Words (about nothing) In The Time of Coronavirus

I am not propped on a lumpy pillow in a questionable little hostel room, tapping out this entry with my two thumbs on a warm phone screen. There are no palm trees outside. I’m not in Ecuador or Colombia or Mexico or anywhere remotely interesting. I write voraciously and volubly when traveling, when glorious adventure and new observations shove me to description almost without my own volition. 

But can I write when the opposite is happening? Can I take the near reverse of exotic adventure—sheltering in place at home—and somehow make it readable, palatable, dare I say even, interesting? 

Let’s find out. 

Hereunto I will cover the dubiously enticing topics of waffles, Zoom meetings, hair growth, and mayonnaise. 

Out my Mansard apartment window I’m watched the crosswalk sign blink redly for nobody. I’m sheltering in place in this third-floor, three-room apartment, just a block from where concerts and bars and bustling and gathering are now venerated history. It may be three-room, but now that I’m working from home there are offices all over the place. Also with me are the wonderful company of a cat shaped like a box, my love Matthew, and 40+ houseplants. That may sound like an overpopulated jungle, but I love it, and some of that population are Matthew’s household which he brought for our combined sheltering. We’re now a combined-household multi-species plant family. I like this.

I wander around the Mansard multiple times a day, peering into foliage, turning pots, exclaiming over a new compressed leaf packet soon to open. I wave Matthew over, “babe! There’s a LEAF!” and he comes over like this is perfectly normal and coos too. For a couple years now I have felt the delight of caring for plants, but this delight is even richer now, something alive and green and growing and changing right in my newly-shrunken world. When there is grey most days in Ithaca between October and May (aka, winter) I consider plants to be physical manifestations of light. They can feast from my happy light and purple grow light, even while days go by with just clammy shrouds of soul-sucking grey weighing heavily from the sky. Ithaca is more miserly about sunshine than Seattle herself. The result is that when a sunny day does occur, unfettered jubilation sweeps around our souls and we go outside and smile at everyone and wear fewer layers than we should and feel motivated and make time for walking like we wouldn’t. 

I have been taking an unreasonable delight in making waffles. I can be found most days, bent over my wretched, overworked, $5-thrift-store waffle iron, picking wads of burnt bean from between it’s teeth, the counter a scene of crumbs and massacre. I routinely create chaotic and ill-fated waffles, pushing the laws of kitchen science and sensibility, and I love it. Follow a recipe and make a basic white wheat waffle for syrup and butter? How pleasing and un-messy and reasonable that would be! But me? Nope. I want more protein, more flavors, more experiment. Let’s be honest: more legumes. I am going for the peanut-butter-swirled-chocolate-black-bean-brownie waffle, or the green-pea-and-ramp-pesto waffle—all green and moist and would traumatize a child off waffles for life—or a bean-and-cottage-cheese-and-red-pepper-and-flax-waffle. For that last one, I learned that cottage cheese wants me to believe it’s a helpful protein-adding binding agent, but once encountering the hot iron it fizzles and faints and dribbles in a ring onto the counter. That flaxmeal serves as glue, so you not only have that muddy ring on your counter, but a waffle iron pasted shut, and, once pried open, two delicious savory umami crisps adhered to both top and bottom jaws. Matthew informed me that it smelled like I was grilling meat, so I guess something was sufficiently compelling and carnal about that waffle. 

In addition to waffles, this is the time of Zoom. I spent Wednesday morning negotiating with Zoom’s Microsoft plug-in, the Microsoft add-on (why both a plug-in AND an add-on?), and just the plain Jane online interface. My simple goal was to host a group lab meeting for Friday afternoon. I added and deleted an abundance of Friday afternoon meetings, and given Zoom’s automatic emailing service which helpfully alerts one to every meeting created and deleted, my inbox preview read “ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM.” Like a baby moving her arms around experimentally and whacking herself in the face, I felt I was inadvertently spamming my dear colleagues with a bunch of these automatically created emails and calendar invites any time I did an action. “Sandra Wayman has invited you to a Zoom Meeting.” “Sandra Wayman has cancelled a Zoom Meeting.” “Sandra Wayman has created a Zoom Meeting uselessly for yesterday.” 

