The first round of LAMAH

This taken moments before the first round of inter-peace negotiations between Llamas and People fell apart.

For more information on the progress of LAMAH (Llamas Are Mad At Humans) check this site again for an upcoming link.

Chronicle of the City of Cuenca

Georgina ordered lunch while I went to find the outhouse. Finding the can, I found it locked, so I climbed up a wee mountain to get away from the road and found the back of a guy’s house. The spot next to the dog house did just fine. Upon return there was a bowl of soup in front of me. Chicken wing, French fry and egg soup, apparently. Who knew? Damn it was good. What a surprise.

What came as no surprise was the second round: fried trout with all the fixings. This was no bolt from the blue, because only moments earlier Georgina, her husband, her daughter and her sister were with me in the car. Someone asked: “Shall we stop for some trout?” “Sure,” I said.

When we arrived at the trout restaurant, it turned out to be a lake. “Here you go,” said the little girl. She gives me a fishing pole. “Oh, shit, you’re joking.” Yes, in this part of the world you have to work for lunch.

Gaby baited my hook and I launched the fishing pole. This fishing pole is nothing more than a damn stick with some line, a hook, and a sinker attached to it. The bait hits the water, and before I can think, something bites. “Pull it in,” yells Gaby. “How? It’s a damn stick with a line somehow attached?” Huck-Finn had it better. I pull the line, she pulls the line, and sure enough we bag the sucker that I’m holding in my hands as you can see to the right.

Good, that’s one. 4 more mouths to feed.

We celebrated the catch and feast with beer, and a bottle of sprite for the wee one. It was such a laugh that I couldn’t bring myself to rush things along. I missed my flight to Quito.

No regrets. We spent the rest of the afternoon on the couch watching football, drinking hot coffee, and wondering what evil plot the llamas were going to come up with next.

On a Sunday night you'd be hard pressed to believe that this is a capital city.

Good grief, a Sunday night in Quito might as well be any day on the far side of the moon. Catholic tradition coupled with a painfully long work week puts this city to sleep. Even the street dogs pack it in. I’m thinking about starting up a “Sunday night cannon firing club.” Because, no doubt, I could fire a cannon off down any given street and surely I’d hit nothing.

A little peace and quiet is nice, but tonight it gets the best of me. You see, nothing is open. Nothing. The closest cheeseburger is at the Airport, and that’s after you board the plane and leave for Texas. Now, I was planning to return from Cuenca today at a good hour, but I missed the damn plane (again) because I was fishing, (see below, and P.S. this is the first flight that I’ve missed where it’s actually been my fault). So instead of getting into Quito when things are open, I get in when things are closed.

No problem. I have some provisions in the apartment, and I’ll whip up a feed. Tough luck. The stove needs matches, and matches I don’t have. Yet another incident where being a smoker would have saved the day. Crackers for dinner it is then. Oh yeah, I ate all but three of those before I left for Canada.

Well there’s a microwave and a can of beans. Filthy as that sounds, it gets worse. Turns out that I mistook the “can of beans” in the store for “can of Ecuadorian surprise™ taco filling®.” For god sakes. Heavy on the surprise™ and light on the taco filling® this is.

So there you go. A random can of poo and a few glasses of vino for dinner. Can’t beat it. A fine way to top off yet another Sunday night in Quito, after having got into a scrap (verbal – my Spanish swears are really coming along) with an over-charging taxi from the airport, and an airport security guard who knicked my razor blades.

I blame the Llamas for all of this.

(for an update on my thoughts on the Ecuadorian elections check Blogging it real.)

Chronicle of the City of Loja

Nothing kills the mood of a good interview more than an ethics form. There you are, talking along, about the most interesting of things, and thanks to technocratic bureaucracy at the home university, you have to slide an ethics form under the interviewee’s nose, and get them to sign it. Nobody likes to sign strange forms, especially from overseas. But, if they don’t sign it, some goof from the University can debunk the research.

Technocratic fart catching aside, Loja turned out to be a very pleasant adventure. No bullets to pull out of feet, or any of that sort of thing. It’s a pretty little city right where the sierras start to turn into jungle, but it’s still frosty at night. After the interview, the good doctor and I went out for beer with some of her friends. At some point in the evening it was decided that we’d go to the smaller village of Vilcabomba. Either because of the beer or the sleepiness, I missed the fact that we were going to a spa. Who would have guessed? Here’s me in Loja fighting off scruffy dogs for the covers on my bed, this in a house with no hot water or heat of any sorts, and a secret passage, so it seems, for the dogs to come in and compete for my covers. Those dogs, six of them on last count, really needed baths. But then again, so did I. So how would I have guessed that a luxury spa was in my future?

Missing the part about going to a spa, when I show up at the place in the picture above, there is a lovely aromatic Jacuzzi happening. Apparently $25 will get you three hours of Jacuzzi and professional massage time. While the doctor and her friend are already changed and ready for the hot tub, there’s me with my bathing suit nicely folded and placed in the drawer in Quito. I ask the staff if they have an extra bathing suit. “oh, I don’t know about that.” Great. Sure enough she leaves the spa through some random back door, and returns 5 minutes later with some guy’s underpants.

