Monday, May 23, 2011

Basilicas, Seals, and Dramamine: A Girl´s New Best Friend(s)


My South American adventure started on a high note; very high in fact: 2,800 meters/9,200 feet above sea level high. Following advice from guide books and medical professionals, I decided to take it handy my first day to allow myself to acclimate to the lack of oxygen in the air.  An easy day travelling around the museums and perhaps visiting La Basílica, which is one of the dominating features of the impressive Quito skyline, sounded like a safe bet.  However, most of the museums were closed for no reason that I could find, and the one I did manage to get into was a confusing mix of Precolumbian huts and dolls dressed as monks (I later realised that there was some kind of order to it, but my route led to an anachronistic and slightly perplexing impression of Ecuadorian history).  Mildly defeated, I puffed my way up Calle Venezuela to La Basílica.  Its imposing Gothic architecture belies its fairly recent construction (by Basilica standards anyway), as it was only built in the late 19th century.  That said, what La Basílica lacks in age, it makes up for in accessibility.  For $2, I was able to ramble throughout the majority of the sanctified innards of the building, which included gang-planking my way across the spine of the roof to a lookout point, and climbing all 115 meters to the top of the belfry hand over hand up increasingly smaller ladders.  So much for taking it handy.  The view, however, was well worth it.


The next day I took a tour arranged by the hostel where I was staying to Otavalo, which has been deemed one of the biggest artisan markets in South America.  "But...", you may say, "Why would you go to an artisan market on the second day of your four-month trip during which time you have to carry all of your possessions around on your back, á la Monsieur Snail?"  Why indeed, my estute friend, why indeed... Anyway, to the market I went, and artisanial objects I bought.  The market itself was interesting enough, tourist stands rubbing elbows with sizzling vats of fried pig and gold chains, but I was surprised to hear it´s in Lonely Planet´s Top 10 for South America.  If you´re planning to bypass a trip to Machu Picchu or Iguazu to get your shop on in Otavalo, don´t.  Unless fuzzy llama toys and gringo pants are your thing.


Left with a week before beginning my 9-week volunteering placement, I decided to team up with a German girl I met in the hostel to do some exploring.  We were thinking of heading up to Colombia for the week, but given that we would have spent about half of our time on a bus and would have voided our Ecuadorian visitors visa (a point I only discovered later - future travellers take note of this point: you can´t leave Ecuador during the 90 days of your visa if you expect to get back in) we decided against it.  Something that had been niggling me since I´d arrived was the fact that everyone I met seemed to have gone to the Galapagos, and would practically plead with you when you stated that you´d already decided it was out of your budget and that you were going to bypass it.  The Galapagos aren´t cheap, and until fairly recently its shores were reserved for scientists and very rich tourists.  However, in the last few years it has grown as a travel destination for a younger crowd as well, and it´s not unlikely to see a scruffy backpacker wandering about the beaches these days.  So I weighed up the points that I will probably never be this close again, this is one of the best times of year to go because High Season isn´t in full swing yet so prices are cheaper while Low Season is pretty much over so the weather conditions are more favourable, and living off beans and tuna for a while wouldn´t be so bad really, and decided to go for it.  Booked flights, high fived, no turning back.

The enchantment started as soon as the airplane touched down in the tiny lean-to airport on the isle of Baltra.  As the airplane taxied down the runway, it was escorted by dozens of giant dragonflies, officious and determined in their duties.  Due to a lucky seat placement, my new German friend had made the acquaintance of a man who was visiting his family in Puerto Ayura, the main port of the Galapagos, and his nephew was happy to help us find a place to stay and offer adice.  The place in question ended up being the hotel where he worked and was a bit more than we´d hoped to pay, but it was called El Castillo and it actually was a castle.  Our room had a balcony, there was a guitar and a couple of hammocks ready for use, and the fresh juice for the morning breakfast came from the fruit trees in the garden.  Never one to turn down a jammy turn of events, we settled in for the night.