Forget the plug-ins and add-ons. I tried the Zoom website directly: schedule a meeting for 2pm Friday, a very reasonable time, even though the system decided that 8am right now was better. I finally scheduled a meeting for the correct time, but now the box for “invite attendees” was greyed out. What? A Zoom meeting with just myself? I might as well wash all my dishes (if my office happens to be in the kitchen) or fold all the laundry (when my office is in the bedroom) or water the plants (office is anywhere). And I wanted a recurring meeting… Good, so now I had 10 meetings every Friday until the foreseeable future with just myself. I went to delete the 10-meeting series. A pop-up message: “the meeting might have been deleted already.” MIGHT HAVE? Since when is software subjectively questioning in this way? “Let’s not be too concrete”, “Let’s stay flexible and open to other’s interpretations.” Finally, after I thought I’d successfully created a meeting for people other than myself that was slated for the future, I was notified: “Meeting ID is not valid.” 

I gave up. Time for a radical change of scenery. I walked the 10 feet to the parlor office, where my love was tapping away diligently on his laptop, writing about tree phloem to basal area ratios and radially symmetric climate-mitigated assessment profiles. I vowed to stay quietly on the rug, do some hamstring stretches, not interact with this beautiful forest ecology man who was obviously trying to focus. This lasted about 25 seconds. “I have an idea for LUNCH,” I decreed with enormous relish. “Would you want to try a black-bean-and-wild-ramps WAFFLE?” Oh damn. So much for my staying quiet and respectful.   

Thursday I stared mutely into my happy light and fantasized about clippers, shears, scissors, buzzers, razors. Fantasizing about the vibrations near my ear, the wind in my face from a hairdryer fluffing clippings from my shoulders. If only I could be finding itchy hairs in my collar. The feeling of someone’s fingers carefully working my cowlick. My hair on the side of my head has grown out enough that I look like a little hedgehog. A little puffy hedgehog that’s put on a few pounds. Hairs grasp over the top of my ears like adventitious roots trying to gain a hold. The pride and pleasure I usually take in my appearance has evaporated. Now when passing my mirror I’m rolling my eyes and looking away. Maybe it’s time to deploy The Hats.   

Or maybe I should cover the mirrors with scarves and order some nice perfume of nutmeg or vanilla from online. Turn up the other pleasurable senses and turn down the ones that aren’t serving me. 

Instead I wheedled Matthew into helping trim my hedgehog. After calibrating himself by trimming his beard, he carefully took his little mower to the side of my head as I folded my ears down. “Does it look good to you?” I asked hopefully when we finished. “It looks good to me,” he responded.

“Everything looks good to you.”

He countered, “It looks good to me because if it didn’t, then I would have to deal with it and then I would mess it up.”

A conclusion was reached by him informing me, “I feel like your head is just uneven.” He swept the stray hairs from my neck, hurrying them down inside my collar

I was ecstatic when, a couple days later, someone told me over Zoom that my hair looked good.   

Maybe getting out of the Mansard, and away from hair-reflecting mirrors, to go make a trillion sandwiches would be a good idea? I wanted to help combat local food insecurity, which is becoming even more stressful because the world is ending these days. My dear-dearest Grannie used to volunteer at Loaves & Fishes, a delicious soup kitchen downtown, and in her honor and because of the times, I signed up to volunteer too.   

My task for my shift was to help make approximately a trillion sub sandwiches. There was a huge 5-story jar of sunshine yellow mustard with a little (aka plentiful) mustard sheltering in place in its basement and a sabre spatula with which to coax it out. I was also assigned a large-batch mixing bowl of mayonnaise, with its refill jar standing duty nearby; “Extra Heavy Mayonnaise” it read and I shuddered. Lordy, how could mayonnaise be heavier? I gathered some out with a long-handled spoon, drawing it across an expectant slice of bread. The mayonnaise huddled in the curved crux of the spoon, unyielding even as the spoon contacted bread. The bread stayed pure and the mayonnaise wouldn’t budge. Awful emulsified white clot. But I was not to be out-clabbered! I used the back of the spoon and whacked a white wad onto each slice: splat, splat, splat. Then spread it out like acrylic paint. I used as few strokes as I could; I had a trillion sandwiches to make here people. Raised by two engineers, to me efficiency was as instinctive as breath. Then squares of cheese, then circles of turkey, and then shuffle that sandwich into the most feeble of tiny sandwich bags. Other volunteers, also in masks and handling obscene sizes of condiment containers, made sandwiches too. 

