Walking high, travelling far, and generally looking up

It really is time that I wrote something more positive here. Luckily my neck issues are now sorting themselves out and I've been able to make some visits out of Loja, so let's talk about that.

On January 11th I headed out with my Colombian friend James (pronounced ha-mezz) to Vilcabamba, the local laid-back hippie/gringo commune for a spot of hiking. The place is interesting as it not only showcases the huge climatic diversity of Ecuador, since a windy 40 minute bus journey brings you to a slightly lower altitude and with it a sultry tropical world of colour far removed from the monochromatic fresh mountain slopes of Loja, but the influx of gringos on the search for cheap land and daily massages lends it a much more laid back feel than Loja.

After said bus journey we headed straight for mandango, one of the many mountains that tower over the village. Not knowing the way to the path, we stopped by 'Hostal Mandango' in the presumption that the owner would have some inkling as to the whereabouts of the hotel after which he named his business. As it was his terrible directions cost us a good half an hour of walking time. We finally found the actual path, and after a decent slog up the top (some of the time on our hands and knees up a rubble path with a sheer drop to one side), we were soon making Jesus poses on the cross at the top. Most exciting of all was the wildlife - we saw an iguana camouflaging itself in the dry grass, had to poke a tarantula out of our path with a long stick, and when we reached the top a grand old eagle swooped over to say hi.

After we stopped for pizza in a well established American-owned joint where the owners spoke barely a single word of Spanish. It left me with a warm glow of self-satisfaction to compare myself with him, out for the day with an entirely non English-speaking friend chatting constant Spanish, and that after only 4 months of learning and immersion. My friendship with James has been funny in a way because it's given me a guide to how I'm improving. When I think back to when I got to know him 2 months ago and was basically latching onto singular words I'd understood and forming any acceptable sentence about the perceived conversation topic, I honestly do feel quite smug that now we can have real back-and-forth conversations, and I understand 95% of what he says. It's strange in a way that a friendship can work in those circumstances but with enough hand signals and 'eyyyy's we somehow muddle through.

The second trip was last weekend, to the village of Zapotillo down by the Peruvian border in order to see the guayacanes trees, which flower brilliant yellow annually, but only for one week, so we knew we had to go for it. Now, due to the the remote Andean location of Loja I've come to approach the interminable slaloming bus journeys required to reach anywhere of note with a Zen-like calm, seeing the endless hours as  opportunity to immerse myself in favourite books and albums, alone withy my thoughts. However this journey tested my tolerance to the i  limit.

We took the bus from Loja at 15.30 on the Saturday, arriving in Zapotillo at 23.00. Due to the one-off nature of the event all hostels were fully booked, so we looked for salvation in the bus station. The building closed for the night at midnight, but the woman kindly offered us some cardboard boxes from the storeroom and some scissors that we might make ourselves some beds and sleep outside on the concrete behind the buses. This actually seemed like our best option until we saw that the bus we'd arrived on was still open and containing several fellow bums sprawled across the seats. There we 'slept' (the bus station was next door to a late night music club) until 5am.

At 5 the engines started up and the bus driver told us he was heading towards the village where all the yellow was. Liar. We overshot the turning for the village by a good 10km and greeted the sunrise with our thumbs out on the side of the road after working our way back there from the dead end village we'd been dropped off in. Luckily hitchhiking is super easy over here due to all the pickup trucks, so three lifts later we made it back to the turning and at 7.30 jumped on the back of one of the many army trucks running a free service to the trees.

I guess you could say we got what we paid for. Between there and the trees was only 2 hours of windy dirt track. Cue much headbanging (ironic since the doc had told me the day before to avoid heavy metal concerts due to my neck) and furious breathing through the nose, if at all. By the time we arrived at 9.30 we'd been on the road and sleeping rough for 18 hours. To be fair the site that met our eyes was beautiful - an entire valley decked out in daffodil yellow, definitely a site for sore eyes and necks, and we gulped down our morning chivo al hueco (goat in the hole) gratefully.