But when one talks of Galapagos, one doesn´t talk about lodgings, so enough of the Castle and on to the the real attraction of the islands: the animals.  Immortalised by Darwin´s 1835 scientific visit, the islands are most famous for the amazing fauna which exhibits little to no natural fear of man.  On our first day we strolled to the fish boat dock where a sea lion was basking in the sun and pelicans rested in the trees a mere meter or so from where we were standing.  When the fish came in they skulked around the corner, waiting for a chance to snatch an unattended fish.


We managed to get a last-minute package deal which had us on a tour ship for two nights, then over to Isabella, the biggest island, for volcano climbing and reef snorkelling.  The Naturalist guide on the tour was an interesting fellow: during the day he would lead tours around the islands spinning off descriptions of the animals and facts about the islands as he clutched a rubber hammerhead shark, obsessively rubbed antibacterial lotion on his hands, and then rubbed his hands on his face.  By night-time when he gave the itinerary for the next day he would be glossy-eyed and slurring slightly.  The last night that we were on the boat (it was an 8-day tour for the rest of the passengers but we were only there for the first 3) after he detailled the activities for the next day he unexpectedly launched into a speech about how tourism was what was keeping the islands going, but it was also killing them.  The money from tourists coming to gawk at the wildlife is vital for the protection programmes to continue running, but the money inevitably lines the wrong pockets and the ever-increasing traffic of visitors is damaging the delicate eco-system they´ve come to see.  At the end of a few minutes there was an uncomfortable silence and then one of the other passengers raised his hand.  "So, what time are you meeting us for lunch tomorrow again?"  His approach was strange, and his audience was perhaps ill-chosen, but his argument is valid and compelling, and isn´t unique to the Galapagos.  Any community which initiates tourism treads this fine line, of benefitting from the income tourism brings, but also suffering from the effects of turning their lifestyle into an attraction for outsiders to pay to observe.  There is a new wave of "sustainable" or "eco" tourism, which aims to mitigate the harmful effects of tourism as much as possible.  But it seems like it will always be a double-edged sword, and if a community relies entirely on tourism for its economy there will inevitably be comprimises.  

However, moral dilemmas aside, I did decide to be a tourist, and it is truly an enchanted place.  I spent about 20 minutes just swimming around with a giant sea turtle, and a good 10 minutes persuing a white-tipped shark.  It did dawn on me during this time that chasing a shark was an odd thing to do, but he didn´t seem to mind all that much.  We had a healthy dose of land and sea iguanas and plenty of seals, frigates, and even some penguins on the last day.  By the end of the trip, I returned to Quito sunburnt, still swaying from the high-speed ferry boats, and mesmerised by the natural magic of the Galapagos.






Next post: my three weeks living with a shaman and his family in the jungle.  There´s a perfectly normal sentence...

More photos of Quito here and more photos of Galapagos here.

Monday, May 9, 2011

Livin´ Large in the Big Easy


New Orleans gets a lot of hype. It´s deemed one of the best places to party in the US, the best place to get some jazz, the best place to clog your arteries with delicious and distinctive food; it also caught the attention of the world in 2007 with the devastation it suffered because of Hurricane Katrina and the country´s ineptitude in handling the aftermath.  New Orleans does encapsulate all of these things, yes; but during my week there I got the feeling, more than with other cities, that New Orleans is all about perspectives.  Every perspective is valid in its own way, but no one perspective encompasses what the city really is, not in its entirety.  Each is a narrative of experience, of what we as individuals saw or chose to see.  There was the Dutch guy in the hostel with a suspiciously Russian accent who spent every night on Bourbon Street and every day recovering under a tree in the courtyard, and my couchsurfing host who didn´t believe in bad neighbourhoods, only overly paranoid people who attracted negative attention.  Then there was Chad, who had spent all his life in New Orleans and recently moved to Atlanta.  He was back to work at Jazz Fest, but he couldn´t wait to leave New Orleans; he hates the place.  He told me about the deep-seated racism that´s getting worse rather than better.  The corruption of the police force, the degradation of the schools (New Orleans had only a 40% literacy rate before Katrina), the fearless gangs of young people who have no qualms about killling someone who walks onto the wrong street.  "You see all these people here enjoying themselves? Black people, white people...at the end of the festival it´ll all just go back to how it was, they´ll go back to hating each other."  It´s a damning view, but it´s his perspective and it´s not wrong.