On this sandwich project, I felt I was part of a biological reaction. We were all enzymes (I was mayonnaise-ase) making storage-organ carbohydrates from sunshine and water, the reactants and products, the soup kitchen equivalent of bright happy lights and plants. 

Another young woman was there, drapey of hair and slow of hand. Though I was new and of zero authority, I offered she should go source a hairnet or hat. Upon return, she took a sandwich from the enzymatic assembly line, tentatively worked it into a bag, daintily wiped her gloved fingers off on a paper towel, and then walked around behind me to place the sandwich in a box. Oh no you don’t honey I thought, and indicated the box I had put next to her feet, “Would you like to put your sandwiches in there?” No one is going to be walking around in this reaction. We have a trillion sandwiches to make. Folks gotta EAT. Let’s go. 

Did my Grannie feel pain in her back from working at a table at the wrong height? Did she wear her classy cat-eye glasses? Did she feel secretly annoyed at someone being inefficient? Was she graceful and funny and loving? I can’t imagine she ever had a bad haircut. I wish I knew more of what her time was like here. It felt such a new context from little kiddo me (“Grannie can’t play with you because Grannie’s at Loaves and Fishes this afternoon”) to adult me ("wow my back hurts and that’s a lot of mayo"). 

But that packing box of sandwiches, growing marginally heavier with each one, was incredibly satisfying to view. I felt so good contributing to something greater than myself, and it was incredibly humbling (coaxing sandwiches into bags is not easy) and how ever do food service people manage work like this day after day??

Friday morning. I plunked back down into my office chair at the dining table office. Having just spent time at the standing desk in the kitchen office working in R, I was ready for a rest. Immediately I popped back up to grab a single fig out of a jar I suddenly saw. And I wanted the fig on a plate so I could feel dignified and savor it. (Here’s to retaining that drop of dopamine for longer than a moment.) But the stack of cupboard plates was non-existent, so I opened the clean dishwasher and started methodically unloading it. Until I realized I was supposed to be writing that R code. I moved back to the dining table office. Then Matthew left the couch office to riotously mix it all up, and set his computer in the kitchen office. 

Lost in a world of R nonlinear regression and my single fig, I moaned grouchily.
Matthew: “What’s wrong?”
Me: “R lost my block object.”
Matthew: “I’m sorry R lost your block object. Dang klutz if you ask me.” 

I am so incredibly grateful that this positive kind sweetheart is sharing this space with me during this time. There is no one with whom I’d rather pass a pandemic. At one point mid-afternoon on some grey quiet day, he circled his arms around me in defiant protest of physical distancing, “We can hug each other any time we want.” The simple delicious truth of this struck me. Let me not ever take this for granted. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ecuador: in conclusion

 

I write this on the interminable journey home (spoiler: I made it back to Ithaca), which involved a five-hour bus ride rerouted up an unfinished mountain road due to Carnival blockages, a harrowing Uber texting-while-driving, a red-eye flight where I just couldn't fold myself up comfortably, being the first one thru customs when they opened at 5am, the onslaught of New Yorker crankiness that is JFK airport, and sitting on the tarmac while maintenance fixed some anonymous issue. 

But I'm back in the States! 18 days later! 

Ecuador is....llamas, volcanos, cloud forests, the Amazon, the Andes, public transportation everywhere, eucalyptus, Jesus decals, grilled plantains, Palo Santo burning in public restrooms, hummingbirds, quinoa soup, alfalfa soup, wool garments, Spanish architecture, buildings with upper stories unfinished, breakfast for $2, polite curious formal people, agave plants, stone fruits and tropical fruits grown in the same country, cumbia, farming on vertical hills, good chocolate, 4000+ species of orchids, street dogs, frozen bananas covered in chocolate on sticks, salty food, cold grey rain and burning insurmountable sun, stunnig biodiversity, breathtaking views.  

