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.

Connecting to the grid - May 2013

Here’s a quick summary of what I had to refresh myself on about electricity while we installed our system. Alternating Current, or AC, is a current which periodically reverses direction, expressing itself as a sine wave, meaning that there is a period during every pulse of electricity when no power being delivered to the system. This period is extremely brief, however it is noticeable with adequately fast recording devices; electronic engines built for AC have compensatory mechanisms to provide for their smooth running. Direct Current, or DC, is a steady, direct line of power.

In addition to current type, there are two basic modes of delivery: mono-phasic and bi-phasic. Mono-phasic, as we have in Ecuador, carries the AC current over a single cable, biphasic carries two staggered AC currents over two different cables, and both have an additional grounding cable. Whereas mono-phasic systems are in a powerless period of flux for the entire “negative” or “reverse” of their sinusoidal pulse, biphasic systems combine the staggered currents, resulting in a shorter “reverse” flow period and a more efficient system. For our installation the significance of this is that electric connections in Ecuador have only a positive and a ground, as opposed to a positive, a negative and a ground.

We began the electrical installation with a single wooden poll we placed at the front right side of the house. We strung a thin metal wire from the utility poll at the properties edge to our installed poll by the house and then from that poll to the brick and concrete column supporting the roof atone corner of the small ground-level porch abutting the front entrance. To this wire we attached a super-flex cable: three smaller cables fit into a large rubber tube. When we bought the main cable to carry the current from the utility poll to the house we didn’t yet know that Ecuador uses a mono-phasic system and therefore only needs two cables, the positive and the ground. The price difference is about ¢0.70 per meter, and at over 50 meters of cabling we lost $35 through our ignorance; the next day we bought proper mono-phasic cabling for the lights and electric outlets. Next, we put a hole into the brick wall just below the ceiling at the convergence of the front porch walls, and we fit the super-flex cable through the PVC

tubing we are using as cable housing. On the other side of the wall the super-flex cable passes into a side-hole in a plastic housing box attached to the wall and passes out of a bottom-hole to continue into the fuse box. From there we have the cables for the lights and outlets (much smaller in diameter than the super-flex cables) leave in tubing and run their current to two outlets and a light in our room, one outlet (connected to the super-flex because we needed more volts for the washing machine) and a light in the larder, and an outlet and light in the guest bedroom. We’re waiting until we progress more on the house to buy more materials for connecting the two lights and kitchen outlet outside on the rear veranda. Wire, cabling, PVC tubing and wall mounts, screws, outlets, light switches, lights, fuses and fuse box all included we paid about $400 for the electric system.

You can take the boy away from the non-polluting transportation methods...- April 2013

There are three grades of 4x2 Mazda double-cabin pick-up trucks for sale in Ecuador. All of them fall under the BT-50 label, all of them are the same length and have the same interior, which brings the difference to engine and horsepower. The cobalt-blue 2011 model parked outside our bedroom at Ana Lucia’s house in Ibarra has 98hp.

Ibarra - Car dealership

We had been looking for a car since our arrival, but it wasn’t until almost a month ago that we went out to some dealerships in Ibarra looking for a model which would suit us. I knew more-or-less what we wanted: a double-cabin pickup of a recent enough model to have driver and passenger-side airbags, in relatively good condition. 4x4 engines are several thousand dollars more expensive than 4x2 engines here, and while there are some steep roads in Quito nothing in our everyday routine requires the power and traction of a 4x4. Chevrolet, Ford, Toyota and Mazda have factories in Ecuador or neighboring countries, so as far as maintenance and ease of resale are concerned they are all good buys. The Ford and Toyota pickups cost more new, however their rarity relative to the ubiquitous Chevrolets and Mazdas lowers the resale value. We were looking for Chevrolets and Mazdas.

