Si

Traveling alone. Some people avoid eye contact and some people are so friendly and reach out for connection, going out of their way to help you. I am definitely practicing way more spanish this way and it´s good to be alone because I feel like you are less occupied with your group and more free to observe your surroundings. Ready, generalization... South American women are unfriendly and have no interest in helping you or answering your question, the men on the other hand, are delighted with the opportunity to lend a hand, or entertain you with a ridiculous spanglish conversation. Though many lent me their opinions, universally it was thought to be bad that I was traveling alone, which just made me feel that much safe and more secure... syke. I didn´t plan on returning alone from Peru, or like the idea of it at all, I was quite nervous for the 30 plus hours of busing. But the others of my group wanted to continue further South and I had had enough, and I needed to get back to the farm by Monday morning to finish up my spanish lessons that were already paid in full for. They left my back pack in Trujillo when I bussed to Piura, so I had to stay over night and wait to pick it up in the morning. I understand traveling can be tricky and many things go wrong, and I have happily excluded any of the messier details of my trip, but this story has a happy ending so I will share. Entonces, I arrived in Piura, no back pack, so no change of clothes or contact solution, and unlike my plan to immediately catch a night bus over the border to Guayaquil I had to find a hostel and stay the night so I could pick up my bag at the bus station in morning, but I didn´t have enough Soles for both a bus ticket and a hostel. And I was sure my debit card would not work in the atm machines because I had been very clear with my bank that I would only be traveling in Ecuador and no other countries, and when I arrived in Piura and called the bank they were already closed and the next day was Sunday. So for a moment, I was panicked...I had no money, or any momentary access to money... and I also became aware that my ipod had ceased to function (a moment of silence por favor... no ipod. Porque!? Probably my most valued possession here in Ecuador. On the positive side I am proud of myself for not breaking or loosing this piece of technology, and that I have actually retained it until it´s end of life, unlike many a cell phone that has come my way). But, never fear, thanks Salal Credit Union, for not keeping too close of tabs on my account, the atm card worked, no problem, and I got out enough money for a bus ticket and hostel. And in the end it was probably good for me to take one night´s good sleep in a bed instead of a bus seat. And I was still able to get back to the farm in time for my monday morning lesson arriving a whole half an hour early by 12 hour night bus from Guayaquil through Quito to Ibarra. Plus while hanging out in Piura I had some friendly encounters with travelers and locals. In the morning after I had retrieved my back pack I was walking around, killing time, trying to find any kind of healthy food I could bring on the bus for snacking. I was flagged down by three gentleman hanging around one of the many juice stands, I got to practice some silly spanish for an hour, have fresh squeezed orange juice for the road and was given un poco regalito. One of the chicos became mi novio (don´t worry Alex, por sola una hora until my bus departed) and he bought me a necklace from one of the other chicos selling jewelry. They really cheered me up and put me in good spirits for my next 11 hour journey across the border. I was a bit unnerved about crossing the border, the first German who left and went back early alone was robbed by his taxi driver crossing the border. Ecuador and Peru really need to work on that border, the other German who came back alone after me, who I was originally gonna travel back with also got hassled at the border by his taxi drivers, and somehow he talked them out of robbery. The immigration and emigration offices are like 10 km apart, and I guess it´s a heavy traffic area for drugs...it´s just poorly organized and the locals take advantage of us naive travelers trying to get across.  So I made sure to be on a bus for the entire crossing, instead of bus to Tumbes, then taxi across then another bus on the other side. Thankfully for me it went muy suave, I got my stamps and all, necessary as they stopped us twice to check our passports for stamps, and then again on my last bus from Guayaquil, they even had us all get off the bus at 11:30 at night, search our bags and check our passports again. The security here is so hit or miss, with little consistency. Some buses would make me give a finger print, some would take a video of the passengers once seated on the bus before taking off...

I am happy being back on the farm. I feel like I moved 500 pounds of dirt on Tuesday. Formed new beds, and Friday we will get to plant all four after the Germans make a trip tomorrow into Quito to buy new seeds. We plant on the lunar cycle, for reasons i do not fully understand yet. I cooked lunch today at the Volunteer house for everyone con guacamole. I miss my Mexican food. i want a taco from Barracuda.

 this is Ouflouf, actually I have no idea how it´s spelled, but it´s the germans FAVORITE thing in the world. That part there without cheese is for me, still trying to do my vegan thing!