(At least my few days there...) 

If I had to sum up my trip, I would call it: 

"For the Love of Leaves. With Walking." 

I survived not having a bicycle! Traversing airports was much more effortless without having my beloved contraption in cardboard the size of a picnic table. But I did not love the bus rides necessitated by not having a bicycle. I did love getting deep into the forest and onto hiking trails that I wouldn't have attempted if I had the bike. Finally, we spent more time in "destination" spots, the verified beautiful places to see, rather than in small nowhere towns on the way to said places. I think this contributed to a very richly full trip. I didn't lose the accustomed 5 pounds due to food-borne illness, perhaps because we were eating in these destination towns. I think I missed out on some of the hidden authentic Ecuador from not being on the ground via bicycle. But all in all, I enjoyed traveling lightly with just a backpack and my walking shoes. 

Some trip stats: 

Days away: 17 

Hikes (including some urban): 13 

Total distance walked: 72 miles 

Total elevation hiked: 19,700 feet (this is 65% of the way up Mt Everest!) 

Highest elevation attained: 12,900 feet

Buses ridden: too darn many

Weird bug bites: 1

Sunburns: 1 (only 1 is amazing) 

Four leaf clovers: 2

Hummingbirds: countless

Balls of delicious smoked cheese carried for days fridge-less and consumed: 1

Pickpockets: 0

Orchids found in the wild: at least 7 different kinds

Guinea pigs eaten: 0 

Incredible views: oh-my-giddy-gad

Volcanos seen: 3

Volcanos in Ecuador: 27  

Passes through Quito on human-knot public transportation: 2.5  

Shirts jettisoned behind: 2 

Jars of peanut butter consumed: 0 (what!?) 

Cities visited: Guayaquil, Baños, Puyo, Tena, Quito, Mindo, Mitad del Mundo, Riobamba. 

Ecosystems visited: tropical rainforest, cloud forest, humid mountain forest, humid paramo (aka shrubby high-altitude grassland), coast. 

Gratitude to be able to travel: enormous 

Top 10 Reasons How Buses in Ecuador are Different than in the States

 

1. There is no announcement from the bus driver thanking you for choosing Greyhound and please use headphones and refrain from making phone calls. Here, I spent a night bus ride listening to another passenger's tinny Bluetooth speaker play "a Dios" music (think Christian pop but in Spanish) all plaintive stretched-syllables and unvaried baseline, loud enough to fill the whole bus. No one else asked them to turn it down, no one else seemed bothered. 

2. At the beginning of a town, a vendor will hop on the bus, and weave up the aisle, "hamburgesas!, mangoes!, cafe!", selling snacks, and at the end of town hop off again. I imagine then they hop on a bus going the opposite direction and repeat.

3. Tickets are about 10 times less expensive than in the states. A solid two-hour ride between cities near the edge of the Amazon cost me $3.25, for instance. 

4. The bus may stop for no known reason. Upon leaving a city terminal, once, we drove achingly slow for 5 minutes thru town, and then stopped by the city park. The bus driver got off and talked with some people at the park's edge, but as far as I could tell, no passengers got on or off. 

5. For what feels like a "fancy" bus with decals and bright paint and a company logo, it makes lots of stops en route for a person and their dog, or seemingly every chicken roadside. 

6. They may not leave on time. If the ticket says "18:30" this can be translated to mean, "we will not consider leaving before 6:30pm but will consider leaving some time after 6:30." 

7. Item 7 actually is a cross-reference for another list, Does and Don'ts of Ecuador: Don't eat a dragon fruit on a bus. Especially if you don't want to get your single pair of pants dripped with delicious juice and your entire right arm coated in stickum. But the mess may be worth it, dragon fruit are soft and lofty and juicy, with tender seeds like chia so satisfying to munch, and flesh that tastes sweeter than dates but has a floral attitude in the way that fresh strawberries do. 

