On the road to Lita - May 2013

Back in Ibarra. For our Visas we spoke with Señor Pablo who operates the NGO “Tierra Para Todos”. He has agreed to sponsor me as a volunteer for his NGO and in exchange I’ll give lessons in English at a small mountain village school, and possibly to the blind of Imbabura and incarcerated adults in Ibarra. Last Thursday Oscar and I drove east with him to visit the mountain communities. He said we would be traveling around the Rio Verde area, but having no idea where that was I could only follow their red Mazda pickup as it left Ibarra by the Panamericana towards Chota, reached the first major fork in the road, and turned left -- to the other side of the Mira river, to where we had never before gone.

Rio Verde Communities - View from near the first village, plus the rare horsed Belgian.

The Mira splits the Andean valley region into a dry side -- where we are building -- and a wet side, which we were now driving through. As we passed the Salinas museum, whose existence had heretofore been of a dubious nature, we stopped to let on some hitchhikers. Very few buses this side of the Mira. As the drive continued, the vegetation around the highway thickened and turned from desert scrubs into lush copses of tropical forest -- palm trees, pineapple trees, enormous bushy leaves pushing out in clumps, tall green grass. And the houses changed, too, from the cinderblock concrete style to an all wood, stilt-frame style. Villages grew smaller and habitations less frequent. Along the highway signs to reduce speed would suddenly appear and in 500m would be a school, completely isolated from any visible community. After driving for an hour and half we arrived at a military checkpoint. A soldier returned from checking the car in front of us, removed the roadblock and waved us over to the side of the road. This is the one of the major roads from San Lorenzo and the Esmereldas provinces -- and Columbia -- to Ibarra. The drug traffic from the north makes for lots of check points.

The highway on the other side of the Mira is so new that on Google Maps it’s marked “Highland Road” and disappears en route to the valley between Cotacachi and El Angel. The new road is well paved and marked, complete with cat’s eye reflectors and mini-shoulders. The side of the road however is prone to collapses and at a few locations we had to switch lanes to avoid landslide debris and fallen trees.

Rio Verde Cricket

We arrived at Lita, a tiny hillside strip of restaurants and hotels, general shops, housing and schools, two hours after our departure. We parked in front of a restaurant offering breakfast. Inside, our waitress had to return several times to inform us that certain food she wasn’t available and did we want something else? Pablo had chicken soup, Oscar took two cheese empanadas and I had the only vegan option -- dry, crumbly sweetbread. The instant coffee sat on the table long enough for us to fill our cups before the waitress took it away to another table. The best part of the restaurant was the view, of the shallow valley just below Lita and the distant mountains covered by rainforest. There were many little birds with bright coloured bellies and wings flitting about, flying through the open walls between supporting wooden pillars and chirping from the rafters before fleeing back to the tops of lemon trees.

Rio Verde Community - Fish Pond

Breakfast eaten, we drove a short ways down into the village looking for rubber boots. The general store we chose didn’t have my size (44) but luckily had just close enough (42) that I could fit without sore feet. We also picked up some water for the trek to the first village. From the store we drove back up to where a dirt road branched off from the paved highway, on the other side of a deep ditch. My poor truck -- the shocks took such a beating from the deep gap between roads! They bounced back though and for the next half hour I thoroughly tested the low-gear 4x2capabilities, driving on a hole-riddled dirt road dipping up and down, through rain-flooded mud fields and past fallen boulders with passing space barely wider than the truck. Jurassic Park came out when I was nine (1993) and I was so enthralled by the setting -- dinosaurs! and exploration of a tropical island -- I went to see it seven times in theatres. Driving through the jungle split by dirt-road was like living out my own exploration fantasy.

Eventually we crossed a bridge and Pablo let us know this would be the end of our drive for the moment. We got out and I was going to change into hiking appropriate shorts, but Pablo suggested that I go pants-tucked-into-sucks as we’d be doing some pretty serious jungle hiking. On the other side of the bridge a guide from the community was waiting for us with three small horses -- Ainoa and Sandra

Rio Verde Community - Young Buck

had been invited but had to cancel last minute when Ainoa floated her first fever. Horses!! -- I was all excited to ride one for the first time since I was a little kid. One foot into the stirrups and then onto the back of a heaving, ponderous beast struggling with the pounds of flesh on its back. Took me but five minutes to get over the excitement. I tried whistling to the horse to signal a stop, as the guide had done earlier. Nothing doing. I tried clicking my tongue against the roof of my mouth and patting its neck. No stop. I tried pulling the reigns back, but I was sloppy and I got a turn instead of a stop. Then I grabbed the front and back of the saddle, slipped my feet out of the stirrups and leaped off, to laughs from the men on the trail behind us. Much more comfortable in mind and fleet of foot on my own pair I quickly caught up with Oscar and Pablo and took the lead for a little while.

The tropical rainforest is an amazing place and one of the few regrets from my visit to mainland southeast Asia was not trekking through it. Here I made up for that -- really, this type of environment

Jungle Road - Dying Butterfly

seems to appeal to all sorts of past fantasies and desires of mine. There is so much to see: ants marching in line across the path, each one carrying mandible-cut pieces of green leaf; waterfalls, rushing rivers with precarious wooden bridges over them; dozens of different species of butterfly and moth, colourful birds swooping across the path, an eagle soaring above the valley; trees and vegetation of all sorts, leaves the size of my chest laying fallen on the ground; zounds, the sounds!!! cicadas buzzing like chainsaws, chirps, water rushing, mud squishing underfoot. At some points the path was ankle-deep in muddy water, at other points I thought we were walking on the most interesting coloured solid rock. I pointed this out to Pablo and he laughed. “It’s clay,” he said. I reached down and scraped off a chunk -- pure clay, bright orange, in enormous quantity. Later we found the same amount of lighter yellowish clay. I told Pablo how excited this find had made me, and how I looked forward to returning for the different colours when we finally reach the plastering stage of our house. He took the opportunity to mention a cache of turquoise coloured clay he had seen about 6~7 hours hike into the jungle, and ever since that hike has haunted my imagination.

Rio Verde Community - Can you see the villagers house in the distant mountains?

When we arrived at the crest of the ridge we had climbed I looked over and saw the mountains extending their fingers all around us. In the valley immediately to our left a solitary eagle soared. We arrived at the village several minutes later. Several buildings consisting of wooden boards nailed to a frame on a concrete foundation make up a commons. Two wooden posts on each side of the commons give a playing field. The buildings are, starting from the right, an assembly room, a bathroom, atemporary kitchen, the 2nd-5th year classroom, the old kitchen, the dining hall, and then two unidentified buildings after a gap where the mountain path continues. Of the buildings that have

Rio Verde Community - Leaf-like moth

windows none have glass, instead using wire netting of 2 by 1 inch open rectangles. The wooden wallboards have bent and warped in the humid weather leaving small openings here and there between them. A variety of moths, some with dark red patterns on their wings, others which at first appear to be brown, wilted leaves lay motionless in unoccupied spaces. Dogs enter and leave freely, unless they become particularly bothersome and are kicked out.