I often think about all the things that have been said to me during my time here which I haven´t understood. Seriously, probably 90% of the total spanish spoken to me has been over my head. From conversations with Taxi drivers to clerks in haciendas, asking for directions to the lavandaria, random encounters with people on the busses even instructions from my spanish teachers. I feel like my trip would be so much richer if I were able to understand more! So must keep practicing. And make more flash cards for verbs.

Okay well I am safe and happy, and sad to miss thanksgiving tomorrow, but looking forward to family/friend time at Christmas that much more.

XO

Viajar

Traveling!

This is the sun coming up in Loja after our first night bus.

So, after our 24 hours of bussing we found ourselves in our first Peruvian city. But, we weren´t crazy about Piura and literally spent the night, checked out a busy mercado then hopped on a bus a couple hours out to a coastal town called Mancora and just took a relaxative for two days. It was a really interesting beach town, muy tranquilo, absolutely amazing waves, lots of people kite surfing and got to meet quite a few interesting travelers... I am worried about our American veterans...

Night bus from Mancora to Truijullo. We were next to another beautiful stretch of beach, this time we didn´t get in the water, instead we bussed out to a couple different ruins. There was a disappointing amount of educational information about them, all the signs seemed to say the same thing, this was a very important ceremonial or religious gathering spot etc etc... but, what was great fun were all the young female Peruvian students on some school field trip to the ruins and were FAR more fascinated with us...gringos. We are an international group, with a very tall blond german and dutch and every single school class we passed screamed with excitement and begged for pictures with Valentin and Klaartche. At one point they even wanted photos with me, which I was like, ladies, I´m short with brown hair too, but I still got a huge kick out of posing for picture after picture after picture with these silly girls. We felt kinda special, even though we were really just distracting these students from their educational experience at the ruins. At the bus station in Trujillo, we traded in one of our German boys for a six foot tall blond Swedish girl (they would have loved her at the ruins). Everyone always asks what country we are from and are always impressed with our diversity of nations.

Another night bus, and now we are in Huaraz. Really took our elevation up another notch, to 11 for sure (Spinal tap). I think we´re at about 3050 feet here. It is COLD. Whoa. I hadn´t been cold since forever it feels, since last spring in Seattle. Quito is so breezy and the week I was at the farm we had outstanding weather, so I´ve been getting my brrrrr on.

(this is the view from the rooftop deck of our hostal, radddd, you can see the city below there, and the gorgeous Andes.)
But as if Huaraz at 3050 meters wasn´t cold enough we decided to go camp up in the Andes and really feel the cold. Instead of hiring a tour or a guide, my lil traveling pod decided to try and organize it ourselves...which was really probably the wrong call, because it was complicated as hell getting all necessary gear and transportation, but it was still absolutely amazing to be up there and beautiful and nice to be totally alone. Plus this way we enjoyed some interesting rides up and down the mountain. At one point I thought I was on a roller coaster that was coming out of it´s tracks, the guy was FLYING down the bumpiest road and my stomach just dropped out, just a couple times... We camped next to a laguna of the most beautiful deep green nestled in between these massive 100 meter rock cliffs. The german said it looked a lot like Bavaria, but to me it was seeing nature again for the first time, the color of the rocks and water and vegetation were so different from what I am used to of the Northwest and it totally rocked my world. I could just sit and stare forever. The hike we took in the morning was totally fogged in, we were up and out by 8 in the morning, but as the clouds lifted we could finally see all the little individual water falls cascading down the majestic rocks to feed the chain of lagunas that were blessing our eyes. One fun thing we incorporated into our mountain trek was ear piercing! There was a huge mercado a block away from our hostal, (the best and biggest I have experienced yet, indoor and out with everything, every every every everything you could ever think you wanted to purchase, and enough meat carcasses to fill up Safeco field) and we found surgical needles, pure alcohol and really cheap silver earrings and now I have a second hole on my left ear which I´d been desiring. Great activity for a lunch break on an alpine hill with a gorgeous view to distract you from the brief pain.

