Gas

"Do-dee-do-do-do… Do-dee-do-do-do…" The metallic tinkle of simulated Andean folkloric music wafts up to the second story window between the morning's revving engines, car alarms, croaking roosters, and various banging and pounding (the source of which is still mysterious to me).  Pete slides the glass open and pushes his head through the window.

"Oh shit!  The gas truck!"  He slides into his slippers, grabs a fiver from the counter, hits the buzzer for the door, and runs out.   Meanwhile Kerry wanders into the living room wondering what's up.  I tell her it's the gas man.  She pokes her head out of the same window.  

"Gasolina!  Gasolina!"  Somehow the driver hears her, and the truck stops.  A few minutes later Pete labors back upstairs with 20 cubic liters of LP gas in a beat-up old container.  The night before we'd run out of gas while cooking dinner, and Pete had to borrow the tank from the hot water heater for the showers.  

Gas here in Ecuador is subsidized.  $2.50 a bottle.  The same LP bottle in Colombia, so says Pete, would go for almost twenty bucks -- which (I'm guessing) is like paying $100 for your grill tank back in Los Estados.  Before you get all huffy about socialist programs (to tell you the truth, at this point I know nothing whatsoever about Ecuadorian politics), you have to remember that gas at pumps in the states is also heavily subsidized.  So is our (also woefully unsustainable) agribusiness… but that's another story.

Gas here is also rationed, "which is why there's a really good black market," says Pete.  

Set in the Inter-Andean highlands, Otavalo is a city of roughly 50,000 people -- though 90,000 is a better estimate since there is no formal census.  Located between two volcanoes in excess of 15,000 feet, this place is incredibly picturesque, that is if you don't look too closely at the trash in the gutters.  It bustles and hums along -- though the only people who seem to be in a hurry are driving vehicles.  Otherwise, people move at a casual pace.  

The rhythm of the city is slowly revealing itself to us, and we are starting to get a sense of how this chaos is orchestrated, whether by official policy or individual entrepreneurs.   In the US, so many of these mechanisms are hidden from view it seems, while here It's all in plain view.  Everything runs efficiently, if not circuitously.  And just about everything is done by hand, from making tiles for the streets to agriculture which comes down from the hills into the markets of Otavalo. 

These public works seem to be a large part of it.   There's a compost pick up on Wednesday, and trash pick up comes on Thursdays.  Each service comes up the street with a slightly different tune.  And if you're not there to catch it, it keeps on moving