Field Trip: Lago Cuicocha by Bike

Stamped

The kids' passport photo extras where taken last spring in Florida, late in the day, after hours of swimming in the sun.  They were told not to smile.  These look like mugshots, and Oakes looks like a candidate for his third straight foster home.

Apostille!

Application is pending approval...

~~~

"Copias, copias, copias… necissite copias?"  

A familiar diminutive man sporting a floppy hat, argyle sweater, windbreaker, and a scarf coiled tightly around his neck makes a familiar pitch while sauntering down the line, hands shoved into his pockets, shoulders hunched.  The sun is just coming up over the office buildings.  The traffic builds slowly, beginning with busses and cabs.

"No thanks -- I was here Friday.  I think I have everything I need this time."   We exchange a few more words.  I tell him that this was my sixth trip to this building.  He nods sagely; he is not surprised.

"That's the way it is.  One trip, and another and another, and so on."  He shrugs and, having already surveyed the newcomers at the back, wanders up towards the head of the line.  The candy/cigarette lady shows up with her box of goodies.  She sets it on a plastic chair that has materialized somehow and arranges the cigarettes (with ultra-graphic cancer photos on the front), so that she can sell singles from the various packs.  More people glom onto the line which extends down the sidewalk about half a block.   

A woman in front of me wearing blanket like a poncho shivers audibly.  Turns out, she's a professional line-holder.  "Fria, fria, fria…"   (Cold, cold, cold.)  The temps linger in the upper 40s/low 50s.  I've worn a long-sleeved shirt and a wool shirt; I've been here before.  Still fresh out of VT, I haven't felt real cold for awhile.

Finally the coffee/sandwich lady comes up the walk, a plastic bag full of thermoses and sandwiches dangling from each hand.  Right on time -- yes!  

"Cafe, Chocolate, Aguacitas, sanduches…"  

"Cafecito, por favor!"  She heads over, sets her bags down, pulls a blue thermos out and stack of clear plastic cups, and pours off a delicious cup of instant super sugar-dosed coffee.  (This is no time for coffee snobbery.)

Germans, French, Columbians, Peruvians, North Americans, and the occasional lawyer -- by 6:30 there are maybe thirty or forty of us waiting outside of the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores in downtown Quito, Ecuador.  Most of its two million residents are just waking up, but not this little pocket of society on Avenida 10 de Agosto, the main vein through this ten-plus mile long city.  Sixteen miles south of the equator, it's still cold in the early morning at 9,000-plus feet of elevation.    

When the folder girl cruises up, things are really starting to swing out here on the sidewalk.  They really love their folders here -- legal size, with the built-in two-hole binder.  Color doesn't seem to matter, but I may be wrong.  The government does not supply folders -- maybe that's why they're not up to their necks in debt with China.   

There is a whole cottage industry that centers on extranjeros (foreigners) needing visas.  Besides the line-holders, you can find all kinds of entrepreneurs within a one block walk: a copy store, the passport photo guys, cash machines, and an assorted variety of law offices.  Then there are the street vendors, several of whom somehow have portable copiers with pirated electricity from three strung-out extension cables.  So it's not crazy to see someone selling sodas, chips, gum, lollipops , and copies on this block.

By 7 the back door of the Ministerio opens and the line lurches forward.  A security guy comes out and starts rolling up the metal doors one at a time.  The line snakes inside to a holding area were the men frisked by the ubiquitous security detail.  There must be a dozen different private firms operating and subcontracting in northern Ecuador, each with its own uniform.  Regardless, they always wear ties under big flak-jackets.  Guns range from holstered .45s to back-strapped sawed-off shotguns, but they don't have guns in the federal building.  In Quito, there are women security guards.  The fact that the National Police may (or may not) have attempted a coup (going so far as to hold the president essentially under house-arrest) nearly two years ago to the day may account for the private contractors in a federal office -- though I am only speculating.  After a cursory check of the bags, I am free to head to the chairs in the next stage of this purgatory.  I sit in the visa section, one of several sections where people a lined up in chairs in the order that they entered the building.

By 7:30, we are ushered up to the all powerful Info Desk ten people at a time.  There, if we are judged worthy (by our folders full of documents), we are given a number.  (Three times before, I'd failed to make it past this desk.) Though I am twentieth or so in line, because there are so many different types of requests, windows, agents, and visas, I am number V1 for the tourist visa line.  I may now go to the "first floor" -- which in Ecuador is always the second floor -- and wait until 8:30 when the first visa agents show up.  

Eventually, the room will fill with people from all over the place -- South America, Europe, Asia -- all looking for visas.  There is a big screen up front that tells us what number is up.  The numbers tick off at a glacial pace.  I am sure that some insects run a full life-cycle within two or three numbers.  For our edification, there is a Ministeio de Relaciones promo-video, exactly 45 seconds long, that plays ad infinitum.  (Cue the jovial farmers shaking hands in front of Cotopaxi scene.)  Sometimes the guards let older folks or folks with young kids go ahead.  Sometimes people return with a missing document, and they are let through.  And sometimes people use the back door.  They've been here before, too -- they know how to work it.  Sometimes they bring gifts for the guard at the door.  These people always know the guard by name; they usually have law degrees.  

