Curacao is beautiful.

Curacao is beautiful.

Curacao is Caribbean, an island of hot air breezes and palm trees. It is thin sandy beaches and sheltered coves. It is recliner chairs by the water and drinks with alcohol and fruit delivered by beautiful barefoot creatures.

Curacao is salty sweat, salty water, salty hair, salty skin, salty thoughts and salty dreams.

Curacao is standing next to the sink to drink glass after glass of warmish tapwater that never tasted better. It is never using the shower on anything but pure cold, which still feels too warm.

Curacao is fruit salad breakfast with yoghurt and granola and a cup of tea on the balcony overlooking the sea a lazy stone's lob away. Maybe 50 meters? It is an avocado sandwich on the same balcony for lunch with Dutch cheese, American pickles, Colombian mayo and mustard on good dark whole grain bread, a tomato if you feel like it, with Pringles and a cup of 100% juice, no sugar added sucka.

It is dinner there too, vegetarian going heavy on the veggies, with mosquitoes indetectable around your feet until the bumps rise, though they are milder here than anywhere else I've been (I theorize it's partially due to the vegetarian fare, no iron here you little bastards).

Curacao is houses both grand colonial and cinderblock mundane, many painted from the array of bright colors only dared/celebrated in the Caribbean. It is bright red, yellow, blue, purple, pink, and green. It is turquoise, amethyst, fuchsia, boysenberry, terra cotta, and electric ultramarine.

It is collonades, balconies, and elaborate molding. But it is Caribbean heat and salt, mansions slumping into ruin as even nostalgia grinds to dust. It is paint bubbling off concrete walls in beautifully decrepit patches of time passing before your eyes. It is high speed decay, frozen when you look, but advancing when you blink. It is beauty subjected to brutality. It is colors laughing and dying in a relentless sun.

Curacao is stars by the thousand in clear night air. It is a constant tail of toxic death leeching south over the water from the oil refinery that squats cancerously in the center of the island, a tumor in paradise. It is a calm lagoon of flamingos, and it is those flamingos covered in oil after a human error spill a couple weeks ago. It is sacred ocean stretching to the horizon, where tankers idle like invaders outside the walls, waiting for their turn at plunder.

Curacao is languages, Dutch, Spanish, English, and Papiamentu, itself a creole of all those plus Portuguese, Amerindian, and African languages. Arawak anyone? It is an amazing mixing, blending, sharing of cultures and people. It is Carribean spices on Latin American ingredients using European recipes.

Curacao is apartheid. It is Europeans on the beach and others sweating in the interior. It is shiny BMWs and rusty clunkers rarely parked side by side. It is staggering inequality, where a majority of the jobs for the darker skinned are as security guards for the lighter. It is locked gates, floodlights, and guard dogs. It is windows rolled up, to keep the AC in and the locals out.

Curacao is broken politics, familiar and corrupt. It is an aftertaste of colonial hegemony over a veneer of democracy over a heart of cronyism. It is the possibility of riots, and a cycle of violence.

Curacao is another troubled Eden. It is problems without solutions, and beauty beyond my ability to articulate/photograph. It is connection to the world, and isolation from it. It is new friendships and the absence of old ones.

Curacao is Caribbean, an island of sun, shade, sand, and water. It is the pressure of hot air, and the caress of cool water currents. It is braincoral and waving sea sponge tubes. It is fish far too beautiful to be true, moving in a three dimensional fantasy of ocean life. It is colors that make the buildings look drab. It is ferocious life played out every second on small scales. (It is forgiveness for the pun.)

For one more month, Curacao is home.

Frozen Nazi zombies kinda ruined my appetite.

Our last night in Ecuador we went to the only restaurant we knew in Guayaquil, the cheap Chinese food place across from the open-late liquor store where seen-it-all attendents passed groceries out to nervous looking customers through the bars.

