Don't Worry Buenos Aires, you Will Always be my First Love

            I can hardly remember where I left you last time. It’s probably only been a week or so, but it feels like time has flown at an incredible pace. The only thing that I can say about that is that I too have been flying, I hope not to come crashing down any time soon, although the flight pattern has been intermittent at times. God I miss the selva (jungle), or should I say, God I miss certain things about my selva life. What I miss most has only been gone for a couple of days, I’m not sure what exactly that means, but it’s a little exciting.

Me encuentro, I find myself in Quito yet again. It is about the same as I described before, but this time it is much colder and raining every day. I was going to write “rainier” and Word didn’t correct it, but I went ahead and filed it under the “Sounds Funny” category and opted for, “raining every day.” For those of you who have never been to Quito or experienced the climate of a city of very high elevation, I would describe the weather now as similar to a rainy fall in Indiana. It’s chilly in the morning, the temperature goes up to comfortable around midday, things change drastically and the temp drops in the afternoon/evening when it starts to rain and the day finishes out with a rather cold night in which you must sleep with a few blankets. The air outside of the covers is always so cold at night that I am constantly waking up with extremely dry lips and a sore throat. Why the hell did I leave my wonderful jungle climate? The funny thing is, just as I wrote that last line, I thought about the humidity and how damp I always feel in the jungle and the way it gets ridiculously hot and nasty afterwards, and I got a little fonder of the cold weather. I better stop myself now because, as I’m sure most of you know, if you’re from Indiana, you can go on and on about the weather for hours.

You are probably wondering what I’m doing in Quito and why I’ve left the selva. I hadn’t explained this earlier, but I get a week off every month! After each rotation of teaching (sort of like mini semesters), they let us loose, free to run around Ecuador. Ecuador may be a very small country, but you can trust when I say that it takes a LONG time to get from one place to another if you’re not flying. To travel a distance comparable to Terre Haute to Indianapolis, around 50 miles, it can take up to three hours!

I’m going to go into detail about all of the following things, but, first, let me paint a “getting out of the jungle” travel picture for you:

-Saturday, October 1^st, 08:45- The young (yet and still), joven aún, Christopher Mackenzie

Baumunk, after an incredible and long night of dancing and celebration, departs, in canoe, from the community where he is residing and teaching, Mondaña, Napo, Ecuador (pop. 75-100), headed upriver to the Los Ríos Community.

-Saturday, October 1^st, 09:15- After 15-30 minutes in canoe, the protagonist arrives at Los

Ríos accompanied by his compañeros (a much more affectionate and better word than “colleagues or co-workers” to describe people who you not only work with, but are also friends with), Erika Lizbeth, Ryan, Amanda and Megan; also traveling with the group were Lizbeth’s brother, Stalin, and her friend, Gimabel.

-Saturday, October 1^st, 09:20- The group discovers that there isn’t a bus leaving until 10:00.

-Saturday, October 1^st, 10:15- The group boards the bus heading for Tena, Orellana, Ecuador

-Saturday, October 1^st, 13:30- After a very “interesting” (I’ll explain later) three hour bus

ride, the group arrives in Tena.

-Sunday, October 2^nd, 14:00- After yet another incredible night of dancing, the group heads

out of Tena, together, to visit a nearby town called Misahuallí. 

-Sunday, October 2^nd, 14:45- The group arrives at Misahuallí.

-Sunday, October 2^nd, 17:00- The group departs from Misahuallí, returning to Tena.

 -Sunday, October 2^nd, 17:45- The group arrives again in Tena.

-Monday, October 3^rd, 02:00- The protagonist, joven aún, leaves Tena, headed for Quito,

Ecuador (I don´t remember the province, opps L) and accompanied by Erika Lizbeth

-Monday, October 3^rd, 06:30- The couple arrives in the terminal Quitumbe, Quito, Ecuador,

right when the sun has just woken up.

In case you missed it, that was roughly 8 hours, give or take, of bus travel over a few days. Now, either tomorrow evening or early Saturday morning, I get to do that trip all over again, but, this time, without any layovers or side trips. I haven´t quite figured it out yet, but I will either be leaving Quito in the evening tomorrow to get to Tena in the night and stay until the morning to, later, depart for Los Ríos. If I don´t work that scenario, I will be leaving at 05:30 on Saturday morning from Quito to get to Tena by around 10:00 and pray like hell I make a it, from there, to Los Ríos by 13:00ish so the only canoe doesn´t leave me stranded there. By the time I actually get to post this blog, I will, hopefully, be back in the jungle and I´ll add a side note to let you know how it went.

Let me go into detail about some of the interesting points of the itinerary I have just provided you with. The compañeros and I had originally planned on leaving from Mondaña on Friday, September 30, but I am very glad that we decided not to. That Friday was one of the best days I have spent in Yachana up until now. The students had a seminar with Megan in the morning, I was “serving” as vice-principal because that principal had left bright and early. On his way out in the morning, at 05:30, he was sure to ring the bell and wake everyone up even though breakfast wasn´t for another hour and a half. I suppose he thought that we should be up if he had to be, what a funny guy… Anyhow, the day was very relaxed, the students did their seminar in the morning and, just like that, they were all packed and heading off to various destinations to spend their week off. I will admit that I felt a little sad as I saw them all leaving. I know it´s only a week, but I´ve gotten very much used to all of those kids, we are like a big family, and I´ve missed them a lot.