 

okay, that is all for now, I´ve got a bus in an hour to begin my return to Ecuador, enough of this traveling around business for me... for the moment.

escoger

I feel as though I am getting more of a European perspective over here than South American, just because everyone I meet is from Europe (Holland and Germany) and we spend so much time speaking in English about world politics. Makes me really want to heighten my U.S. government and politics knowledge. I find myself rarely defending America but at the same time often explaining some of our questionable interactions with the rest of the world based on our size and cultural differences...something like that. But! These young kids from Europe, who are the educated ones with the desire and opportunity to travel are getting me very discouraged about Mother Earth and her future relationship with humans. This entire trip to South America has gotten me thinking even more (if possible) pessimistically. These kids who claim they have more environmental conscious nations than America actually don´t give two shits about the environment, or know any actual real time information about what is happening or the rates of change and degradation our eco systems are experiencing right now. and if I have to hear another person tell me "you should not be to be vegetarian/vegan/whatever if it makes you unhappy", and ask "why sacrifice your food pleasure doing something that really won´t make any difference" I will kill them and barbeque their ignorant meat...sorry, I only jest..., but I just wanna shout SHAME shame on you for being so selfish and not realizing the potential for change in each individual person. I am obviously far from practicing the ideal lifestyle for the earth, faaaaaarrrrrr, and many of you have seen me eat many a delicious meat stick with utmost enjoyment, but that is wrong and, I eat that meat with at least the comfort knowing that 85% or more of my daily meals have excluded meat, and yes every single meal counts. If Americans reduced their meat consumption by 10% it would free 12,000,000 tons of grain - enough to feed 60,000,000 people (the population of Great Britain) (http://www.flex.com/). The conversations I have engaged in here just make me ever more aware of how stubborn and unwilling people are of change or to reducing their personal comforts at any level. This experience has made me hate my major as I sometimes do because it opened my mind up to so much depressing knowledge but also love my major (environmental studies) with a new vigor and passion. I feel like I am able to see the world, humans and society with an extended perspective to the earth and...I just find it very interesting... alright well sorry for the RANT! But I am continually asking myself WTF is up with this western perspective. I am as guilty as the rest, but I am talking to people who either don´t even know what is going on, or know and feel they don´t have to change any aspect of their life and free themselves from any kind of global responsibility.

okay so on the note of all this environmental do'goody business... I left the farm and am in Peru for two weeks...
The volunteer coordinator of Brethren Y Unida, the farm/foundation, left a month before I got there. Stuart was the one with all the authority, knowledge and organization. So although I could have continued to wake up at 6.45 and preform manual labor, weeding in the tree nursery, shoveling cow poopoo, and forming earth beds I chose to have another kind of learning experience and left with four of the other volunteers to travel to Peru for a bit. I feel like I am still learning, though different kinds of things. And getting to see some of the most beautiful landscapes of my life. 24 hours via bus  (14 hours to Loja and then another 10 to Piura) just to get to the other side of the Peruvian border, but I seriously enjoyed it with my face hanging out the window the entire time we had day light. I didn´t think I would have another opportunity to leave Ecuador and it is exiting to get to experience another country in South America. Amazing to see also the dry, barran dirt fields right next to the shanty towns with hundreds of thousands of plastic bags blowing around THINK ABOUT YOUR CONSUMPTION.

lots of love, especially to those consciously navigating their time on earth. Yes, we are animals, who put our own survival first, but somewhere in our brains we do have access to rationality, lets use it!

again sorry for the Agro blog post. I am trying to process the experiences here, in a place with all the same problems and worse thousands of miles from home...whew

ciao baby.

La Hacienda

Hola amigos!
Up on the farm now! it´s great. Totally picturesque with a little bit of everything. There is about an acre plot that is the garden, growing carrots, onions, broccoli, lettuce, more other kinds of lettuce, avocado and lemon trees, tomatoes, basil, cilantro......and more! there are chickens, guinea pigs (pretty popular meat here in Ecuador), cows, wild turkeys, and pigs! An amazing tree nursery and a school facility for Ecuadorian students to come up and stay for a week on the farm for a week learning about sustainability and small organic farming. This week a big group of fifty students came up, they quickly got put to work weeding.