Now here’s a dilemma. Jacuzzi with some random pair of underpants that may have been worn by a hobo and 5 of the 6 dogs, or me sitting around reading for three hours. You can always read. You don’t often get the chance to wear random Ecuadorian underpants in a hot-tub. I dive in.

After dinner we race back to Loja to catch the last bus to Cuenca. It is going to be a long ride, and the weather is looking pretty rough. Still, a 4 hour bus ride should hopefully bring me to a warm bed where I’m not fending off brown dogs.

So there I am on a bus swinging through winding fog soaked roads in the Andes. Most people have the good sense to go to sleep on this into-the-night journey. But not the drunken bugger behind me. No no, he decides to sing us songs. Brutally off key songs. You know the feeling of a nail on a blackboard? Yeah that kind of singing. This dummy just kept singing and singing in his painfully annoying fashion. He sang for so long that he had to clear his dry throat, and then he’d keep going.

After the third hour of his drunken babbling I nearly leaped over the seat and strangled him silent. The only thing that held me back was the idea of the headline in tomorrow’s paper. “Tourist strangles man for singing.”

The bloody media.

They never take kindly to these sorts of situations.

Not sure how to go forward, impossible to go back: Chronicle of the middle of nowhere.

Here’s a photo from the valley of the moon in Bolivia. You may want to click on it to enlarge, but I'm the little dark spot there perched like an owl up above this here gorge.

I have never seen a landscape anything like this, and neither had the original inhabitants of La Paz, so they turned it into a sacred place to worship the moon.

So there’s me lodged on a narrow “path” in this sacred valley. A fitting example of how things are regarding the research. Loosing my contact list was a major set back, and it is a painstaking task to try to reconnect with doctors in the rural Amazon, especially when telephone is sketchy and internet is non-existent.

Still, the positive response to the project from those back in Canada, and now the just received acceptance of a research paper for a major U.S. journal, prompts me to believe that you really can’t turn back, or switch the game plan in this sort of a situation.

Back in the apartment in Quito it sort of feels like I never left, and it certainly doesn’t feel strange to be back. 3 more weeks here in Quito with plans to head into the Amazon twice and the Andes twice as well. There’s no doubt that it will be life out of the backpack for the rest of the year, as it is now quite definite that duty calls back to Cuba before the holidays commence.

So yes, three more weeks of madness and adventure, then it’s back to Vancouver for a brief week before setting sail again to everyone's favourite socialist paradise. My inside connections tell me that El Comandante is doing very well and he is set to give his first public speech, since his tummy was tucked, on December 2. Hopefully I’ll see most of you in that time before I run down to Cuba and beyond. I’m sure that by then I’ll be in dire need of comfortable resting places, fine Vancouver food stuffs and hygienic services. Ahh, sweet sweet hygiene.

The Valley of the Moon

Hey Geography department, how does mother nature go and make this sort of landscape? My goodness. Just a better perspective on this sacred valley to give a better feel to that narrow ridge that I posted above.

A Machu Pichu llama

Cultural war with Llamas

Here’s a Llama. Not quite as cute as their close cousin, the Alpaca.

You know I saw a damn Llama walk right up to a little child and kick her in the face. I tell you, llamas are sketchy critters….probably grumpy from over 500 years of indentured service, and all for a few bites of Alfalfa.

Now Alpacas are much happier critters. All they want to do is give you sweaters and funny hats. They are such docile beasts. As Spanish conquistadors soon learned, if you’re cruel to an Alpaca and hurt its feelings, it’ll just sit down and die. But not llamas, they kick children.

I really think that we’re at cultural war with Llamas.

Strange critters

I encountered this guy in Peru. Any ideas as to what the hell he is?

A sense of home? Chronicle of the City of Kingston

People ask me where I'm from, and where I'm living, and I'm having a great deal of trouble answering. Quito doesn't really fit, and Vancouver, at times seems to do so less and less.

Today I was in Kingston, my former "home" for 5 years. In fact, for 3 of those years I lived on this street, and 2 of those years were in the house that once stood on this crater.

I was giving a guest lecture at Queen's university this morning. It was a great honour to return to the old Alma Mater, not as a drunken buffoon during homecoming but as a recognized lecturer.

Things always change when you come back. New restaurants, new buildings, new students, and other little changes. I knew that the university was going to destroy my old house, but seeing it was a little shocking...truly the end of an era.

The wild times on Clergy Street will never be again. Never again will 200 people be jammed into 101 Clergy for a house party, and never again would we have the opportunity to send the overflow to 85 Clergy Street.

Sure these houses were dives, and ready to collapse at any point. We had rats the size of skunks and skunks the size of raccoons, and raccoons living in their own special rooms but not paying rent.

A strange feeling it is to return to Canada for a short week between 4 different cities, while officially on the road in South America. Stranger feeling yet to stay in a hotel in your old town, and see your old house blown away in the winds of time.

Awe Inspiring Mahcu Pichu

Machu Pichu under the sun

Incan GPS and the ethics of knowing (double click the photo for better detail)

Machu Pichu should be considered a wonder of the world. Built over 500 years ago without any cement, lined perfectly with the stars, the moon and the sun, this dynasty of the Incan empire is awe-inspiring even though it is in ruins, and half buried under 500 years of natural growth.