~~~

Unless you've run this gauntlet before, you cannot really appreciate what it takes to get to this level.  The first time we came, we were too late; there would be no more visas for that day.  But the first time  I made it to the first floor/second level, I had number V87.  Late again, I waited from 9:30 until 2:30 for my five minute audience with Jimmy.  (I've had Jimmy twice, out of three visits to this level; we're bros now.)   People who know me know that I am not exactly the most patient person in the world, but I waited it out, admirably I'd like to think.  Waited for my five minutes to be told that my original documents (in this case, the kids' birth certificates and our marriage license -- the originals mind you) needed the official apostille stamp.  Against my will, I now am intimately familiar with the apostille stamp.  

Penned by the Hague Conference on Private International Law (established in 1883 in case you were wondering), the Apostille Treaty lays out the circumstances and manners by which a legal piece of paper issued in one country can be legit in another country, assuming both countries have signed the old treaty.  As it happens, both the US and Ecuador have.  Basically, it's an international notary stamp, a really fancy gold one.  (More on notaries tout suite.)

Anywho… I'd been to the same office on Friday, had all of my paperwork approved (a Herculean achievement in and of itself), and was ready to get the gold stamp when I was told, "OK you can bring out your family now.   We need them for pictures."  But the family was blissfully un-beuracratified in Otavalo, ignorant of this latest twist in the labyrinth.  So, we'd come back to Quito on Sunday, got a family-sized room at a hostel within walking distance of the Ministerio, which brings us up to speed with number V1, Monday morning 8:30, all good to go.

If I may, however, I would like to digress here for a moment.  Please pardon the GenX pop culture reference, but this whole experience is a lot like Donkey Kong: you start at level one, jumping barrels and climbing ladders on a random construction site, trying to get to the top where the big monkey holds the girl captive.  And when you get to the top, Donkey Kong beats his chest and grrrrs, then takes her up another level.  The only way you improve -- i.e. ascend more and more levels -- is through experience, trial and error.  

Sitting there in the waiting room on the first (or second depending on how you count) floor of the Ministerio with number V1, I had made it to the Pie Level.  This is Donkey Kong again -- you know what I'm talking about if you spent more than 50 bucks on it in 1985 (maybe at Godfather's Pizza, maybe playing a little Galaga intermittently).  You have to beat a bunch of the same construction scene levels, each progressively harder, until, finally, you come out on the Pie Level.  At last the Pie Level!  Here for some reason there are pies, which shoot down conveyor belts, which you/Mario have to jump over or they kill you.  Not exactly logical, but neither is Ecuadorian bureaucracy.  