I am staying in the volunteer house with 8 others at the moment, a swede, a dutch, a frenchie, one other America and four germans! It is very popular for these guys to go off for a year of volunteering between high school and university. But volunteers come and go pretty frequently,  this weekend we had a huge fiesta for two girls that were leaving the farm. We killed three chickens and two guinea pigs. I was not savy killing my chicken and it got off the block cause I let go of it not realizing i would need several hits for complete decapitation... yea pretty intense, but every step in that process was intense. It made my heart race like crazy when we were running around the chicken yard trying to catch the chickens, but I think it´s cause the chickens were so freaked out too, they could just smell the eminent death...plucking wasn´t so bad, but took quite a while, the crazy part was gutting them! oih. Pretty gnarley. The guts were so colorful though. We put them in a delicious onion soup one of the germans was making. All the food we cook in the volunteer house comes from the farm, or most of, our eggs and milk also come fresh from the farm as well but we come into town to buy grains and other "luxury" foods we want to add to our meals, like peanut butter or raisins... Pretty cool. So i got to eat the chickens and feel morally okay about it. Finally got to kill the meat I eat, which I do believe everyone should experience. And damn we would not be eating so much chicken if every bird had to be plucked and gutted first, it took some work and was messsssy.

 

well thats all for now, gotta go to the supermercado and get back on the bus to return to the farm.

La Playa!!

Oooooooooooh, we gotsta go to the beach this weekend!!


Journeyed to the north coast of Ecuador to a lil town called Atacomes. This is a very long holiday weekend for Ecuadorians, still going on, ends tomorrow, Wednesday. Currently it is very quiet in Quito, as if it were Sunday. Many, many shops and restaurants are closed with their big metal doors pulled down and locked. It is a very popular weekend for trips out of town, we had to book our accommodation and bus down to the coast about a week in advance. I enjoyed the bus ride immensely! We drove through GORGEOUS scenery, winding roads up and down over green hills, through small towns and commercial strips, passed so many cows and chickens freely roaming, groups of young and old boys playing pick up games of futball (soccer) on cement basketball courts. Such a wonderful opportunity to get an overview of other parts of the country and see what it´s like outside of the major capital city. I had my ipod playing the entire time and the battery lasted just long enough for the 6 1/2 trip. I was with 5 other students from Yanapuma (mi escuela), two Dutch, an Australian, and two other Americans. The Australian and I were both sitting next to strangers, and by the second end of the bus ride we were being  passed cups of red wine and all kinds of chips and biscuits. South America LOVES their junkfood. There is more cheap accessible junk food here than anywhere else I´ve ever been; pastries, candy, ice creams, around every corner, and everything is fried, french fries come with every meal standard. I said to my teacher the first week how surprised I was that the people of Ecuador were not all morbidly obese, he just laughed at me. Alright now, back to the beach. We got into town late, after dark, had some greasy chinese food and checked into the hostel which was quite adorable. The next morning we realized we were less than half a block from the beach. It was amazing to get into the water! We had a little sun, but only a little, although it was quite a bit warmer than Quito, it was a bit cloudy. There were identical open air bars lining the entire beach, as far as we could see and walk in either direction. The first day we had the most delicious piña coladas from one of them at 2 in the afternoon made from fresh pineapple. We watched them blend them up and the glass came dripping with fresh fruit tooth picked together all over the sugar rim. Delicious! I read an English Vanity Fair cover to cover and got to vacation with all the other Ecuadorians. We were the only white foreigners we saw the entire weekend. We grocery shopped and cooked all of our meals in the hostel kitchen and how adorable family dinners and breakfasts. One of the girls from Holland had a boyfriend from Africa and he had taught her to make these really cool traditional sauces and one night we had one with pasta and vegetables, a nice change from the Ecuadorian merienda, rice and french fries with lentils. (and meat, of course, for the omnivores).


okay speaking of omnivores I finally cracked last week and got flexible and got myself a hot dog...and I LOVED it. Ha. It came with diced tomatoes, onions, basil and cucumbers. I´m hoping the meat came from some of those happy country animals I saw during the bus ride. Though I have to think that Ecuador´s production of meat is just as bad as the United States, with such an abundance of cheap meat on every corner it must come from some kind of factory farm situation... or imported from Argentina?


Well tomorrow is my last "ladies night" in Quito, then Thursday I am off to the farm about an hour and 1/2 from Quito to commence volunteering. I am very very excited to get started! I´ll be living in the Volunteer House with the four or five volunteers up there currently and cooking communal vegetarian meals from the bounty of the garden and learning all kinds of who knows!


love, peace, and harmony y´all! and equality.