Due to work on Monday and the ridiculously long journey we'd have to take back, we only had 3 hours in the actual village we'd been aiming for. We spent those eating goat, walking alongside a herd of goats towards some old Inca bathing pool before hitching on a pickup instead, which we shared with a travel sick goat on our way back from the baths. To me this was such a south american thing to happen - chilled out about giving us a lift and then springing the surprise of a retching goat in our travel space with no apology or explanation, hilarious. So we huddled at the far end of the back of the truck, grimacing with each goaty retch as we knew that if anything came out of its mouth it would trickle down to us and our bags sitting downhill from it.

After another army truck journey from hell it was back on the bus. Luckily I was armed with my neck brace, which is brilliant for sleeping on buses as it stops your neck moving around with the movement of the bus, and my secret weapon - the unabridged Moby Dick audiobook. Works every time.

A very dizzy Christmas

I haven't written much in my blog recently because it was simply too depressing to write about the situation while it was still ongoing. Now that I'm feeling better and things are just about back to normal I feel I can write about it with a bit of distance and perspective.

So what happened? On Thursday 19th December, after the last proper teaching day of that year, we had the Christmas party of the business empire (that's right, business empire. Bet your secondary school wasn't part of a business empire) to which our language school belongs. The previous evening we'd had our own lovely little teachers' party in a fast food chicken restaurant - where else - and given out secret santa presents and the sort, but this party was rubbish. It was for 40 employees and took place in a pizza restaurant which had one stone oven which fitted four small pizzas at a time. Spot the problem there... After seemingly endless ceremonies to crown the prince and princess of the school, which involved each one of the 10 candidates giving two laborious speeches about the message of Christmas, we heads the joy of witnessing a secret santa gift-sharing between 30 people which weren't a part of and which went something like this: the person who just received a present stands up, says 'my secret santa is a person who I just meet recently, seems very nice, blah blah blah... the person is revealed, gifts given, they stand up and the whole thing continues. For 30 people. Of course whilst all this was going on the one person trusted with making pizzas for 40 people with a small oven was chatting away to his mates and drinking beer. When the ceremonies were finally over after 11pm he finally started to prepare (!) the pizzas. Needless to say we left that place in a bad mood having been fairly inadequately fed...

When we got home we had to make ourselves some tea. After i put my basket of staple foods (2kg sugar, 2kg rice, 1kg pasta, bottle of tommy k, packet of biscuits, tin of peaches, packet of sweets, fair play) in the corner of the kitchen, I stood up, hit my head on the cabinet, and fell to the floor. I distinctly remember thinking 3 things down there: 'what am I doing on the floor, this is pathetic', 'I need to move my glasses so I don't crush them with my head' and 'oh, I can't move. Or speak'. The situation was so innocuous that my housemate Oliver 'common sense' Reynolds told me to wake up because I can't sleep on the floor. I recovered the power of speech and movement after a few minutes and trotted off to bed.

I expected that I had a bit of concussion but bravely dragged myself into school because my kids needed me for their big Christmas performances, and to be fair I was looking forward to my starring role as well. We had 'The Night Before Christmas' with the 7-9 year olds, climaxing in Santa and Rudolph spectacularly 'flying' off into the night from the swings in the playground, followed by a comparison of Christmas in Ecuador and Christmas in the UK, where we mostly discovered that it is in fact disappointingly similar. So that was fun. Even played a bit of charades and watched Wallace and Gromit with the one adult who showed up to my evening class, and I have to admit I feel slightly bad that he had to pay for that dubious pleasure.

I was meant to be leaving the next day for a big Christmas/new year trip around Ecuador, but had to keep putting it off due to feeling dizzy whenever I tried to walk anywhere and generally feeling low on energy and crappy. The situation continued until I gave in and found myself in a hospital clinic on Christmas Day being prescribed nausea tablets by a doctor who confessed to knowing very little about matters of the head. Those made me even more dizzy, but didn't stop me enjoying a lovely Christmas lunch with some English blokes and their friends. Roast turkey, roast potatoes, bacon stuffing, yorkshires, cauliflower cheese and gravy. Top stuff. That and the various packages from home (and a charming Rudolph hat from Korea, see below!) and being able to watch literally every Christmas special on iPlayer on my tablet (even the queen's speech!) at least did something to quell the homesickness of my first Christmas abroad and alone and sick.