After all the kids were gone, the high school felt eerily empty and strange, I didn´t like the feeling at all. With the compañeros, we left the school and walked to the lodge where we passed most of the rest of the day. We ate lunch and, shortly afterwards, my day became really great. Lizbeth had been preparing, for weeks, a big party in the community to celebrate the birthday of her brother, Robert. She needed to make two big cakes to serve everyone that was going to be there. Not many people know this about me, but I love to be in the kitchen, and I actually really know how to make a pretty good cake, so I volunteered to help. I know that this would be against the health code in the states, but I took off my shoes and installed myself, barefoot, in the kitchen of the Yachana lodge and began whipping up the mixings for two very large cakes. I don´t think I have ever mixed up such a large batch; fortunately, we had an electric beater. The chocolate cake came out delicious, I´m proud to say. Meagan turned out to be very talented with icing and drew a very impressive “¡Feliz Cumpleaños Robert!” along with flowers.

Later that night, the party would turn out to be the highlight of the day. Robert, the cumpleañero, was the DJ, guest and host of honor. There were very fun and entertaining games, the whole community was out and, later, there was dancing, followed by more dancing. As you´re reading this, if you take this next part the wrong way, it´s because you don´t really know me. After several weeks of getting use to the selva, adapting, overcoming obstacles and straight teaching every day with limited materials and nearly zero technology, among other things, I definitely needed a beer and it was the best damn tasting $1.00 Pilsener I have drank in my life! What I was alluding to with the “knowing or not knowing me part”, is that doesn’t mean that I got intoxicated or anything ridiculous like that, because I most certainly didn’t. I simply enjoyed a single, well-deserved, brew. The dance brought my back to my Buenos Aires days, when I used to go out with a big group of friends and dance all night long. Keeping in mind that we’re in the jungle, we danced until 01:30, until the poor generator could take no more; I haven’t felt so alive in quite a long time. I might not be the greatest dancer, and I’m far from professional, but I just love to do it. ¡Qué viva el cumpleañero!

I´ll group Tena and Misahuallí together. Tena was fun, it isn´t a big city, but it is nice, the people seem hospitable and it is relaxing. You have the luxuries that you miss in the jungle (electricity, warm water, internet, cell phone, limited bugs, etc.), minus the rush and die of a city overfull like Quito. Don´t ask me what “rush and die” means, it just came to me like that. I think I had in mind something like, “In a hurry to get nowhere,” or, “In a hurry to die,” thus, “rush and die.” We went out on Saturday night in Tena and it was just as great, if not better, as the dancing of the previous night. At 02:00, leaving the club in Tena, someone in the group had caught wind of a party in the outskirts of the city. We all jumped into a taxi-truck, that´s right, a taxi-truck, with the girls up front in the crew cab and the guys all in the back, and, $1.00 dollar later, we arrived at a party at the house of someone I didn´t know at all. On the rooftop of their house, we continued dancing until 03:30! Lizbeth was very clever in acquiring the number of the taxi-truck before her left us, and we called him up to have him pick us up.

The next day, we went to Misahuallí, a very interesting little town/community with a bunch of monkeys. I know that people love monkeys and they think they´re cute and all, but I really don´t trust them one bit, they´re sketchy as hell. If you let your guard down, they will grab whatever you might have on you at the time (cell phones, cameras, watches, etc.) and smash it against whatever hard thing they can find. They are also mean little suckers, one of the compañeros got threatened big time over some food. I apologize to certain readers, you know who you are, ahead of time for what I´m about to say, but the monkey went, well, ape-shit crazy J.

Finally, I´d like to end with my return to Quito. Lizbeth´s younger sister lives in Quito, but she recently moved here and has only been for a few weeks; she will be studying at the UCA later, but is working for the time being. Liz wanted to see her sister and get to know Quito a little better. I was more than thrilled because I get along very well with her and I also know Quito really well at this point. I can´t tell you how good it was to not have to travel alone. Trust me, I´m not looking forward to it in the next few days.

I had a great time in Quito showing Liz around. It felt great to know where to go and be able to point out different places and accommodate. I have never really been a guide before, so I had a great time of it. The rain didn´t impede us too much, but it was rather cold at times. We went to all of my favorite places in Quito: to the major shopping centers (El Jardín, CCI, Equicentro), the Centro Histórico, the Basilica (from afar), the Panecillo (from afar), Plaza Grande (the central plaza with the government house and everything), The Water Museum (Yacu), the Mariscal, the taxis, the colectivos (argentine for bus, in Ecuador they say “bus” or “omnibus”), the ecovía and everything in between. To be entirely honest, these were probably the best days I have ever had in Quito, and I am beginning to really like this city, it grows on you. Don´t worry Buenos Aires, you will always be my first love. 


Postdata:

I decided to go to Tena from Quito last night. I left Quito, arriving at the terminal right at 6pm, just in time to see that Ecuador was beating Venezuela 2-0 and Argentina was smashing Chile! That helped the night along. It took about 5 hours for us to get to Tena; the bus stopped in every single little town on the way. I sat up front, next to the driver, and it was an interesting experience. I could see everything, which was great and terrifying at the same time. Highways in Ecuador only have two lanes, when you pass in a big bus, it's a bit scary. Add to that curves around mountains, fog and a bunch of blind spots, and you can understand my fear.

I got into Tena around 23:00-00:00, checked into an $8 dollar a night hostal and crashed. I caught the bus out of Tena to Los Ríos this morning and the trip lasted about 3 hours. That was with the wait for a fallen tree on the road, which was removed by machete. The bus driver loaned the machete to some guy in a pickup, he cut up the tree and moved it and took off with the machete! Don't worry, we caught up to him later and stole the machete back. We arrived at Los Ríos just in time to wait 3 hours because they had forgotten to send a canoe to come and pick us up.

I´m back in the school with a million things to tell, but I´ll fill you in later. It´s dinner time!