8. Movies are shown on all rides over 1 hour, and if under 1 hour, cumbia or bachata music will be played over the speakers. Movies qualifying for showing include anything egregiously violent, mortifyingly stupid, or disgustingly sappy, originally in, or dubbed into, Spanish. Volume will be high enough that you need to strain to hear your NPR podcast on your earbuds. 

9. You can catch a bus without buying a ticket first. Just get on at the station, confirm where it's going, and at some point during the ride the attendant will come by with a handful of coins organized neatly by size and collect your fare. 

10. There will be either a Jesus or a rosary decal on the front window of the bus. 

 

Day 16: The Zenith (with labor)

Each step forward needed a huge bite of air. I needed to learn to accept the panting and just move onward. I reminded myself, I'm in the Andes! We were doing the final day of our three-day hike, with the grand prize of reaching the sunken caldera, the lake of Quilotoa. 

Walking up through sand at 12,000 feet elevation felt like one of those dreams where you try to run but it's like moving through water. And indeed it felt like a dream up there, with the clouds drifting among the craggy topography. I had just enough air to tell Elise, "we're climbing up a collapsed volcano!" I tried taking long slow steps; I tried taking small staccato steps. No difference, I still felt like I was 100 years old. But this was also wonderful, to apply myself so fully to one single incredibly challenging thing. Up the sandy slope we climbed. The scenery was stunning, we were high enough now we could turn around and see stretched behind us all the terrain we had traversed on our days of walking. Sweeping views are almost always delicious, but to feel the sense of participation within them, and the immense energy spent, and the sense of claim, that was truly incredible. 

After hours of hiking up, of heavy feet, of labored breathing, we saw the trail cresting at what was the end of the world, but was actually the steep drop into the lake below. We walked side by side, wanting to see it at the same moment. Arriving at the rim, it was like a whole orchestra surged with sound when we saw the huge bowl of teal water suddenly exposed below us. My whole vision was taken with this huge spread. I felt like laughing and crying and collapsing all at the same time. Instead, I sat down and began eating all the food I had in my backpack. 

The hostel dinner last night had been bland at best, and after emptying by degrees a black pepper container over it (which was shaped like a flower), I gave up and put the flaccid pasta in a bag for either a trail dog or my trail self. At the top of this hike, after such enormous effort of climbing with low-concentrate oxygen, I ate that pasta and it was, inconceivably, the best pasta I have ever enjoyed. And I don't even like pasta. 

I looked over at Elise. "The only thing I haven't eaten out of my bag is my sunscreen" she observed. I opened the bag of silly cookies from my Jet Blue flight, which I had carried this whole trip. "They go well with coffee," I said, handing her some and indicating my little to-go mug of hostel coffee. "Right now everything is going well with everything," she said. 

What feeding! What elation! The color of the lake deep below was a teal not often found in nature; the color comes from minerals from the volcano. We continued our climb along the rim, perched on a thin raised trail not for the heights-afeared, finding a biome of plants adapted to cold windy desolate conditions. These had us exclaiming and stopping in delight: purple lupines and some pink snap-dragon-like flowers, some orange pine-coney explosions on a plant with spikey miniature leaves, looking stoic and invincible. It was thousands of feet below that big gorda leaves like bananas could manage. 

We finished the hike--the culmination and zenith of my trip--hungry, damp, dirty, tired, smelly, and hairy. Especially in comparison with the shiny new tourists walking the opposite direction just beginning their trek. But how great did we feel. I had been worried about the elevation--but it was just a lot of breathing, no headaches or dizziness--and I had been worried about nasty rural dogs--but there were no attacks. We'd been worried about getting lost, but the signage was great, and a new app, Wikiloc, helped a lot with gps navigation. 

Arriving back in a bigger city after bussing down from the caldera felt overwhelming, especially since we were hungry enough to eat our sunscreen and Carnival (the celebration before Lent begins) was in full force. People were dressed in their finest, a peacock feather in the traditional hat of an indigenous girl, dangly earrings, shined shoes. And kids ran around spraying each other with water guns and throwing paint powder on each other. Vendors sold brightly colored spray cans that shot some sort of white foam. Families posted at upper windows with water guns and soaked taxis below. I moved through this playful mess with ambivalence, assuming I was immune as a tourist. Then: SLAM. Something punched me, hard, in the back of my neck and suddenly my back was wet. When was the last time I was hit with a water balloon? A group of boys behind me laughed. I didn't like it, but my motto here: when I don't like something it makes a better story. So I got some Ecuadorian Carnival after all.

