Sadly, we couldn’t bring any brownies home, but after our final bus transfer we made it back to campus with 31 cents to spare. Talk about cutting it close!



Top Left: Before the game. Right: Roommates.
Bottom Left: Cheering on the Liga. Right: Game action.

On Tuesday a group of us went to watch a local soccer game between LDU Quito (the local team known as the ‘Liga’) and San Felipe de Chile. This was part of the South American Cup, an annual tournament between the best pro teams in the continent. A few days before, the Liga lost to the Chilean team on the road and this was played on the day of the miner’s rescue. I imagine there was a lot of emotion involved when they pulled the upset. But at the game we went to, the Liga gave them a 6-1 beating and it was a lot of fun to watch. Also, our tickets were only $9 and we could sit near the field! The crazy section of the stadium (known as la muerte blanca, the white death) was so fanatical and passionate and I want to watch another game from there. Yoan and I were originally planning on being there until we decided to go with a bigger group.

Finally, yesterday (Wednesday) we had a field trip to La Capilla del Hombre, a local art museum that showcased the work of Oswaldo Guayasamin who was a humanist and expressionist influenced by Picasso. He worked to promote peace and indigenous rights and he reflected the hurt of misery of humanity in his artwork. The paintings were impacting and we learned about the history behind them. There were also some powerful quotes, one of which has still stood out to me: “I cried because I didn’t have shoes, until I saw a child who didn’t have feet.” On a lighter note, we went to lunch at a Mexican restaurant afterward that had amazing food and served habañero sauce. I ordered the biggest burrito I’d ever seen, and the ‘Super Machote’ was 50 cm (20 in) long and extremely delicious.


Above: El Super Machote!

Later there was a two for one deal at the cinema so a group of us went to see Piraña 3D (Piranha 3D). I was expecting to see a good horror movie about piranha attacks (a good thing to see before travelling to the Amazon), but the movie turned out to be kind of a joke and was more about teens partying over spring break. I found it sad that other cultures get their view of US youth culture from media like this.

Well that’s the gist of what went on the past few days. I also added some more pictures to my Andean Adventures album on Facebook. I will try to not get too far behind on blogging in the future. Hasta luego!