My perspective was a bit different, though.  I´m a bit in love with New Orleans, with the booming personalities and the po´boys and the music.  Music has a different status there: it´s as ubiquitous and essential as the food.  The people there have suffered, and it dates to well before Katrina, though her name still hangs over the city and frequently slides into conversations.  I was sharing lunch with a lady from Baton Rouge who was also volunteering at Jazz Fest my first day in New Orleans, listening to her stories of 20 people staying in her house for months after the storm because they had nowhere to go, and the tales of water rising faster than the people scrambling up the stairs to their attics, when the waitress caught a snatch of it.  "Are you talking about Katrina?"  "Yeah."  "Yeah..."  And that mutual, slightly pained, almost reverent pause before the stories continued.  But life goes on, because it must, and to me, it seemed the music is a catharsis for all that hardship.  On street corners, at the Jazz Fest, in dive bars, in front of coffee shops, people poured out music, damn good music.




 But on to less serious things.  My first few days in Nawlins was spent toing and froing to the Jazz Fest, where I jammily managed to get a volunteer position.  My expertise now extend to children´s canvas painting assistant, Assess Tent sitting, and Recycling Centre standing.  But even better than gaining this CV-worthy skillset, I got to see Mumford and Sons, Tom Jones, The Decemberists, Low Anthem, bits of jazz and bluegrass, and on and on.  So not a bad endeavour at all in the end. 

The hostel I stayed in for the first four nights was delapidated but clean, and more importantly full of interesting folk happy to swap tales over a beer or five.  One man, who´s currently moonlighting as the maintenance guy, used to work on a pleasure boat that was right next to Deepwater Horizon when it exploded last year.  He´s currently waiting for his $450k cheque from BP to come in and quite looking forward to it.  Among others, there was also an 85 year old Swiss man who´d lived most of his life on the Amazon carrying tourists to and fro, and a doctor from Brazil who played violin, but only with a backup track and speakers - he held regular nightly concerts by the barbecue.


The final three days I stayed with a Couchsurfing host and became travel buddies with another Couchsurfer who was staying there.  Together we were able to tick crossing the Mississippi, seeing City Park and its associated bayou, and getting in some proper dive bar jazz off our lists.  The dive bar in question was called Bullet´s Sports Bar, and for all you Treme fans out there, yes it was the Bullet´s featured in the first season with Kermit Ruffins.  



I finished out my last night in New Orleans with a good old cheesy ghost history tour.  Not one to shirk cultural responsibility completely, I picked a tour that leaned heavily on the history side, and it provided a (mostly) factual look of the weird, twisted past of the French Quarter, with a bit of flair thrown in ford good measure.  Our tour guide had a colonial Indian accent that suited his flowing garb and feathered trilby, and his penchant for cackling at the end of each harrowing vignette served its unnerving purpose.  Among the bits of insight gleaned from the tour (which, by the way, I would recommend to anyone visiting: Haunted History Tours) were that all the buildings in the French Quarter bar three are actually in Spanish colonial style due to the entire area and all its wooden buildings burning down twice in the space of six years, the inhabitants are descended pretty much exclusively from convicts and prostitutes shipped over from France (the first time the convicts asked the king for women he sent them over nuns), and Johnny Depp has recently bought a very haunted house from Nicholas Cage which seems to bring a curse on all its owners which he intends to turn into a museum in the next year.

I definitely left New Orleans with a taste of more in my mouth (and not just for the bienets from Cafe du Monde); hopefully I´ll have a chance to dine once more on the Big Easy.

Nom nom nom...Later ´gators.






 Next stop, Quito. Photo albums are temproarily suspended until I figure out a place in South America that doesn´t take 5 hours to upload a single picture.

Update: More photos of New Orleans can be viewed here.