It was clear that I had to see a specialist, and 3 days later I was going through one of those massive body scanners and having my head and neck xrayed. The upshot was that the bang on the head caused a swelling in my neck which was causing my spine to bend somewhat at the top and also restricting the blood flow to my head, hence the dizziness and all that. I was given pills to increase blood flow, relax the muscles and injections for my bum (good that I have a lesbian friend who used to work in a pharmacy) and a neck brace to wear for a month. Party on.

To be fair the neck brace isn't such a big deal, I only need it when I'm out and about and it gets me plenty of sympathy which let's face it we all enjoy. It's the biggest hindrance on hot sunny days and when doing any strenuous exercise, when the thickness of the material leads to some serious sweaty neck syndrome. It's also allowed me to reduce my hours at work, and having the one hour off in 6 makes an incredible difference.

I still managed to celebrate new year's, albeit in Loja and not on the beach in the party capital of Ecuador. They have some interesting customs here. In the week before people buy dolls dressed up as various hated famous people or make their own with their own personal figures of hate, presumably bosses or little sisters.

 On the night itself I saw boys dressed up as girls stopping the traffic (literally, not figuratively) and demanding money, along with little boys and girls doing similarly who may or may not have been actual beggars. At least the town felt alive for once. I spent the evening with my Venezuelan friends eating hallacas (corn dough filled with a three-meat sauce, and a little bit of each of egg, pepper, olive, broccoli, ham, carrot... then wrapped in a banana leaf and boiled) which we'd prepared the night before. At quarter to 12 we headed to the roof to see the fireworks all over the town, and then at 12 the dolls, which had been stationed in front of the houses were set on fire across the whole town. This gave an appearance of some kind of hell on earth, which some might say is fitting for this place. Well it looked cool anyway. Then came the questionable tradition where all the kids have to jump 12 times over the fire for good luck. Not sure about that one.

Right I've talked enough. I promise to make the next post a bit jollier. Seeya then.

Feeling festive with my morocho lady

Girfts from home

And advent calendar from my girlfriend

Christmas party with my 10-12 year olds

and my 7-9s AKA Santa and Rudolph

The root of all evil

Christmas lunch

Smiling

Venezuelan new year's

and said dolls burning on the street

New year's dolls

The Loja Sunday market

The market, which takes over a large proportion of the town on a Sunday morning, is definitely where you see Loja at its best. I love to pop down there of a Sunday morning to see lovely old indigenous ladies sat in huddles shelling peas, piles and piles of every exotic fruit and vegetable that you could care to imagine, and people shouting off about their toilet paper, fresh honey, parsley, potatoes, sugar cane juice and everything in between.

Of course, bartering is expected, and any attempts I make at it instantly mark me out as a gringo, but it's fun to try. The bottom picture of this post is how much fruit and veg I managed to buy with 5 dollars, so my bargaining skills must be improving (in my first week here I was duped into buying a small bunch of grapes for 2 dollars).

Christmas looms large

Some of you may have noticed a slight undertone of homesickness creeping into my recent posts, which doubtless has a lot to do with the unstoppable advancing of Christmas into our lives. Don't get me wrong, I love Christmas. It's just that practically all of the elements of Christmas that I love are missing from my life right now. My loved ones are far away, the usual build up and pre-Christmas excitement (let's face it, the best part of the whole shenanigans) is lacking from this part of the world, and most importantly it's far too warm to be Christmas at all.

So what is Christmas like in Ecuador, where they may not have the snow but they sure enough have the catholic following to make it into a big occasion? Well one thing is for sure - there's not the frenzy surrounding it that there is in England. Here in Loja the local independence celebrations saw a much bigger buildup, which is understandable of course, and although charming trees and decorations have been put up in the square, market, and in the houses, there's certainly not the same mad this-year's-has-to-be-the-best-ever-or-else feeling which has poisoned English Christmas preparations over the years.

