The Last Chapter...

We arrived in Cuenca pretty late and took a cab to our friend Francis Yang's place where we would stay for about a week. Francis is head of piano studies at Cuenca University; his students take very good care of him in Ecuador, and they extended their kindness to us as well, organizing hikes, suggesting good lunch places, lending cars, and generally being very nice to us.

We drove out to Cajas National Park just west of the city on our first weekend there. There were six of us who made the trip - three piansists, a singer, Neil, and Jen. The trail started at a sort of outdoor church which was built after a local saw the Virgin Mary appear on a rock. We looked but couldn't see her. It was a Sunday, so the place was crawling with worshippers.

The region of Cajas that we saw was scrubby, with low hills that were for the most part accessible, and we managed to coax all four of the musicians up to the peak of a mountain without too much trouble. There were a couple of ducks in a laguna but that was the extent of the wildlife. Well, there was the singer. He asked me repeatedly to take photos of him in front of picturesque backdrops (just in case he needed Vaughan Williams Vagabond album covers on short notice), and would send hoots and long sustained cries through the hills.

I went to Francis' student examination performances early in the week, and was extremely impressed at the quality of the playing; Francis has elevated the standards tremendously by challenging his students. I was particularly impressed by a performance of Beethoven's Waldstein sonata, a very difficult piece, that was played with true courage by one of his second-year students.

We spend the rest of the week in Cuenca walking around, working, and planning our final week in South America. This was a fairly painful process, since we still had about three weeks worth of stuff to do, and were feeling the sting of perceived lost opportunities.

From among our options, we decided on another three days in the jungle, so we booked ourselves in to Aliñahui Lodge near Tena, in the Oriente region of Ecuador. We flew from Cuenca to Quito, dropped off a bunch of our stuff in a hotel, and went by bus back into the jungle.

The drive was beautiful, on winding roads through jungle-covered mountains and hills. There was rain on the way there, and we passed an overturned car and distressed looking guy on a particularly steep portion. Nobody was injured. The car had to be turned back onto its wheels, so another driver had tied his bumper to the overturned car's axle with a nylon rope, and yoinked on it. They succeeded, miraculously.

Tena was a funny little jungle town. We watched the Copa America semifinals in the Beer House there, which was fun. 1$/750mL bottles of Pilsener.

We took a series of buses out to the lodge and checked in to our little house on stilts. This jungle felt much less isolated and jungly that the Peruvian jungle, which took two days in a boat to visit, but there were plenty of birds and interesting insects to greet us. The place was not a volunteering spot... we were carefully looked after and fed by the staff.

A walk that night revealed many very strange insects and spiders. You could basically pick a plant, any plant, and on close examination find one or two things that would blow your mind. My favourites were the sunburst jumping spider (I don't know what it's actually called, but it was awesome), and the leaf and stick insects. We also saw a showndown between a baby tree boa and a tree frog. No blood was spilled. Damn. Well, it's not like it would have been a fair fight. There's no way the tree frog could have eaten the snake, right? That actually reminds me of bullfrogs around Powell River, BC, who are having a huge impact on SONGBIRD POPULATIONS!!!! These frogs are big enough (and fast enough) to eat songbirds!!! Whoa.

On our first full day at Aliñahui we went for a walk through the ecological reserve up the road from the lodge. The Jatun Sacha reserve near Tena is one of 7 or 8 tracts of land all over Ecuador that are protected by an NGO of the same name. We checked in with the front desk, got climbing harnesses for the 30m platform, and set out to explore the trails. It was the wrong part of the day for wildlife viewing, but we think we heard some howler monkeys.

The platform was pretty intense. Jen couldn't quite hack it psychologically, and I fried like an egg on the metal platform at midday. It was fun to be up there though. The tower was really pretty flexible, but it felt safe, and with the climbing harness it was possible to get pretty bold about looking out over the edge and stuff. The heat was just too much... I was soooo sweaty, and I believe that one could have fried not only eggs, but bacon, up on the platform.

Our next stop was a waterfall on the other side of the river. We had fun walking up to the falls and swimming in the cool water. There were a couple of good spiders, and tons of mud, on the way up.