 

This unbecoming high bit is actually the rim containing the stunning teal lake. This is what 12,500 feet looks like.

Succulents along a protected part of the trail.

Growing peanuts! It was amazing how much agriculture was happening on even the most challenging topography here. Vertical farming.

The stunning caldera lake, what we'd been walking towards for three days, which made me feel like laughter and tears simultaneously.

The sweeping views, containing our path over and around and through.

Funky flowers I don't even know how to start identifying, which lived on the rim of the caldera.

Hiking along the rim at cloud height.

 

Day 15: Second Day of Walking (with up)

I could be found wearing a wool shirt and a down coat, in long pants, balancing at the edge of the shower in our hostal room tonight. I had my hand under the water, trying to determine if the temperature had warmed from what Elise had previously announced was "too much Luke." It hadn't. I extended a foot and washed it, doing some sort of yogic Cold Hiker's Pose, then extended the other for the same. I could've used the shower; I had a bug bite on my neck the size of France and a zit on my chin which felt like a bot fly. But I didn't want to suffer the cold. At a chilly 10,800 feet elevation, on a rainy night, it was hard to believe I was just south of the equator. Ecuador is so amazingly diverse, the hot coast, the hot Amazon, the chilly Andes. At least I was in a hostel and not trying to camp! 

Our hostel room is allegedly heated with a narrow uninsulated chimney pipe rising from a woodstove two floors below. I've tied my wet socks to it in desperate hopes they dry by the morning. Otherwise it's barely warm enough wearing this wool and down ensemble, and Elise just crawled into her fleece (!?) pink and purple (?!) bed and scree'd how cozy comfy warm it was. Central heating or thick insulation doesn't seem to be a thing here. The locals are wearing fleeces and hats and big draping ponchos. 

This was Day Two of the wonderful Quilotoa Loop. We walked 8 miles with 2,500 feet of elevation climbing. We started after a delicious communal breakfast of homemade granola and eggs, with proper coffee (no sugar added! no instant!). Our German table mates (now friends) asked when we were starting our hike. "Now", Elise responded, because breakfast was a late 8am and we were concerned about getting rained on. The weather seems to be mixed sun and clouds in the morning, turning greyer and into rain by afternoon. 

The trail descended out of the little village where we had slept. We had garnered hiking sticks by this point, from some cleared eucalyptus wood on the side of the road, which we trimmed awkwardly with our small pocket knives. It felt very play-fort and delicious childhood nostalgia to be creating something useful out of tree branches. Elise had good luck finding a perfectly straight solid stick, and although my luck has been in finding three 4-leaf clovers on the trail, my stick is rather post-modern and a bit crooked. But it certainly helps me test for deep mud and balance on the slippery sandy descents. 

The trail was a narrow tunnel in between damp rock walls as we descended to the river. I enjoyed the meditative nature of the task of just placing my feet. Other thoughts couldn't take up as much space because so much concentration was needed for traversing. Hours can pass this way. 

Our walking continued and we hit sticky sandy mud from the long rains last night. I laughed as Elise's feet collected mud loads and seemed hugely out of proportion to her body. "I am walking with dumbbells for shoes!" I said. We wiped them on the grass and continued on. We passed cows grazing, a tiny man with a huge gas cylinder strapped to his back, a woman standing in the road watching sheep and simultaneously knitting a small blue scarf. We stopped by the river and ate bread and guava jam we had hoarded aside from breakfast, and the sun came out. Almost instantly too warm, we changed into shorts. The temperature difference is amazing! 

The trail, which goes along dirt roads and through pastures and on narrow pathways, is marked with yellow blazes occasionally, and some sweet wooden signs pointing to various hostels. 