I suppose a lot of it has to do with the fact that Christmas in the UK is the one shining beacon on the horizon during the descent into another demoralising winter, and families feel under pressure to produce a day which lives up to the endless weeks of excitement and presents which keep their little dears happy through the cold winter months. For this reason alone Christmas takes on a huge importance for a lot of people. Here, Christmas falls during the most agreeable weather of the year, and therefore it won't have too big a knock-on effect on people's lives whether it's a good Christmas or not.

A strange thing to observe is that the Christmas paraphernalia which does exist is very much orientated towards the image of Christmas depicted in 'It's A Wonderful Life' or that bloody coca-cola advert. If you were to seek out a Christmas card (I struggled with this - apparently South Americans don't send cards and it's a 'very European' thing) or some Christmas wrapping, you would almost certainly find it with either rosy-cheeked carol singers or Santa Claus dancing in the snow with his reindeers. Even the Christmas tree, with its roots in Nordic and German celebrations, seems rather out of place here.

In my classes I have been spending some time proudly comparing Christmas traditions in England with those in Ecuador. This has illustrated to me again the slightly depressing similarities between the two. In Ecuador the Christmas adverts start way too early, the tree is up in November, they sing carols (same ones as us but with a Spanish translation) in the run-up, and they even eat a turkey dinner, albeit on the 24th. They'd probably have Santa coming down the chimney if most of the houses didn't have tin roofs and it wasn't far too warm for a fireplace.

So to a certain extent Christmas is cancelled this year in my life. No need to feel sorry for me though, as myself, some of the teachers and our new Colombian compadres will be making the most of the time off and travelling around Ecuador for 10 days. It is definitely disappointing that I am in effect running away from Christmas, but there are definitely worse places that I could be running to. On the plus side I haven't heard Mariah Carey, Wham, Band Aid or any of that crap yet, and most likely won't. So there's a positive thought to end on if ever there was one.

(This post was originally written on 9th December but due to technical issues I'm posting it again with pictures)

Cultural differences handily summarised

I decided it was a good idea to sum up a handy list of cultural peculiarities thus far collected in my time here.

Social: in Ecuador it is customary to shake hands with every single person of the already-present group when arriving at a social event. Then, when beer or other alcohol is served, it is rude to take a beer just for oneself, and rather several beers are bought by the group, and small amounts are poured into each glass. If you then want more, you are too offer it to every other person on the table before pouring your own. ¡salud! is rarely bothered with. I was also told that answering the question 'do you want to go to a bar tonight?' with the question 'sure, what time?' is so European.

Commercial: bartering is commonplace in all but the biggest chain stores, and it is actually considered rather rude if you don't barter on price. I was recently told by a friend that one of the best ways to win the respect of an Ecuadorian is to barter with him. They also seem to be a lot more accepting of dodgy travelling salesmen, and willing to fork out for whatever crap the guy who's ambushed us on the bus with a 30 minute speech is peddling. That could just be down to the Ecuadorian mild-mannered nature of course.

Manners: little emphasis is placed here on the manners that we hold so dear in blighty. Please and thank you are used sparingly, and people would rather barge past you than utter a simple 'perdón'. Despite this, they are a very warm (if slightly reserved) race of people, and any friendship will be greatly repaid.

Hygiene: one aspect of life here that I've found unusual is the fact that used toilet paper is not flushed down the toilet, but rather placed in a designated bin at arm's length of the toilet. Inevitably, this usually reaches the point of overflowing before anyone bites the bullet and empties the container of shitty paper out. As such, the relative benefits of this system are surely outweighed by the mankiness of the overflowing shit-bin. A teacher from England told me once that the thing he loves about Ecuador is the freedom to urinate where he wants without fear of being judged, and yes, I have seen plenty of evidence, male and female, to back that statement up.