We ate chop suey and watched a super-gory movie about a group of teens staying in a snow lodge getting bloodily murdered by frozen Nazi zombies. Awesome (especially the peculiar dubbing), but faintly nauseating with a plate full of cheap chop suey and a belly garnished with pre-trip nerves.

Yes, after 4 years of nearly continuous traveling, I still get nervous when I move from one chapter to another. I was going from a Backpacking Chapter to a Stationary Chapter that would resemble work in some ways, staying with friends in Curacao for a couple months. But I woke up excited when the alarm went off at 3:30 AM.

We packed, ate our leftover fruit, and went downstairs to catch the taxi we'd scheduled for 4:00. We found the lobby empty, dark, and quadruple-locked: heavy lock on the door, secondary pad lock, floor bar, and security gate. There was no way we were getting out without help.

We of course had no idea where "help" could be found, so I wandered the closest hallway, shout-whispering "hola?" at a level intended to awaken but not disturb. It's a fine line to tread.

I apparently tread it well enough, as a sleepy senora stuck her head out, complete with hair curlers and flower robe. All she was missing was the green face mask to qualify for an Eddie Murphy movie.

She opened the door just as our disconcertingly sleepy cabbie appeared. He dropped us off at the airport with a yawn, an hour in an amazingly slow moving line, and we were on our way towards the Caribbean with a stop in Bogota to watch the middle-aged Colombianas prowl the terminal hallways in skin-tight silk body suits. Leopard print of course. With heels. And attitude.

Our second flight wasn't long enough to watch a movie, so I didn't quite get my US blockbuster fix (what happens in the Avengers movie after he turns into the Hulk?) but dissatisfaction could never survive that first breath of humid Caribbean air. Take a deep breath.

Awesome names, schizophrenic poodles, and racial insensitivity.

It was tempting to stay in our Casa de breaded eggplant, mosquito net, and clean sheets in Canoa, but we had a date with an airplane coming up, so made our way back to Guayaquil, bussing first to Jipijapa, a town worth forgetting, but a name worth celebrating. Jipijapa.

There was a little longing in our gazes as we passed through Puerto Lopez. Our favorite pastry street vendor was already set up, thick wedges of soggy cake in their styrofoam cups waiting in the smudged display case. Another time, amigo.

You can take this chance to say Jipijapa a couple more times if you want.

Misty futbol in Montanita

We spent a day in Montanita, wandering through the flip-flopped tourist bonanza with something like nostalgia, and greeted like old friends by the old lady who runs the hostel. She made a series of comments in her murmured English that we think we jokes, but were too soft and weird to quite understand. Her poodle was at first happy to see us, then barked at us in that schizophrenic way poodles have. Hello and shut up, Nina.

The only other guest was a retired American teacher who looked like Indiana Jones' drunk uncle Merle, and whose conversation alternated between bitter musings about the Good Old Days and suspicious overstatements about how he never drinks or does drugs. We started off a little slow, but were moderately chummy by the time we left. Good luck with your suspicious and nonspecified business dealings, my compatriot.

Then we were back in Guayaquil's main bus station megacomplex, where we wandered into the sprawling food court with enthusiasm and reluctance, which go together like the rice and beans I got from a place called Menestras del Negro.

"Menestras" is beans, and the Negro? Let's just say the restaurant chain's logo would never work in America. Is that a bone-fork holding his little topknot of hair in place? Wow.

Full of my Negro's beans and rice, we walked over to Guayaquil's Metrovia bus station, crossing a pedestrian bridge over a 72 lane highway and were stared at by every other person there. One lady literally dropped her oranges as she twisted around to watch us walk past. Apparently they don't get a lot of gringos in backpacks there? Why not?

Guayaquil has a distinct rivalry with Quito, but modeled their bus network on the capital's. They forgot to the signs or maps saying where the hell you are, so I was peering out the window trying to see street signs (another detail they forgot) with the tiny guide book map open in my other hand. Just slightly Clueless Tourist.

A young businessman helped us, even staying on a stop farther than he needed to so he could point us towards the bus back in the right direction. Have I mentioned that Ecuadorians are awesome?