  

So here I am, 8:15, fifteen minutes more to see Jimmy, and everything is in place.  The kids and Kerry, having slept and had breakfast, are on their way.  All the documents are there in my folder: My application with 4 official, color, passport-sized photos of the four of us affixed; my official letter of request for visa 12 IX stating my purpose for being in Ecuador (in Spanish, thank you, Google Translate); our faux itinerary for leaving (thank you, Jackie Lucia of Childs Travel); our notarized color photocopies of our passports (thank you Otavalo Notary lawyer who just signs the document without looking and takes my five bucks); our bank letter and its translation, both notarized, stating that yes, we are financially solvent and won't be panhandling on the PanAmerican Highway (thank you again, Otavalo Notary Lawyer); and finally, our official aposille-stamped, straight from VT via FedEx (3 days late, no thanks to you FedEx, but bless you a thousand times Saint Kathy Watters in the VT Dept of Archives and Records who shot our documents off) birth certificates and marriage license.  Yes, everything is in place for this, my sixth trip to the Ministerio.  Kerry and the kids show up.  Our number is called before they go too crazy -- so far so good -- and finally, we are called up to Jimmy's booth at a respectable 8:55.

But Jimmy was going to stuff us.  Like a 5' 5" U.S. Grant Middle School forward driving to the hoop against 7' Hakeem Olajuwon, he was going to smack that ball right back in our faces.  He would do it in a rather pleasant way though.  

"Soooo, this looks good… but are the translations for your apostille documents?"  

~~~

This sinking feeling was familiar.  Twice before I'd sat in this chair, hoping my 'folio would pass muster.  Kerry had read that there was a new rule: you could have apostille documents in English.  Kerry was ready to jump over the desk and rip is jugular out with her teeth.  In an odd role-reversal, I was the calm deliberate one.  We were going with that argument for a awile, but this was Jimmy's lane; he wasn't having any of it.  His word -- as far as we were concerned -- was law enough.  He told us that the translation would need, of course, to be notarized.

In retrospect my experience with notary guys in Otavalo was comparatively mellow -- I had translated our bank letter myself, with the help of Google translate.  When I took it into be notarized, the woman with the stamp asked me what it was.  I then proceeded to ramble on expressively, with plenty of gesticulating to my letter and the hypothetical US, in barely intelligible Spanish.  After a minute or two, I am fairly sure she just stamped the document to get me out of her cubicle.  I then took it across the office, waited for another minute before the lawyer -- engaged in pouring over documents with a couple -- motioned me over.  I told him briefly that this (showing him my Google trans doc) was a translation of (showing the English which he wouldn't understand).  He looked at the docs, looked at me, and then signed them without a question.  I paid him $3 for the signature, which went into his desk.  He went back to the couple without missing a beat.  Bade me adios without looking up.

If the Otavalo notary was a small filling, the Quito notary experience was a mouthful of root-canals… without novocain… and then being forced to eat a bowlful of glass shards.  If I thought this office would be like sleepy Otavalo, I had another thing coming.  But first we needed the translations.

Thinking that I could get away with a quick stop in an internet cafe (there's at least one every two or three blocks wherever you walk), I did the translations of the cover-pages, again, with the help of Google translate and printed them up.  We finally found the office of the Notary, Notario Octavio, conveniently located 10 blocks away fron the ministerio on, as it happens, Jorge Washington Ave.   After some deliberation about who should sign the thing, we decided it didn't matter, and I put our landlord's name on it, figuring he wouldn't mind.  At Notario Octavio, though, they were not buying it anymore than a four-year old's lie.  But we were given another clue for our hassle: a business card for an official translator.  A business card with a non-functioning phone number.

It took an hour, but we found the translator… right across the street from the same building we'd left a couple of hours earlier.  After a brief bout of despair, I'd remembered to insert the new extra 9 in cell-phone numbers that was just recently added.  So we tracked down the official Ministerio de Relaciones translator Maria Luisa Davalos, and pled our case.

"OK, I can do it," she said.  We exhaled. "Can you come in tomorrow?"  I was starting to feel a little like Wile E. Coyote.  There were more acts to come.

But Maria Luisa Davalos did indeed have a heart.  We explained our plight (if she'd heard it before, she didn't let on), and she told us to come back at 1:30.  It was now 11:30.  We said we could do that.  

After walking the 6 or so blocks to El Ejido Park, we started killing time again.  At least the kids could go nuts on some awesome slides.  Random detail: Kerry ripped her one and only pair of best-favorite jeans on the hoopty-ass teeter-totter.

~~

By 1:30 I was back at Maria Luisa Davalos' office.  I am guessing that she is German or Swiss, and hence when she said 1:30, she was more likely than the average Ecuadorian to be ready at 1:30.  I'd gone to the desk, said "hello again," signed in, traded my passport for a visitors' pass suspended by a lanyard (the actual wearing of which is mandatory before passing security), and retraced my steps to the third (fourth) floor.  She was just finishing up; I tried to calm my breathing.  I paid $10 per page, including the apostille cover translations, which only varied in numbers, 60 bucks total.  Each was stamped with her seal.  (Seal-making businesses abound here as well.)  No cashier was necessary; I paid the money directly to her.

And now on to the notary!  Notario Octavio, the only Notary that accepted Maria Luisa Davalos' stamp, so I hear.  Which would be why they gave us her card, I reckon.  I got to the office (for the second time) just before 2:00.  Which is lunch-time.  Of course.  I waited patiently outside the gated door.  Someone left after half an hour.  I peered in.  Apparently some people hadn't left the waiting chairs for who-knows-how long.

"Si Senor?"

"Mis blah blah blah tracuccion bla bla bla original blah blah blah notaria, por favor…"  

"You can come back at 3:30."  But… but...  Seriously?  I politely asked why.

"The lawyer is at lunch until then."

