hey everyboday,
i realize its been a long time since the last one of these, so get comfy. two weeks ago today we officially finished classes here in quito. it was kinda sad cuz we had to say goodbye to our favorite teacher on earth, Raquel who had lead us through a great literature class. poetry, types of literature. parts of our exams were simply, interpret this poem, or even better, write a poem about this image. it was great. though admittedly the prevailing feeling was relief, at being done with the academia, done with quito. quito is a dirty city. the cars are fast and reckless and use their horn at any tiny opportunity. its still amazing to me though how something, even something i wouldnt normally like, could feel comforting just because of its familiarity. i can successfully find my way around, get myself lost and back, know the general cost of a cab ride from A to B (and accordingly debate it out with taxistas trying to rip off the knownothing gringo). even more so now that we´ve been gone for a bit and come back to it.
my birthday was wonderful though i was feeling a bit of the touristas (translation: uncontrolable colon). i chose to look at it as a bodily cleansing in preparation for my 22nd year on the planet. the day saturday before, devon and i had gone to see an indigenous shaman just north of quito in the highlands somewhere, in preparation for our directed-independent study projects (his on shamanism, mine on indigenous medicine), and we both got spiritually cleansed there by him. it was kind of a weird experience though because we went with a class from the bourgie Universidad de San Francisco de Quito. we all had to wait outside the tiny, electicityless healing room in a bare room (with only one lightbulb, three benches, and a curtain in the doorway to the outside). the cleansing consisted of us taking our shirts off, getting eucalyptus branches and fresh eggs shaken all over us, and chewed up flower petals, tobacco smoke and alcohol spit on us. there was a lot of chanting in Quichua which i wish i could have understood.
thanks for all of your bday notes and love. it was all greatly appreciated.
we had a fiveday vacation after classes were over before we had to be back in time for the plane to peru. many plans fell through before we (devon, dane, dane´s hostbrother jaime, and me) just decided to go back to Mindo, since Dane had never been anyway. we jumped the 12m (apparently it had grown since i had been there last...) water falls like 5 or 6 times a piece, hiked to others, went ¨tubing¨ (just like what it sounds, 7 innertubes, lashed together in order to get down a river too shallow for rafting; we had the added luck of it being REALLY low so we got stuck on a lot of rocks:) down a river for three hours (devon and i forgot sunscreen on our legs, we´re still peeling right now...), and went to a butterfly conservatory, one of the only in south america, which was great because they´re totally used to human interaction and will just come to chill on your shirt or in your hair for an hour.
at this point we ran out of money because i was stupid enough not to get money before we left and Mindo doesnt have any banks. so we pooled together what we had left and convinced a bus driver to give us a discount (even though ¨you guys are from the richest country in the world!¨) to Santo Domingo de los Colorados.
we found the Tsachila outdoor museum where we got to play with the paint that they use from fruits on their bodies and the bright red on their hair. the black is now finally fading away.
the Incan trail took us 3 days. Cusco is a cute, very colonial, very touristy town that sits in the mtns higher than Quito. every day of hiking was a full one. it felt like all we did was sleep, eat, hike, eat, hike, eat, sleep, but not always in that order. our first pass was on the second day. its call the Paso de la Mujer Muerte (the pass of the dead woman) and sits at 13,487 ft above sea level. we all felt like we had asthma when our last footstep hit the top. we got extraordinarily lucky with rain, it only rained once while we were hiking, the rest of the time only at night, safely in our crappy leaking tents. don´t put anything you want dry near the edges, like your feet or head. yay fetal position! still not sure why dane, devon and i, three of the tallest guys on our trip shared a tent. yay body heat! there´s really no fair way to describe the trail nor arriving at Machupicchu itself. i´ll send photos when i get a chance. its a magical place that sits on a mountain ridge at the very edge of the Peruvian Amazon. our second day at Machupicchu we got up hella early to avoid the crowds and watched the morning fog lift from the sight, then climbed Waynapicchu (picchu means mountian in Quichua, the lengua franca of the Inca), the hill in the background of the famous photos of Machupicchu. the view is 360 degrees at the top. its amazing how stairs can change your hiking style. i look back at the 166 photos i took on the trip and still have a hard time telling myself that it really happened. definitely one of the coolest things i´ve ever done in my life.
tomorrow we leave for our 10 day rural homestay with indigenous communities in Cotacachi. i´m really looking forward to that. i´ll be sure to let yáll know how that all goes.
hope that you´re all doing well. i know i´ve forgotten something to tell you that i meant to, but its getting late here, i haven´t packed and i had to spend all day today in an internet cafe picking classes for next semester that i may not even end up taking if i end up getting to go to china. cuidense todos, y diviertense demasiado. (i love that asha :)
smiles
Ben
