There’s always the point at the end of the trip when you start fading: the idea of getting home starts to sound a little exciting, your stamina for pushing through multiple daily excursions starts to taper off, and “that one restaurant we liked yesterday” becomes a just-fine spot to take every remaining meal until you leave. And along with all of your adventuring steam, all your wearable clothes start to dwindle dangerously and, if you’re like me, whatever grasp of the language you had three days ago is pole-vaulting away from you without telling you ahead of time.
As such, with just 2 days left of our Ecuadorian adventure, I told the ice cream lady that “I would like my ice cream served in a rabbit, please,” and I am That Lady who purchased a giant alpaca poncho from the artisan crafts gift shop and is now wearing it all around town (and also wore it out of the gift ship) because it’s freezing here and all of my clothing that covers my arms and legs is drenched in either mud, wet-smell, or plane scuzz. I am on par with the New York tourist who wanders around in a NYFD Sweatshirt and a free Statue of Liberty visor shouting “WOW, it’s the Big Apple!” and there’s nothing I can do about it anymore because I just don’t care.
It’s been an interesting but enjoyable penultimate 24 hours of travel; we got up early yesterday to cab it 30 minutes out of town into the Andes cloud forest, and the forest is aptly named. The lodge we stayed at rests at just about 10,000 feet, and in many places your head is level with the clouds, which weave in and out all of the volcanic rivulets crawling down the Andes and closing in on you from either side of the tiny winding mountain road. We could have tried to hike into it and explore Cajas National Park, but the rain came back in to bookend our trip and so after one failed attempt at finding the fishery that sells you bamboo stick-poles to catch your own pond trout (i.e. hooking fish in a barrel), we retired to our Mountain lodge and drank an impressive amount of wine.
Hosteria Dos Chorreras, where we stayed, is a lovely establishment. It’s also really spooky. It’s a sprawling all-wood lodge that’s built straight into the mountainside, and although both restaurants look like they are made to seat 200 a piece, we are pretty sure we were the only ones staying there which was a little disconcerting. We rationalized that if everyone here disappeared and turned into a ghost, though, that there wouldn’t be so many good reviews on TripAdvisor (ghosts can’t type on keypads except for Sam from Ghost). Weather-permitting, the lodge also has all kinds of horseback riding and hiking and indigenous town visits you can get into, but as noted it was pretty dreary for us so Enter: wine. For a backdrop to the wine drinking, there’s a glorious chiminea in your bedroom that the staff will light a giant fire in as you charge more and more bottles to your tab and look past the giant in-room hot tub and out the window at the rain, the nature, and in our case, 6 dudes working right outside the room on some kind of drainpipe at most hours of the day. It was just like having friendly, industrious roommates!
And then, there is the gift shop. Really this whole establishment exists in service of the gift shop, which is both awesome and strategically placed for tourists who are not at all prepared ahead of time for how cold it is up here. It offers every single cool handmade Ecuadorian gift in every single color you could ever want, all for about $25 a pop, and I’d honesty like to meet someone who stayed here and didn’t buy some kind of badass poncho or sweater with some Ecuadorian animals knitted on it.
And now Kevin has this awesome sweater with llamas on it and I have a new cape. And we wore them right out of the gift shop, and to dinner, and back to Cuenca the next day, and in my case all around the town of Cuenca. I figured maybe no one noticed until we saw a quartet of older tourists leaving the same place we were eating, and they were all wearing zip off camping pants and Ecuadorian ponchos. #tourists #touristswhoarecold
And it seems my Latin-inspired poncho has supplanted my Latin-inspired vocabulary because I just can’t remember how to say anything anymore. To be fair, “Conejo” is VERY similar to “Cono” but also means something VERY disturbing to your ice cream lady, and I keep wishing people good morning when it’s 10 p.m. and good night when it’s 7 a.m. and perhaps most embarrassing (I’m so sorry Señora Patty and Señora Sands who taught me so welll…) I’ve gotten to the point where I’m mixing up “sí” and “gracias.” So the time has come to just see myself out of here.
I have time to write this because we got up at 5 a.m. and through security to have our 8 a.m. flight cancelled, but after getting iced out of the 1:40 replacement, these lovey flight attendants for a very crappy airline got us ticketed on another airline’s flight leaving at 10:30 a.m., so now it’s waiting area World Cupping and travelogue updating. I’ll get around to Galápagos continuations once Kevin sends me my prized sea lion-swimming photos, and we’ll probably have some thoughts on the trip when it’s finally all said and done.
On that note, I’d like to add a final thought on Ecuadorian food before signing out: you can order Hebos y Queso here for $2, which gets you a 2-pound bowl full of gigantic fava beans and some squeaky cheese cut into little rectangles on a separate plate. Never in my life did I think I’d find a land that so gets my most secret culinary desires.
Ciao (they say that here)!