Hello there!

Greetings again, this time from Quito, bustling capital of
Ecuador, populated with street vendors selling everything from 
dubious sausages to inflatable instances of Scooby Doo.

Quito, located about 22 km south of the equator, was one of
the twin capital cities of the Inca empire in its high days
(the other capital being of course Cusco). Today however
not a trace of the old Inca city remains, and modern
Quito is quite a difference from Cusco with its provicial
atmosphere. Quito is big, at least four or five times
the size of Cusco, although with a 'mere' 1.5 million
inhabitants or so it is still only a fraction of the size
of, say Lima. Quito is also much more a modern city,
complete with big ugly office buildings, well-known American
fast-food chains, and of course lots of smoggin' traffic.

Having said that, the old colonial centre of Quito is quite
nice though. (Although for some reason I cannot quite fathom
it has an unbelievable amount of shops selling either shoes,
DIY-equipment or small pink objects made of plastic.)

The rather noisy "Dagui's Hostal" in which I am currently 
staying is located in what some call 'Gringoland', a tourist
area located inbetween the old centre and the 'new' city.  
You will find more Dutch people here (or indeed anywhere 
in Ecuador) than you are likely to see in the centre of 
Amsterdam on an average summer day. And two weeks back we 
had to share a room with what sounded like the Ecuadorian 
equivalent of the Abominable Snowman, but other than that 
it's quite allright.

A few days ago we went to see a soccer-match between the local
teams of Quito and Guayaquil (the latter of which is oddly and 
somewhat confusingly named "Barcelona"). It was absolutely
hilarious. The point in Ecuadorian football seems to be to
get the ball off the field as soon as possible, before the other 
team can get to it. Because of this I suspect, they keep large
numbers of spare balls along the edges of the field, which
at some point in the game resulted in some minor confusion as
two balls were thrown back onto the field at once. It took 
most of the players several seconds to notice that there was 
something not entirely right...

As said, Quito is quite a nice place, but of course one does not
travel all the way to South-America just to hang out in the big
cities. Ecuador is a lot smaller than Peru, but for such a 'small'
country (it's still about seven times the size of Holland)
it has an amazing amount of different ecosystems. Or rather, it 
used to have, as unfortunately Ecuador is also a lot more 
- what some would call 'developed', which in this case means
that there are lots of big pick-up trucks and SUV's driving 
around and that most of its natural heritage has been destroyed
to make place for settlements and plantations. I wrote last time
that the jungle-area around Tena had suffered quite a lot from
such 'development', but having seen the extent of deforestation
in some other parts of the country - especially west of the Andes
where nearly all primary forest has been cleared for banana 
plantations, and in the northern Amazon basin where oil is 
being won - I am surprised that there is still any rainforest left!

(Anyone even remotely interested in such subjects I can recommend
the excellent book "A Green History of the World" by the British 
historian Clive Ponting. See bottom of this page for more info.) 

Not suprisingly with so many banana plantations, banana 
features quite prominently on the Ecuadorian menu. Now,
as was the case with potatoes, I am not particularly keen
on banana's. You can imagine that I was therefore thrilled
to find that most meals here (inlcuding of course breakfast 
and dessert) consisted mostly of -you probably guessed it- 
various combinantions of banana, potatoes and rice.
Either that, or yuca (which is basically the jungle-equivalent 
of the potato). Luckily Quito has some excellent restaurants,
and the food served at our first voluntary project was also
very good. (Although during our lunches at the jungle-school 
I think we must have had just about every conceivable combination 
of yuca, tuna and rice. You'd be surprised at how many there are.)
 
Helping out at the jungle-school was great fun though (despite
the slight yuca-overload). A typical maths-lesson would go 
roughly as follows:

"How much is seven minus one?"
- "Nine!"
"No, seven MINUS one?"
- "Zero!"
"No..."
- "Four!"
"Mmm, no not quite"
- "Fifteen! A hundred! One! ... Eight?"

Language-lessons would follow more or less the same 
pattern, between the children and me not being overly 
good at Spanish, and many of them hardly being able to 
read or to tell the difference between such things as 'S', 
'C' and 'Z' (or, for that matter, 'M' and 'N', 't' and 'f', 
and of course 'b', 'd' and 'v').

Granted, this would at times get a bit tiresome, but at least some 
of the children were showing some progress, and especially 
some of the older ones were actually quite good at things like 
maths and even English.

Apart from the school-project we also spent a week at an
'ecological' project in the western lowland jungle, although
I have yet to discover what was ecologial about it (as our
activities consisted mostly of painting a fence for three 
hours, gathering leaves for an hour or so, chilling out in
a hammock with a good book, and of course having to eat
lots of bananas). 
It was a good place for seeing animals though - there were 
bats hanging under my bed, huge frogs in the toilet, 
hummingbirds, fluorescent funghi, and on one occasion when 
I looked up from my book, I noticed a 4 ft. black-and-yellow 
poisonous snake hanging from the ceiling just over a metre 
away (and nearly fell out of my hammock).

But the snakes and spiders weren't the scariest animals around
by far, actually I quite liked them. After recovering from 
the initial shock I went to get my camera, took a picture,
got back in my hammock and continued reading while the snake
went to take a nap under our roof and stayed there for about 
two days...

No, the scariest animal-encounter I had on this trip was 
when I went horse-riding for the first time in my life, 
in Ottavalo, at night, with a grossly oversized group of about 
20 people.
Now I had never sat on a horse before (let alone at night), and 
this was a seriously BIG animal. I was absolutely scared shitless. 
And when the first people started being thrown off by their horses, 
that didn't really help. Here I was, sitting on top of an animal that 
was a good two heads taller than I am standing up, and which I had 
absolutely no idea how to control, and to the left and right of me 
people were being launched off their horses (which incidentally 
were a good deal smaller than mine). 
I must have patted the animal on the neck and said "nice horsey" 
about five-hundred times. As soon as I found out how to get the 
thing into forward gear ("Just kick the horse." -"What, are you mad?!") 
I was actually quite all right though and managed to get off about 
two hours later with merely a sore bum...

Of course two weeks later I fell down a 2.5-metre waterfall
and couldn't walk for two days, but that's a different story.
For the moment, I shall just leave you with -finally!- the
Long Awaited Llama-picture! (YES!) You shall find this elusive 
beasty lurking below.



I myself will get back to you in a week of two from the great 
city of San Francisco, with the latest news from Ecuador
and Peru (as I am traveling back to Lima to fly from there),
and my first impressions of the States.

Until then, regards, and have fun!
Levien

PS. If you're interested in the book I mentioned (and if 
you're not, you should be - it's a fascinating read), 
it can be ordered online from, among others, 
Amazon, Proxis (www.proxis.be) or, even in a 
Dutch translation, from Bol.com.