There is no Spanish word for “refurbished” in the Ecuadorian automotive industry. When an owner wants to sell their car they bring it to a dealership (irrespective of mark) where mechanics inspect the mechanics. If the vehicle is damaged to the extent that its legal operation would be impossible, I suspect the owner pays for repairs or foregoes a significant percentage of the resale price in lieu of paying. If the damage is not immediately apparent, the owner can choose a third path: reclaiming the car from the dealership and attempt to sell it on their own through mercado libre or one of the other classified websites used in Ecuador. Often this path of resale involves tampering with the odometer to lower its reading. Andres and Caroline had the pleasure, to the sum of $2,000 in post-sale repairs, of purchasing their Chevrolet Grand Vitara from an owner who chose the third path. (refresher: Sandra is my partner, her sister Caroline is married with Andres, they have a 2-year-old son, Valentin).

Every car dealership in Ibarra is located on either side of the main route into and out of the south of the city. The first dealership we visited there had two used (“segundo mano” -- second hand) Chevrolet double-cabin pickups, both with over 100,000 kilometers and asking prices over $15,000. The pickups were well used and the tires looked in need of replacement. At about $200 per tire that would have been $1,000 extra, including service. We thanked the salesperson and headed south and across the route to a Toyota dealership where we could see several segundo mano pickups in the fenced-off lot. The first pickup shown to us looked worse for the wear and had the same tire problems as the previous two pickups. As we prepared to leave the salesperson let us now that the dealership had a 2011 model in very good condition, and it would be in the lot the following day.

We were all immediately interested in the Mazda pickup. Two years old, 48,000km (~30,000 miles) on the odometer, exterior and interior almost spotless, barely any scratches on the bed: a trade-in by the owner to finance an upscale purchase. For $19,500 it was $5,000 less than a brand-new model, and the excellent condition was enticing. After a call to Andres to make sure the price was right for the year and mileage, I said I’d take it. When we arrived in Quito the next day, after my first highway driving in Ecuador (much more comfortable and scenic than by bus), Andres told us that his friend who works at the dealership hadn’t been there the previous day. That friend later had told him that, personally, he wouldn’t have paid more than $17,000 for the car. As a first time car owner, I was happy with that figure as a “could-have-done better” amount.

Lita - driving through a foot

and a half of mud flooded roads

The pickup, being significantly longer, was at first far more unwieldy than the small sedans I learned to drive in, but several weeks later I’m comfortable enough to parallel park, reverse out of the sloping driveway at Andres and Caroline’s house in Quito, and thread the pickup through the gates of Ana Lucia’s driveway into a position where it doesn’t block her garage. More importantly, I’m comfortable driving in the chaos of Ecuadorian traffic.

There are plenty of traffic signals in Ecuador. Observing the manner of driving in the country, one wonders why they bothered to put in a single one. Traffic signals, legal priority, passing lanes: practical jokes on the novice driver. The surest way never to arrive anywhere in Quito is to obey the traffic signals. In the beginning, this manner of driving scared me because I couldn’t understand the underpinning logic. How to predict what the other cars will do; in other words, how to drive defensively? I observed traffic when Andres would drive us to the grocery store and gradually I began to understand. Traffic in Ecuador is completely logical. It follows skate-park logic. The logic of the flow between multiple skaters in a skate-park is this: no one follows any set rules of flow, everyone pays attention to the area around them at all times and (usually) everyone conducts themselves to avoid collisions between their person and foreign bodies. Replace “person” with “vehicle” and you have the logic of traffic in Ecuador. Put simply, all drivers here drive defensively. One learns to expect other drivers to nose-in at roundabouts and quickly learns that if one does not use the nose of one’s car as a traffic jam one will get nowhere, fast. This logic works for the sole reason that everyone obeys it; in New York, where some drivers obey the logic of traffic signals and other drivers obey a logic of chaos and disrespect, driving feels much more dangerous. Gradually, I find myself more at home driving under these conditions than in New York or even the over-ordered streets of Brussels and France. So comfortable now am I, that we’ve been able to purchase more materials in Ibarra and transport them to Chota, speeding up our building and allowing us to complete the interior electric system.