Guayaquil is known as a rough town with nothing worth seeing beyond the riverside "malecon" boardwalk, but we liked it well enough. I ate some seriously funky lunch specials, pulling shreds of meat off unidentifiable knuckle-looking chunks of bones, and K bought a hat.

I also bought the netbook I am currently using, slowly discovering how crappy a netbook can be. The operating system blows (it takes three weeks to launch the "games" folder and if you click anything else in that time it all freezes), the audio jack doesn't accept headphones, and the worst detail: the keyboard is only semi-functional.

How can you produce such a crappy keyboard in 2012? My opinion of HP is seriously damaged. Think they'll let me return it?

A few words here, a few words there.

I have just enough of a toenail in the 21st century to know that when someone links to your blog, you're supposed to return the favor, so my friends, I direct you to the 5 Things to Do Today blog.

I find myself in Paradise, with a fairly regular schedule, a project I've been procrastinating for years, and a balcony that screams for my attention like Kate Middleton's breasts apparently scream throughout Southern Europe. These things (the project and the balcony, not the breasts) have left me little time for my other pasttimes: blogging and dicking around online, but in the aforementioned website they conjoined perfectly, hanging pleasingly paired like the princesses' scepters.

Anyway, here's my contribution to the other blog.
http://www.5thingstodotoday.com/2012/09/18/pay-attention-to-the-sequence-of-flavours-of-wine/

(Probably one more short post on Ecuador, then I'll catch up to this hallowed isle.)

 

Copacetic in Canoa

We spent four days in our Spanish expat palacio in Canoa, eating, getting over our colds, and wandering around town.


Breakfast at home in the sandy inner courtyard of blue paint and ferns, cheap fish soup lunch specials on local benches and a stray dog gazing at me beseechingly, and (relatively) chic dinners from the affable Spaniard who worked the evening shift in our hotel and made fantastic breaded eggplant in a savory tomato sauce. I was too busy eating to take pictures.

The beach was still crowded during the day, though noticably less than during the weekend (thank gods). At the north end Surfers carried their boards home at sunset, when the wind rose to flap the colorful shelters which you can rent during the day for a buck.

As is customary, the beachside street was the marketplace for hippehandmade woven bracelets and feather earrings (in case I accidentally sound too dismissive, I wear one of the former and K one of the latter). In the more permanent stalls (ie larger folding tables) their Ecuadoran colleagues sold customary tourist kitsche, key chains, T-shirts, and ashtrays, while watching telenovelas on tiny screens behind the counter.


It's a pretty calm town, which was just what we needed as we finished up our time in Ecuador.

How we barely avoided sleeping on the street in Ecuador.

All locked up.

We stepped off the musty bus onto the abused concrete sidewalk of the town of Canoa and immediately looked around for hotel signs in the dark. From where we stood, hoisting out backpacks on, we could see a half dozen hotels, with the promise of more on nearby streets. Cautious sighs of relief. We went looking for rooms.

"Perdon, hay habitaciones?"

A look of surprise from the manager. "No."

Next place, same. Again. Repeat. What the hell was going on?

We found a female innkeeper who was less abrupt about dismissing us and asked her if there was a festival or something. She looked at us with that "you poor tourists are so terribly stupid" look that every traveler dreads.

"Si. It's Festival Weekend throughout all of Ecuador. The entire country comes to the coast for this weekend, every place has been booked months in advance."

Crap. This is why we avoid festivals.

We couldn't help but wonder why our friendly abuela in Puerto Lopez (or either of her sons) had neglected to warn us as we sauntered out the door that morning, but at the end of the day, it's the tourist's responsibility to have a clue.

We kept looking. (What's the Spanish word for "manger"? Maybe we could find one of those...)

Things were getting desperate when a woman carrying her shopping bags home down the sandy street asked us if we were looking for a room.