~~~

Meanwhile, at the park.  The kids where having a grand old time on the slides and swings.  The plan was for Kerry to eventually make her way back to the Ministerio via sidewalk, through two-million people bustling through their busy Monday.  No more than eight blocks away, on Jorge Washington Ave, I got huge bowl of rooster-leg soup and then went back to the notary office, thus entering into another dimension altogether. 

~~~

Like a demented yogi sitting lotus-style on a bed of hot coals, I let the excruciating pain take me to another place.    I would rather be back in that hospital bed in Olean (pronounced Oh-Lee-Ann), NY having my cornea scraped with a rough tool and then having liters of saline poured on my open eyeball while I hung upside down for six hours.  At least at the notary office I had my book, a look into a 9/11 hijacker's head while he patronized a strip club where the heroine's four-year old daughter who was supposed to be asleep was actually looking for her mother while she happened to be in "the Champagne Room" with the prospective hijacker posing as a high-roller.  Really uplifting stuff.  I shut the book after twenty minutes.  At least I could mutter obscenities with a reasonable degree of confidence that they would not be understood.

The scene in the Notario Octavio essentially represents my worst nightmare: The room was more like a hallway, with a row of seats opposite, in this order from left to right, a cashier (always, always a separate trip here, whether government office or hardware store), a secretary's desk (???), a copy room littered with Notario Octavio folder stuffed into boxes and on shelves from floor to ceiling, and then three offices, maybe four extended into the back lawyer's den.  When I came back to the office at 3:00, there were only a few people waiting.  By the time I left at 4:45, the place was packed to capacity like a bag of raisins left in your back pocket.   There was barely anywhere to move.  I had my brief case/bag and a backpack full of the kids, Kerry, and my dirty clothes from yesterday.

Unlike the fairly predictable Ministerio DLRE, there was no priority here, no way at all to tell who was next and when your stuff would possibly be ready.  No fewer than three, sometimes four non-distinct lines intertwined, so that it was impossible to tell whether or not, for example, one was waiting for the "secretary" or the woman in the copy/stamp room.  One line extended well into the equally narrow hallway.  People were butting in like crazy, especially the lawyers.  The four or five "assistants" wore flight attendant suits, were extremely calm and professional and efficient, and every time one of them elbowed her way through the crowds (quite professionally I must say), one of the suit guys would accost her with questions.  It was hot.  My wife thinks that I am slightly claustrophobic.  There was a really bad Spanish soap opera on the TV.  I'm pretty sure one man had been there for days.  I was ready to throw some elbows.