 

All hostels provide a dinner and breakfast as part of the stay. A local man told us that between May and September he sees hundreds of hikers a day doing the loop. We are grateful that we have the trail mostly to ourselves, feeling a preference for potential rain over crowds. No local Ecuadorians hike these trails, it is mostly Canadians and Germans (rarely Americans). 

We crossed the river on a long log with little traction steps cut into it and an untenable handrail. 

 

The trail passed through a meadow, every single blade of grass depositing her last-night's rain droplets on our shoes, as if we had sponges on our feet. Now we had marsh foot, but at least we weren't being rained on. 

This sweet dog was into a selfi with me outside a pocket sized church in a village smaller than village designation.

And then the trail headed up. Like the other handsome white cliffs contributing to the glorious views at every turn, this one was huge. The trail zig-zagged up it, sometimes with little bevelled steps, and I panted up like I was an organ bellows. Stopping for breathing is a nice way to spend time, because the views are just spectacular. Arriving at the top, winded and proud, it felt amazing to look down and see the little village by the river as if it were a toy set, and to be eye-level with the other looming cliffs across the valley. 

 

 

At a view point over the valley, a small girl pulled a plastic bag off a plate of pineapple hunks and sold me one for 50 cents. I was happy to support a local family, even in a little way, and juicy pineapple with views after that climb was perfect. 

The trail spilled us out on a paved road (did that feel different!) and we walked the last mile to the little village of Chugchilan. Here we found our hostel, and availed ourselves of the bottomless hot coffee and tea there, and found a tienda in town for some fruit, and prepared Avocado on the Half Shell (aka guacamole when you have a pocketknife and no bowl) while we waited for the family style dinner. 

Tomorrow is the last day of the hike. We should reach the zenith, which is the crater lake of Quilotoa. I hope my socks dry.

Day 14: Tour by Walking, Quilotoa Loop

What a rare thing it is, to have a through-hike in sweeping-view countryside with little villages ideally placed to stay each night in a cozy hostel, not having to schlep your camping gear. We have completed the first day of the famed Quilotoa Loop, from the village of Sigchos to the smaller village of Isinlivi. It was wonderful to wake up this morning, know I was going on a hike, and know that I wouldn't have to return to sleep, that my destination would offer a bed. It was also wonderful carrying everything I needed just on my back: water, some snacks, first aid kit, and my small monotonous portion of clothing. It felt really free and resourceful and content. I did jettison some things in the hostel before I left, to lighten the load (a travel pillow, my hat which Elise had named the Flopness Monster, and two shirts I can live without though they compromised 40% of my wardrobe).

This hike offers sweeping views of the Andes, little square fields set like quilts in among craggy peaks, green pastures, dirt roads cutting in and out of valleys, bridges over streams, the three sisters of corn and beans and squash all growing together in small fields. Cows gaze at us as we pass, and the local people caring for their small farms bid us good morning and hello. A little truck with two huge milk jugs went trundling past when our path was on the road, but that was the only vehicle we encountered. Some of the trail is on a narrow footpath along hillsides or through pastures, and some is on rocky dusty roads. All of it has been beautiful so far. 

 

 

We were concerned that we'd be walking wetly and grumpily in the unavoidable later-day rain, but so gratefully we arrived at our destination just as the first few drops fell. Today was just under 7 miles and 2,000 feet elevation gain. I was indeed panting with the elevation during the climbs, but the heart and lungs are powerful and along I went. 

 

 

Our route! For those of you who like maps.

 

Our destination was a hostel called Llulu Llama, and the stay there was as delicious as the hike itself. Because we finished our walking by noon, I actually had time to recline on a couch and without objective flip through a book. This place feels like a retreat center, peaceful, intentional, with beautiful Andes views. A German couple sat cross-legged on a couch and ate a plate of toast and looked at each other, a woman with fly-away grey hair sat on a foot stool, intent in a guidebook, eating a pack of chips. There was yoga to look forward to, and the jacuzzi was heating up. Even though $19 per person for a little bed in the dorm felt like a lot compared with what we'd been paying in other places, it included the yoga and sauna, and dinner and breakfast. And gardens and bottomless tea and coffee and a bunch of friendly other travelers. Most people were German, there was one group of Canadian women. I told them I grew up on Lake Ontario and that we were neighbors of sorts.  