Relationships: not got any personal experience in this field but from what I've seen latino men live up to their less-than-positive reputation. It is widely accepted that men are scumbags who can't keep it in their trousers, and cheating between couples (married or unmarried) seems to be fairly accepted. Someone one told me that her father's unfaithfulness is actually a running joke in the family, and many nights after tea he'll pop out to 'meet a business partner' with a knowing wink. Everyone knows what this means and it's accepted as long as he crawls back into the marital bed at the end and doesn't take drugs. As Ecuador is quite a conservative catholic country, teenage marriage is quite common and some people seemed surprised that I was unmarried at 24.

Environment: fair play to the president, Rafael Correa, in this department, as he seems to be someone who actually cares about the environment. There exists something in Ecuadorian law called the 'law of nature' where the beautiful nature of the country is protected by law. The Galapagos are a bit too touristy but at least travel to the islands is highly restricted by the park entry fee. He tried an unusual policy of promising to leave the vast reserves of oil under the Ecuadorian jungle alone if the international community would come up with the $3.5bn that they could earn by exploiting 0.1% of the national park. In the end they only received a few million so the scheme was a abandoned, but a bit more cooperativeness from more well-off countries or individuals and it could have worked. Here in Loja I don't really see a lot of love for the environment, despite the beautiful natural location. I've yet to even encounter anywhere that you can recycle anything here.

I'll continue to add to this post as and when I think of more stuff. Contributions and suggestions gratefully received.

What I dream of when feeling homesick

In no particular order:

Fish and chips meals out to the pub with my parents

Chaotic Sunday afternoon cafe visits with my wider family to shelter from the pouring rain

Taking a flight to Dortmund to see my girlfriend and enjoy the pure  Gemütlichkeit of her apartment

Jumping on a train and being with my uni mates in Sheffield in an hour and a half

A proper cup of tea

The British sense of humour

Christmas by the fire, huddled up from the freezing cold with my closest family and playing some terrible board game

The look on my nieces and nephews faces when I knock on the door of their house in Bristol

Games of tennis with my brother and camomile tea and curry nights with my sister

Fifa tournaments and afternoon kickabouts with my old school friends

Regional accents

The ability to understand everyone with minimal difficulty (although this admittedly has its drawbacks)

The rain

My guitar

Home

Half time reflections

I am now roughly halfway through my stay here in Loja and it seems like that coupled with my mozzie travails and my little flirt with death on the mountain has put me in a reflective state of mind. I am currently unable to say if the halfway stage is a good or a bad thing. On the one hand it means I'm halfway to seeing my girlfriend and starting a new little chapter of adventure with travels around south america and beyond. On the other hand I feel like I'm starting to develop a nice routine here, am building strong relationships with some of my students and fellow teachers and am just starting to get a firm grip on the language.

A word that keeps popping into my head is freedom. You could definitively say that one of the most positive aspects of my life here is freedom. From the moment I wake up until the start of classes at 3pm I can essentially do what I want, which is nice of course. The problem is that freedom and loneliness can be defined similarly, and the two often appear hand in hand. So as I freely stroll around town or lie in the hammock with the day stretching ahead of me I can't help but feel the heavy hand of loneliness on my shoulder, dragging me back slightly as I go about my business, and I guess that wears me down somewhat.

This isn't meant to come across as moany or ungrateful for the opportunity I've got here. I can already hear the voices of my family and friends back home saying 'you're living the dream in a lovely warm country while we shiver here and count down to Christmas, stop complaining!', but I guess it does us all good to have a bit of a moan once in a while...

What it comes down to is that I just miss having my family and friends around. To be honest I don't particularly miss England at all, I more miss having people who truly care about me and are just a phone call away (Skype does NOT count) if I feel like calling. The natural response to meeting people from other countries who have cut all ties to come and live out here is one of respect and envy, but on further reflection I wonder how I would feel in their shoes? Is it such an enviable thing to have no real connection to your roots, to want to leave behind all that you grew up with? I'm not so sure.

So I am determined to make the most of my remaining time out here, and then of the time I spend in other places seeing where my money and interest will take me. The important thing is to remind myself that the vague sense of certain important people missing isn't loneliness at all, rather the feeling that you're more needed and wanted in one part of the world than in another. I guess that isn't really such a bad thing.