~~~

And by this time, Kerry had taken up a position back at the Ministerio.  Turns out that they stop seeing visa issues at 3.  Yet Kerry -- this is just what I imagine -- had laid five guards out with kung-fu kicks and chops and charged for the first/second floor office where, after she grabbed him by the tie and threatened to choke him with it, made Jimmy write a note saying that I should be let up the stairs when I arrived.  All with two children in tow.

~~~  

My phone rings.  It's Kerry.  She tells me that Jimmy will see me, that we can come up at any time before five.  Just call, and she'll come down with the permission slip she made him write.  I just need to make it by 4, before the cashier on the ground/first floor closes for the day.

~~~

There is no movement at 3:30, 3:45, 4:00... I call Kerry.  Tell her I'm still waiting.  I tell one of the flight attendants that my family is waiting, has been for hours, back at the Ministerio.  She is not moved.  At last some luck: they've switched the TV to a Japanese obstacle course where contestants hurt themselves in funny ways.  The mood is lighter.  People chuckle at other people's misfortune.  I'm finally handed a slip that I'm supposed to take the cashier.  The cashier's line is 7 people deep -- why oh why does it move so slowly?

When I make it up to the window (a couple dozen Japanese contestants have been crushed by papier-mache boulders and fallen face-first into moats by now), I push my slip to the lady behind the glass.  I hear her say "dos", and push a five through the slot.

"No, THIRTY-two" she says...

"Seriously?"  Several people laugh quietly behind me, whether in sympathy or at my naiveté, I am not sure.  The cashier takes my two twenties.

"You don't have anything smaller?"

"Seriously?"  There are two ladies in the booth, and now I see that the second woman's function is to dig for change in her purse to cover the office.  It's now 4:45, and whether I can make it back to Jimmy before 5 is a question.  I call Kerry.  Tell her I'm still waiting for the documents.  Finally, I see them on the "secretary's" desk.  I think about grabbing them.  None of the flight attendants has come out of the recesses for days it seems.  It's even hotter.  I take the documents.  I press back as far as I can.  I contemplate fleeing.  I've paid, haven't I?

A kind woman goes into the back room and tells one of the attendants (I'm guessing) that I have taken my stuff from a desk, that I look volatile and may snap at any second.  The attendant comes out and asks for the receipt.  (She needs to sign it.)  Fortunately for me, and thanks to the kind woman, I did have one more step to go through.  The notary woman thumbed through each of the copies, each of them having at least two different notary stamps, and officially put official stickers on each document -- the final touch.  And then, I was free.  Free at last!

I run all the way to the Ministerio.  A dozen blocks.   I hurdle a cab and pivot off a light-post.  I call Kerry on the run so that she could meet me at the stairs.  I make it upstairs, out of breath and sweaty.  I hand the stuff over to Jimmy.  Jimmy is serene.