Llulu Llama Hostel

I was impressed with the hostel's commitment to the environment (composting toilets and reminders to turn off the lights, recycling) and to the community (employing local people and offering health benefits, sourcing produce and milk from local small farms). I read that 65% of the local folks in this area live under $1 a day. 

Dinner was one of the best meals in Ecuador so far. Standard Ecuadorian dinners are salt on a bed of rice with salt on some meat, with little greenery or herbs to be found, maybe some plantains. But at Llulu Llama, there was a big bowl of green bean and tomato salad, and an onion quiche, followed by pineapple icecream that was somehow more pineappley than the fruit itself. Everything was served family style, and we sat at big tables according to whether we were vegan, vegetarian, or meat eaters. Us travelers from all over the world passed bowls around and served each other, and sharing travel stories among everyone was so great. 

 

Dinner, family style.

 

Day 13: The Human Knot

Have you ever played the human knot? You grab hands randomly with a bunch of friends and then everyone works together all scrunched up and giggling to untangle into a big circle without dropping hands. 

I was riding a "trole-bus" in Quito up to the botanical garden. And it was so packed with people it felt like a human knot. Just we weren't holding hands. Doors would open and more people would mash inside, backpacks on the front against pickpockets, somehow making space in the knot. If someone needed to get out--bless them--there was ducking under arms and mushing past. I was positioned near the doors, which gave me a slightly less claustrophobic experience because I could be near one of the filthy windows. But every time we came to a stop, the doors would wack open. If I made myself narrow, I had exactly enough room for my body to fit between the opened door and the handrail bar without getting wholly pinched. I watched incredulously as one guy got on with his dog, carrying the beast into the slew, legs floppy and draping. Somehow we get where we need to go. 

The system is painfully slow, stopping nearly every block to load and unload, in addition to stopping at red lights nearly every block. It takes a weaving sore-footed handrail-grabbing forty-five minutes to move only halfway up or down the city. It's no wonder we don't see any other pale tourist people traversing Quito in this way. Finally at a destination, I come knocking out from the wack-doors, stupified and stiff and disbelieving it's actually over. This is when I miss the bicycle the most. 

Once at the botanical garden, I breathed in the peace and relished walking slow and gazing at leaves and flowers. I was so excited to learn some of the Latin names for the exotic plants I'd been seeing the past couple weeks, happy that Latin doesn't need to be translated from Spanish to English. I love seeing which plants fall into which families ("oh! So you ARE an Onagraceae! You looked like it!"), maybe this is my love of organization and finding patterns. 

When I entered the orchid space, it felt so serene and so sacred and I thought about how there are 4,000+ species of orchids and all this beautiful biodiversity and I actually kind of teared up a bit. 

I'm glad I had this plant appreciation nugget in the day, for the rest of it was walking around Quito hungry with Elise finding that the places where we had hoped to eat (last chance for salads) were closed, in addition to spending more interminable time riding that horrid human knot, and then waiting in a hard-seated grey bus terminal for hours for a bus to the town of Sigchos, south of Quito in the Andes. When traveling in Ecuador, I'm learning there are things you just can't know. Google maps may tell you a restaurant is open and then inexplicably it's not. You expect you need a series of buses with transfers to a place, but learn happily you can go directly to the place instead. There are gorgeous hiking trails available that are not listed in any guidebooks. 

Speaking of hiking, we are going to attempt the famed Quilotoa Loop, which traipses past supposedly stunning views and a series of small towns with hostels, so you can stay along the route without camping. (This will be my last venture before I fly across the ecuador and back to the dark grey of the north.) I say "attempt", because the AccuWeather report for the next couple days includes key terms like "rain", "downpour", "thunderstorms", and "48 degrees". Ew. 

The human knot.

This is a horsetail! An obscenely large brother to the ones we pull out of our gardens back home.

Orchid garden!

Orchid garden, Quito.

For all the interminable public transport in Quito, there have been truly beautiful strolls and sights.