HOME ON THE STRANGE
He sleeps with a chain saw
Got eyes like an outlaw
He takes a two smoke walk
He don't like to talk
As soon as he stepped foot on Ecuadorian soil, Supernova was immediately possessed by a violent assault of diarrhea. He hadn’t even eaten a speck of amoeba-laced Ecuadorian cuisine. It was the mere proximity to Ecuadorian restaurants that sent the intrepid traveler immediately to Quito International Airport’s bathroom where, after emptying his bowels, Supernova was forced to use his hands to wipe himself since there was, of course, no toilet paper in the stall. Supernova had foolishly forgotten to bring his own 12-pack of 100% recycled-content Trader Joe's toilet paper from the U.S.
It was a 14-day whirl wind vacation in the land of rainforests, intestinal parasites, and breakfasts, lunches and dinners consisting of rice and some mysterious source of protein. Vegetables were few and far between, although nearly everything served to Supernova by his generous hosts was 100% natural, straight off the host’s farm: yucca, varieties of banana, organic free range chicken (which, by the way, has nothing to do with the soft, bland ‘organic free range’ chicken you find in U.S. stores; Ecuador’s free range chicken really is truly free range since the chickens there spend their entire days walking all over the farm, thus making their meat tough and chewy so that you have to tear the meat off the bone like a cro-magnon); fish caught in Amazonian rivers by family members; organic eggs laid by the same chickens that are later slaughtered and eaten; a variety of tropical fruits; cheese harvested from the local cows, and to drink: abundant, non-stop, overflowing chicha (an all natural, alcoholic beverage made from pureed, fermented yucca – umm delicious……and absolutely no hang-over no matter how drunk you get from it).
Supernova’s rough itinerary of activities was as follows:
FEBRUARY 14
Fly to Quito on Copa Airlines with US$400 roundtrip ticket. Ecuadorian friend Cristian R. picks Supernova up at airport. The two then take a bus to the northern Ecuadorian town of Cayambe. The sound of the bus’s loud diesel engine brings back a flood of memories. Supernova meets Cristian’s new wife. The couple lives in a ridiculously tiny room with an even tinier kitchen, and a bathroom that requires Supernova to half-squat in order to get inside. The day Supernova arrives to Cayambe happens to be the day when the Cayambe inhabitants are parading statues of baby Virgin Mary and they light of fireworks in the middle of the street and sing hymns. Cayambe happens to be Ecuador’s epicenter of rose production where Ecuadorian rose workers are regularly exposed to heavy doses of pesticides. Supernova gets a haircut for US$1.50 and stays in a hotel for US$8 where the toilet doesn’t flush well, and the bed is saggy and moist.
FEBRUARY 15
Supernova and the married couple walk to the local open air market where abundant fresh fruits and vegetables are sold, as well cow meat, chickens and strange looking innards of all shapes and sizes. The stray dogs fight over the scraps of sheep stomach. After breakfast, Supernova returns to Quito airport where he hops aboard a 30-passenger prop plane operated by TAME Airlines. He flies to the southern Amazonian town of Macas. The plane ride is very bumpy, while the views of the rainforest and rivers are stunning. As the plane nears Macas, large swaths of rainforest have been destroyed in favor of cattle ranches. Macas stays in a US$8.00 hotel with sweeping vistas of the town and surrounding rainforest and cattle ranches. That same day, Supernova takes a bus to the nearby village of Sucua, home of Ecuador’s Shuar Federation. He immediately heads to the Shuar Federation where he spends the next four hours drinking chicha and conversing with a group of friendly Shuars. The young Shuar women are startlingly beautiful, already with children. Supernova returns to Macas that evening where he has dinner at a Chinese restaurant. The food does not taste Chinese; it’s just noodles buried under a thick pool of cheap, bottled Chinese sauce.
FEBRUARY 16
Supernova takes a taxi to the nearby massive river (I don’t recall the name of the river) and then has a delicious Ecuadorian breakfast consisting of eggs, bread, milk, coffee, and freshly made juice (which forces Supernova onto the toilet once again, but by now who cares?). Supernova then travels Southward to the lovely village of Mendez where he has lunch, takes a stroll around town and then crosses an old, rickety wooden bridge over another Amazonian tributary where he takes a hot hike into the rainforest (what’s left of it, that is). He meets an Ecuadorian who lived in New York for 20 years. The man is building a new home that has incredible views of the river. Such prime real estate would be worth millions in the U.S., but this house costs only US$30k to build. Supernova then continues traveling on a very bumpy dirt road to Gualaquiza. The route is sparsely populated with hardly any traffic, but with incredibly gorgeous views of intact rainforest. US multinationals and retailers would love to destroy this gem so that they could harvest the timber, mine for ore, and then build huge business parks, parking lots, tract homes, Walmarts, Starbucks, and strip malls. Supernova dines in Gualaquiza and then takes the final leg of the day’s journey to El Pangui where he stays in a US$6 hotel. El Pangui is a sleepy village in the province of Zamora-Chinchipe, which is where Supernova completed his Peace Corps Service some years earlier.