"Long day, huh?"

~~~

Turns out we didn't need to see him at all since I'd have to wait in line again.  I'd have to wait to get a little slip of paper I'd take back down to pay a cashier.  I went back yesterday, had the papers approved finally, got the little pieces of paper, and paid the initial visa application fee.  It was supposed to be 30 dollars for the application, but they charged us $120, $30 per person.  I didn't argue.  I just paid and left with a light feeling.  The lightest feeling I've had since the Dead at Soldier Field in '92.

We've learned the hard way to make copies of every receipt, every piece of paper, so after I paid I went out to see my old friend in the floppy hat.

"See you next Wednesday," I told the guy.  He didn't even bat an eye.

"OK."  At least I know how to get back to the Pie Level.

Field Trip: Climbing Fuya Fuya

10/15/2013

We have lived in Ecuador for two and a half months and have settled into a comfortable routine. So now it is time to start exploring a bit more. Yesterday, I did my first big hike. After getting both kids off to school, I packed myself a lunch, filled my camel back with water and packed it with lots of warm clothing. My friend Lindsay was supposed to pick me up around 9:00 with two farm volunteers (Isabelle and Nicholas) but ended up coming around 10:00. The worker at her farm borrowed the truck for a "few minutes to get some water" and didn't return for an hour and half. This seems to be normal behavior around here so none of us let it bother us. 

It was warm, sunny day and we all started the hike in short sleeves. This didn't last long though as the temperature drops quickly at this elevation (the base of the trail is over 12,000 feet.) The first part of the hike was a nice gently sloping trail through the paramo (high elevation grassland), then the trail turned steeply upward and eventually ended in a rock scramble. The whole thing took us about two hours and we took lots of breaks to catch out breath. My body is definitely not used to this elevation. As we sat on the ridge looking out over the Andes and the valleys below, a hail storm blew in, and then back out again. We also got to observe the rain shadow effect perfectly. This is when the clouds on one side of a mountain get pushed up to the ridge, dropping their moisture as they go. Once at the top there is very little moisture left and so the opposite side of the mountain is considerably dryer. I remember reading about this in one of my ecology classes, but is sure is easier to understand when you get to watch it. 

The hike down was much faster, as it was easier to do a controlled fall (run) than to walk slowly on such a steep pitch. Just as we neared the car, it began to sprinkle but none of us got all that wet. Two days later, walking up stairs is still pretty painful, but I look forward to my next big hike. Perhaps Niffer and I can do this one together in January.

Fuya Fuya-Our destination

Nice hike over the paramo (high grasslands) before our steep climb.

Looking back at Laguna de Mojanda

Catching our breath-man is it hard to breath up here.

Time to add a layer-the temperature is dropping.

Lindsay and me at the top.

Perfect example of a rain shadow

Currency

The currency here in Ecuador is the US dollar, and I can't help but get a kick out of forking over a fiver for a papaya, a bag of oranges, or a bunch bananas.

"We're from the same place," I sometimes say to a vendor, pointing to Honest Abe -- but then I have to get into who he was, the whole civil war thing, and from there it's just a short hop to slavery, which is hard enough to explain in English.  Here these guys are, busy enough trying to sell their stuff, and some crazy gringo comes along trying to give a history lecture.  I usually cut it short with, "he was a good man" before I leave the market, vendor shaking his/her head, me muttering to myself about how "rail-splitter" or "stovepipe hat" translates to Spanish.

Anyhow, fruit always seems to cost a dollar, no matter what it is, and the change from a five is (check out my math skills in action!)… four dollars.  More often than not, the change is actual change, monedas, or coins that someone fishes out of a pocket or re-used plastic container.  Ecuador uses US coins, but also presses its own coins.  So when you get a fistful of (four) dollars for your bananas, you get a mix of US and EC coins.  EC coins come in 1, 5, 25, and 50 centavo versions -- but not the dollar; those are exclusively imported from up north.  Rarely, by the way, does anyone give back four dollar coins; it's always some combination of quarter, fifties, and dollars.  (Once I did get a taped up stack of 20 nickels from a cabbie.)