The next day we signed up for a birdwatching tour with a guide named Pedro. The night before Pedro asked us when we wanted to start... he suggested 6:20AM. I said that the earlier the better, so how about 6AM? He agreed. We slept through our alarms and met Pedro at about 6:20. Losers. Here's a list of the birds we saw. Four of the names are made up. Can you tell which they are?

• yellow-billed caracara
• cacique
• lesser simple brown musky poof
  
• flycatcher
• crimson-backed tanager
• ruddy ground dove
• chestnut-bellied seed-eater
• smooth-billed ani
• greater ani
• plenum-shanked roof-gnawer
  
• blue-grey tanager
• orange-backed troupial
• wood creeper
• black-fronted sunbird
• lettered araçaris
• hoatzin
• white-eared jacamar
• tropical kingbird
• slanty-fronted chichimincalocaco
  
• barbet
• roadside hawk
• chachalaca
• dacnis
• magpie tanager
• cranky orange-nippled wench
  
• yellow-tufted woodpecker
• black-capped donacobius
• yellow and orange oriole
  

More hoatzins; they were cool. And the toucanettes (fancy name: araçaris) were fun as well. Tanagers are amazingly colourful and fun to look at through binoculars. During the tour the guide also told us a couple of very weird stories about local indiginous people being murdered for their organs a few years ago! Apparently people were disappearing, and refrigerator trucks were seen rolling mysteriously around the area. This caused mass hysteria, paranoia and xenophobia among locals. I don't blame them. It has mostly worn off, but without reliable news media and/or local authorities to report on and prevent further activities like those, it has been really hard to figure out what the hell actually happened. No Google searches have revealed any useful information... so we have no idea what to think (beyond "whoa... jeez... hmmmph... wow...").

On the way back to the cabins we almost got eaten by a totally harmless snake. It was about 2.5m long, basking on a log... mostly black with yellow blotches. It was slung over the log such that when it slithered away its tail end was whipping and writhing around freely in the air. That was deeply troubling. Jen got a better look than I did, as usual. Damn.

On our trip back to Quito, we found to our surprise that none of the bank machines in Tena were willing to give us money, so we were only able to buy 30 cents worth of bread with our last money in the world, and got on the bus stone broke. That was sort of exciting, but not a real danger situation.

We stayed in a neighbourhood called Mariscal Sucre by the gringos, and Gringolandia by the locals. It was very comfortable, and stomach turning. Way too many tourists, overpriced bars, restaurants, etc. But very convenient for what we had in mind for our last couple of days there, namely souvenir shopping, a tour of Cotopaxi (volano/glacier park), and lots of wireless internet.

The tour of Cotopaxi on our last day in SA was an excellent choice. We didn't have time to sulk, because we were too busy climbing on glaciers and biking down very exciting, often soft, and pretty much totally washboarded road from the top of the mountain to the bottom. Our group was made up of a bunch of nice people from all over the place. Many americans. One of them, a teacher from Denver named Victor, was a perfect hybrid of our old friend Steven Presser, and our other mutual friend Rodney Wilts. So I hit it off with him and we had many laughs and covered a wide range of retarded subjects that we both found interesting (eg. hiring Prince as a housekeeper and making him dress like a monkey).

The bikeride down Cotopaxi was really awesome. My bike was only 25% too small for me, but the brakes were good, and I did catch some wicked air once or twice. I also came across a couple of fast and unsafe Israeli guys on my way down, lying in heaps on the wrong side of the handlebars with shocky looks on their faces. But there were no serious injuries, and we all made it down the hill, by bike or in ignominy in the back of the truck.

We were returned to Quito about 7PM where we packed up for the last time, and went out for a reasonably good Mexican restaurant called El Mariachi Taco Factory. Sounded bad, wasn't so bad.

We successfully distracted ourselves from the imminent departure, set our watches for 4:30AM, and laid our heads down for the last time! That's it! Nada mas.

Quito-Houston-Toronto was easy and fast, and there was really no problem adjusting to North American life.

Thanks for reading, and for the nice comments! I have been so happy to know that people actually found our stories interesting. And for people who are thinking of a trip to South America at some point in the future: Don't believe (or heed) everything you read in guidebooks and newspapers. In most important ways, South America is no more scary or dangerous than North America. The people are very warm and genuine, and the importance of family and community is very refreshing to see through North American eyes. People have less and waste less.... but they litter... and that's pretty much it, in a nutshell.