"I have a...room. But it's not really...nice." She warned us. I had been sizing up clumps of bushes to sleep under (no, I'm not kidding) so we were happy to have the option.

Every year so many people flock to the coast for that weekend that locals rent out their extra rooms, or even entire houses. Our lady had rented her house to a group, and she was staying with her husband and 37 children in the other spare room, which looked like a converted storage space.

We had the laundry room.

There was a foam pad on a bedframe with a powerful odor, but there was also a mosquito net. (They hold the smell in, but are supremely worth it.) There was a "bathroom" we could use, which was really more of an outhouse, with a semi-broken toilet and no light.

But our hosts did all they could, and strung a bare bulb up in the outhouse via an extension cord from their room. This was very nice, but we had no control over the light, so when we got back from dinner and it was out, we were stumbling around in there blind, trying not to think about spiders, cockroaches, and things that go clickety-click.

Between the smell, lumpy surface, highway a couple meters from our heads, and relentlessly meowing kitten somewhere nearby, we didn't expect to sleep much, but we actually did pretty well, all things considered.

But we woke up with full-fledged colds from the overly AC'd bus, and did not want to spend another night there.

First things first, we went looking for breakfast. We found a place run by a retired Dutchman living the good life. He had opened an eco-cafe/hotel thing, and was happily bustling around serving breakfast with bare feet in his sand-floored yard just opposite the beach. It feels like a blessing to witness someone so utterly happy with their place in life.

(I wish I had a picture of him, but the cat at lunch was also part of the pep squad/welcome wagon.)

His happiness alone was a blessing, but when he heard we were looking for a room, he resolved to help us, and went marching off down the street with us, hailing each hotel owner by name and asking if they could fit his "friends" in.

These were people we had asked previously, and been universally rebuffed, but on only the second try they answered "no, we don't have any rooms. (pause) Except one, but it's not...nice."

Familiar refrain. This place's "not nice" looked better than the other one's (a functioning toilet!), so we grabbed it immediately. It turned out to be worse than the first one, with plenty of mosquitoes but no net or air circulation, but we felt lucky to have anything, and made it through to Sunday afternoon, when we suddenly had our pick of the town again.

We settled in a nice Spanish-owned place, where we stayed for our remaining four nights in Canoa, appreciating every moment in our palace of mosquito net, non-stank-ass matress, and fully functional bathroom. With light! This, my friends, was not "not-nice."

And to top it all off? They made the best tortilla espanola I've had outside of San Sebastian. All's well that ends well-seasoned.

Would you rather catch a cold or stink like fish?

(I don't have any pictures from that day, so here's a couple each from Riobamba and the Amazon.)

One fine Friday morning we paid our bill with the old lady who ran our hotel/hostel in Puerto Lopez, said goodbye to her two sons who we'd become friends with, and walked to the bus stop, aka the large parking space next to the town's only traffic light.

The travel gods were with us and a northbound bus pulled in just as we were crossing the street. I threw my bag in the storage space underneath, and had just enough time to notice the plastic tubs and strong scent of fish before he closed the door.

As the bus headed north I pondered what to do if my entire backpack emerged stinking of fish. But that was a rocking horse going nowhere, so instead I stared out the window as we drove up the gorgeous Ecuadoran coastline, marveling at the plumes as whales spouted offshore. Our bus answered with enthusiastic eruptions of noxious black exhaust.

The bus was full, then empty, then filled up again with rambunctious kids going home from school on Friday afternoon. All in navy blue uniforms, they sang along with the love songs, flirted, and teased each other, boys howling and girls blushing.

We all piled out in Manta (where I was relieved to note my backpack did not stink of fish), and took the next bus to Portoviejo, which made Manta look luxurious. We bought our tickets and climbed on the overly air-conditioned bus to find we were nearly the only people onboard, so I went looking for a snack from the bus station vendors, K waiting on board.

I was working my way around when I noticed my bus's parking space was empty, then looked up to see it driving away through the parking lot. So I got to run through the crowd of people and jump onto a moving bus, which is always fun.