When it was discovered in the 1900s (from the point of view of Western society that is, because sometime in the 1400s it discovered itself) there were two Quechua families living in it.

Today Llamas live in it, and tourists by the bus load come up to visit every 30 minutes. But between the construction of Machu Pichu and the most recent tourist bus to arrive, there were 500 years of knowledge and understanding lost, that we may never be able to fully comprehend.

The GPS is above a stone that the Incans used for a compass. The stone is shaped like the Southern Cross (that intensely bright constellation that Northern Hemisphere types may never get to know), and is, as according to the GPS incredibly accurate.

We need satellites to find our way now, but the Incas used rocks. They relied on the stars to navigate themselves, and now, thanks to our means of getting around, the poisonous pollution clouds that choke our cities throw the stars from the sky.

The Incas understood stone work to such a degree that they didn't even bother to use cement. Brickwork was a temporary fixture compared to their masonry which still lasts to the day, and was purposefully designed to withstand earthquakes. Making buildings stand up during an earthquake is a completely lost science in Latin America.

What other ways of knowing were lost over time? The Spaniards, waving bibles, dogs and guns did a good job to blame a lot of what they didn't know (astronomy, medicine, hygiene, manners, and respect for the natural environment) to witchcraft and acts of the devil. Words of the bible were shoved into the Incan folk, and if that failed bullets went in shortly thereafter. From fear of what they saw, Spaniards justified repeated attacks on the Incans, because this witchcraft could only be made sense of by forcing the creators into a state of indebted labour.

How many pains of the world have been caused by too little understanding and too much fear to seek new ways of knowing?

At this conference in Ottawa that I’m at, a man wearing a suit and showing signs of eating more than he should, asked us if we thought that the research ethics committee should restrict research based on deemed use and importance.

What the hell? The Spanish inquisition did not even have the fallacy to summon an ethics board before administering an execution, I thought.

In all the knowledge that we've done so well to destroy, perhaps none better is the ability to learn from our mistakes.

The highest I've ever been

You may have to double click on this photo to see it in detail, but this is me with the GPS at 15283 feet above sea level. 15,000 feet is where things start to go funny. Ball point pens start to burst, hard drives burst, diesel engines do not perform worth a damn and German tourists puke and puke and puke. Nothing funnier.

It is something to think that if you were standing at this elevation above Vancouver the turbo prop planes would be a good thousand feet below you, and the sea planes, nearly ten thousand feet below. It's no mystery why the Spanish had such a difficult time colonizing this neck of the woods. Sitting up is a challenge at this height, and I can not possibly imagine lugging a cannon and mortar up to this elevation

This is the place where you begin the trek down Bolivia's death road. The death road (see photos below) is being improved in parts so that it is paved, and a few safety standards are put in place.

Funny that even in the new parts the locals refer to it as "el nuevo camino de muerte."

Such confidence in local engineering.

I'll just let Machu Pichu Speak for itself

6:20am at Machu Pichu

The Death Road!!! And my role in the war on drugs.

Communication isn't always easy on the road, and this is especially true when you're spending your time on the most dangerous road in the Americas.

Here we are barrelling down el 'camino de muerte'. That's what the locals actually call it. A few years ago one of the big and mighty development NGO's labelled this road the most dangerous in the hemisphere. Now, crazies such as us can go barreling down it at 55 km/h on a damn mountain bike. At this point the road is paved, but it certainly gets a bit worse in parts.

This is how we spent a day in Bolivia. A fantastic country that is fantastically poor. This makes for your dollar going a long way, and coincidentally, exceptional hospitality from the local folk.

For most of the time we were well over 3,600 meters above sea level. This makes for frequent use of Coca tea, Coca candies and other wonders that are coca. This strange little leaf tends to help with the altitude, wards off hunger, fixes your guts, and probably has about 16,500 other medicinal properties. But, because rich lawyers in New York like it best when mixed with gasoline (and other fine traditional ingredients), and then have it shot up their nose in the form of Cocaine, the poor little Coca leaf has been at war with the U.S. for quite some time. Funny how in order to make Cocaine gasoline is just as important as the Coca leaf, but it is the impoverished Coca farmers in Bolivia who get soldiers sent on to their farms and agent-orange-like-herbicides sprayed on them and their crops.

Personally, I'm all for the Coca leaf. And I plan to bring some Coca tea back with me to share with you all. Certainly our customs agents will have the good common sense to recognize this traditional herb for what it really is....a tastey infused beverage, and not a dangerous drug.

More on the death road

Now imagine two of these guys passing each other on a blind curb.

This is not exactly like riding in Vancouver, now is it?

This is what you're up against. Oh and P.S., while that is a fully loaded lorrie barreling past my right leg, about six inches from the left leg is a 2,000 m vertical plunge.

As reward for survival....you get a tight fitting T-shirt. Bienvenidos a Bolivia

And it gets a bit dusty on the death road

In case you haven't got a complete feel for this road

Oh, and let's not forget about the Coca tea

Natural medicine at its finest.