FEBRUARY 17
Travel to Los Encuentros to visit Shuar ayahuasca master Sebastian. Sebastian lives in a home about 1 mile’s walk from Los Encuentros. Supernova then returned to Los Encuentros to visit Lastenia, who years previously invited Supernova to a good time in bed. Now Lastenia has three children and lives in a hastily built wooden house where mosquitoes abound. Supernova then takes two more buses to his final destination of Chicaña, his original Peace Corps site. The village looks different. More roads have been built as well as new houses. Supernova later finds out that the Ecuadorian government has plans to fully ‘urbanize’ Chicaña, which means buying up all the farms, build lots of paved roads, construct thousands of cement block houses, and turn the now 500 inhabitant village into a full-on city over the course of the next couple of decades. The charm will be gone, the sterile cityscape will reign, and the rainforest will disappear. And that is what President Rafael Correa’s billboards mean when they say ‘Construction is a Citizen Revolution’.
FEBRUARY 18-26
Supernova stays primarily in Chicaña and its nearby environs with two visits to the county capital of Yantzaza, 45 minutes away.
• In Chicaña, Supernova participates in the festivities of Carnaval where the locals hold several dances that last well into the night.
• Supernova is invited one night to eat guinea pig (an Ecuadorian delicacy; to reject it is considered extremely rude) at a friend’s house. The friend raises several hundred guinea pigs in his back yard and, to kill a guinea pig for human consumption, he merely grinds the poor creatures face into the ground. The women in the group then flash boil the animal, after which they pull off the hair, and then throw the corpse onto a BBQ.
• A family invites Supernova to have lunch at the banks of a river during Carnaval. The river is filled with people who are enjoying the warm, inviting temperature of the water. It’s a wide, shallow, small-moving river that’s easy to bathe in.
• Supernova spends part of another day with a family that fishes a river using a plant called ‘barbasco’ that stuns the fish, making it easy to harvest them.
• One day in Yantzaza is spent at a Shuar indigenous people’s festival where the Shuar dress up in traditional clothing and perform traditional dances.
• Supernova accompanies a family to the farm of a friend who makes fresh cane juice and invites the visitors to harvest ‘chonta’, which is an edible fruit that grows on a tree that looks like a palm tree.
• Supernova plants 10 chonta trees with a friend on the land of a local family. The activity is arduous because Supernova must haul the 10 trees in a bag up a steep hill and, after a while, that bag feels very heavy. To make the task even more challenging, Supernova has borrowed a pair of boots from a friend, which are two sizes to small for yours truly. The boots create searing pain throughout the tree planting, but Supernova holds fast and continues on with the directive at hand. This was an activity that Supernova was looking forward to since reforestation of the Amazon is few and far between, and something which that precious rainforest truly needs.
• One night while walking back from ‘downtown’ Chicaña to his sleeping quarters, Supernova is overcome by yet another bout of diarrhea. With not a toilet in site, Supernova strips off his pants and underwear, squats over the dirt road and releases the ill inside, an explosive pastry of steam and petulance that scares off the nearby, lurking cows. He then continues to walk up the dirt road, naked from the waist down even as a passing car shines its lights on him. Supernova finally reaches a water faucet where he is able to wash himself.
• Supernova hikes for four hours deep in the rainforest on land owned by a friend. Waterfalls abound on a long stretch of mini-river that lies on the friend’s land. The hike is strenuous since the two hike on steep banks with no trail. Some climbing and jumping is required, as well as liberal use of the machete for cutting away thick vines and branches.
• Supernova drinks chicha nearly everyday. Chicha is a fermented drink made from yucca (manioc root), which is a very common starch grown all over the Amazon Basin.
• Traveled to a tiny little village called El Plateado, inhabited by Quichua and Shuar indigenous peoples. Supernova has a number of friends there. The zone is gorgeous with ample rainforest, although soon that will disappear as the Canadian mining companies make inroads for exploration and harvesting of ore.
• Towards the end of his vacation, Supernova realizes that the inhabitants of this land have true food security. The vast majority grow food on land that they own. In contrast, the vast majority of Americans are dependent on grocery stores for their food, thus forfeiting all food security to big multi-nationals. In L.A., it is virtually unheard of to grow crops at home, where the vast majority of homeowners bury their soils under grass. In one rare instance, Supernova recently saw a front lawn with corn growing on it.
FEBRUARY 27
Supernova takes 4 buses back to the southern Ecuadorian town of Catamayo (a 6 hour trip total) where he shacks up in a $10 hotel.
FEBRUARY 28
Supernova flies out of Catamayo to Quito on TAME Airlines. He then visits the tourist attraction Mitad del Mundo where the equatorial line lies. That night, he goes to a Mall which has a food court similar to those in the U.S. This food court has a KFC and many Ecuadorian fast food restaurants. What sets Ecuadorian fast food restaurants apart from those in the U.S., is the Ecuadorian ones provide their customers with real silverware and real plates. U.S. fast food restaurants wastefully give their customers disposable silverware and plates.
MARCH 1
Supernova returns to the U.S. on Quito-Panama-LAX route drinking plenty of whiskey and Panamanian liqueur. He uses and reuses his own mug for drinks. He does use one plastic cup over and over for the alcoholic beverages, and then puts it in his backpack for recycling upon arriving home. When the plane touches down at LAX, and the passengers exit the plane, Supernova is dumbfounded to see how many hundreds of used plastic cups are strewn about on the floor and on the passengers’ seats. The passengers exit blissfully ignorant of the mountain of trash they leave behind in the airplane, just another sign of how unsustainable the human population conquers poor mother earth. A Supershuttle whisks our intrepid traveler home to his apartment in the ‘hood’, where he finally crashes out in bed at 1:30 am March 2, totally exhausted but quite fulfilled from the trip -- although it does feel quite strange to return to L.A. after two weeks in the jungle.
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