Luckily vendors got on in the next town, so I had lunch of a pastry thing filled with dulce de leche, with a plastic baggie filled with sweetened coconut milk to wash it down. They do love their sugar in Latin America.

That bus, our third of the day, stayed overly air-conditioned for the 6 hours we were on it, and we could both feel that nasty taste growing in our throats that meant we were getting sick. Just short of 8 hours on buses felt much longer by the time we reached San Vicente, a small town just 5 minutes from our destination of Canoa. But this is where the driver and money-taker stopped for dinner, so we sat, trying to accept the delay with Zen-like perspective despite our blood sugar levels dropping past Crabby and into Downright Cantankerous.

Right outside our window was one of those barbeques in a half an oil drum, and the woman tending it had it heaped with all manner of indistinguishable entrails and sweetbreads. The big rubbery floppy things were actually starting to look good to me, but I felt bad for K.

Meanwhile night had arrived, and one of our travel principles is to avoid arriving in new towns after dark if possible, but there was nothing we could do. K worried about finding a place, and I reassured her "I am sure we will find a place. It's not like the entire town will be full or anything."

Can you see where this is heading?

Djou know who djour firs president was?

(I may stop using this blogspot account, so recommend switching to the wordpress one if you're interested...I already skipped the last post here. vagabondurges.wordpress.com)

In 1999 Ecuador had a 197% inflation rate. The wealthy removed about $2 billion from the country, and the GDP shrank by 5.3%.

As part of the reforms in response, the country adopted the US dollar in 2000, pissing off Ecuadorians but helping stabilize the economy, which, with the help of good old high oil prices, recovered dramatically, posting an average 5.2% growth from 2002-2006.

Okay, the economics history lesson is over (you're welcome) but the point is, Ecuador uses the US dollar, with relatively crisp pictures of Andrew Jackson, weathered images of Ulysses Grant, and ratty specters of Abraham Lincoln gazing out from well-worn bills. I saw a couple George Washingtons, and the paper felt more like greasy cloth, moments from disintegrating completely. Most of people's daily commerce in Ecuador is in smaller units, so the country supplements US coins with their own 1, 5, 10, 25, and 50 cent monedas (minted in Mexico and Canada).

But the fundamental monetary unit is the $1 coin. Sacagawea, determination on her face as she leads the invaders into their newly purchased land, baby on her back. I remember when they introduced these in the US. The seemed to be a new monetary unit reserved as change in the post office's stamp vending machine.

During high school jobs there was usually one or two bouncing around the bottom of the cash drawer, curiosities that blended in with the credit cards receipts and Canadian quarters people had slipped us.

Down here she's queen. I picture hordes of Sacagaweas sneaking south across the border into Mexico in the middle of the night. When we bought almuerzo lunches: two Sacagaweas. My haircut, the same. One Sacagwea gets you four rides on Quito's bus system.

But recently the little lady has developed quite a social life. She dates former US presidents exclusively, and has been found canoodling in pockets with the likes of Martin Van Buren, John Quincy Adams, and Rutherford B Hayes. Oh Rutherford, you marvelously bearded charmer.

This influx of presidential presence lead to the experience of sitting on a crumbling Ecuadorian curb, eating my nightly piece of squishy chocolate cake from the sidewalk vendor around the corner, being quizzed on US presidential history by Alejandro, the tour guide next door.

He is apparently a big fan of the US, and has been collecting and studying US president coins in preparation for his US citizenship test.

"Ey, jou know who de firs' president of de US was?"

My US History class in high school was among the hardest classes I ever took, and by the end of the year I knew my presidents pretty well. But on an overcast evening in Ecuador, I barely passed muster. I got Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, but forgot old John Quincy Adams. Probably because he was necking in the hall closet with Sacagawea, the mutton-chopped scoundrel.

I was only slightly embarrassed at not being able to answer all Alejandro's questions, and was left with one of my own.

What's the deal with Millard Fillmore?