The most popular form of the dollar, hands-down, is the Sacajawea [sic] dollar coin, apparently also known as the "golden dollar," the second piece of US currency to feature the portrait of a groundbreaking, heroic woman.  Oh, I remember well the massive controversy when Susan B. Anthony dollar was first minted in the 80s:  how in the world were we going to use this in video games at Aladdin's Castle?  Of course, the furor died down quickly when the video game makers adapted the coin-slots, and you could use your SBA dollar to play a half an hour -- maybe 45 minutes -- of Tron.

In honor of Columbus Day, AKA Native American Holocaust day, I will now take a moment to digress on Sacagawea (sa-cah-gah-WEE-ah, as some Indian historians insist her name is pronounced).  She was born in Idaho, a member of the Shoshone Nation, daughter of a chief.  When she was twelve, she was kidnapped by a raiding party of Hidasta Indians and moved to North Dakota (or thereabouts) and then passed on to the Mandans who lived in the same vicinity.  Finally, at about age thirteen she was sold to a full-blood Quebecer trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau.  Not the best way to begin her teen years.  

By then a "free agent" trapper/trader, Charbonneau lived among the Hidasta and the Mandan Nations, at the headwaters of the Missouri River, near present day Bismarck, ND.  Charbonneau purchased Sacagawea (or Bird Woman) and another Shoshone woman (Otter Woman) from the local Mandans to be his wives, simultaneously.  It is not known whether these marriages were official, but apparently the Quebecer considered them so.  He was no hero; by some accounts he was an attempted rapist, and much later he struck Sacagawea when during a marital dispute (William Clark apparently intervened, presumably on her behalf). 

I digress within this digression because without Charbonneau's linguistic incompetence, Sacagawea would never have been a key member of the Corps of Discovery, and consequently the Corps of Discovery never would have succeeded.   Incidentally, Charbonneau's incompetence also extended to piloting boats, and he had to be rebuked on several occasions by Clark for not fulfilling his duties to the Corps; on the other hand, he apparently made a killer buffalo sausage.  Suffice it to say, only the sausage-eating component of the Corps were fans of Charbonneau.  More importantly to history, however, is the fact that he never fluently spoke Hidasta, despite living among them for much of his life. Though they hired him as an interpreter and guide, Lewis and Clark were never impressed with Charbonneau in large part because his Hidasta wasn't stellar, but more importantly, he didn't speak English.  

But Sacagawea did.  And fluent Hidasta, Mandan, and of course, Shoshone.  No dummies, Lewis and Clark knew that they would need her help to get through the Shoshone territory and the Rockies.  They intended to use horses to cross the Continental Divide, and they were aware that the Shoshone had good horses.  And another plus: Sacagawea knew a heck of a lot more about edible plants and medicines (one of Jefferson's main aims for the Corps).  So in short, they put up with Charbonneau in order to have the invaluable help of his much, much better half.

There's no shortage of drama in this narrative, but in a made-for-Hollywood moment, Lewis and three other members of the Corps met Cameahwait, Sacagawea's long-lost brother.  The men had split off from the bigger Corps for a scouting mission when they came upon a Shoshone camp.  Lewis wisely took a peaceful posture (60 Shoshone warriors, freshly returned from hunting, were ready to throw down on those whiteys, purportedly, the first they'd ever seen).  Painting his face with vermillion, a sign of peace, and preparing other gifts, Lewis convinced the Shoshone that he was not there to fight.  Eventually Lewis convinced Cameahwait (and his boys) to follow them to the larger Corps camp in order to find the translator, his sister.  (By some accounts, she was his cousin as the Shoshone, not distinguishing between the two, use the same word for brother and cousin.)  Of course, it was a moving reunion for Sacagawea, her brother-cousin, and eventually also Otter Woman, the second girl kidnapped by the Hidasta.

In return for reuniting him with his sister, Cameahwait offered the Corps of Discovery horses and important directions for passing through the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho.  The Shoshone, or Snake People as they called themselves, lived on both the plains east of the Rockies and on the western side of the range -- so they knew what they were talking about.  Again, good fortune for the party.  Again, thanks to Sacagawea.

All this brings me to the point of my rambling, albeit a super-obvious one: American history, especially as it concerns Native Peoples, is steeped in a giant melting pot of irony.  The Lewis and Clark Expedition is rightly celebrated as an amazing feat.  Those guys boated, hiked, rode horses and basically gutted it out for three years, eventually making to the Pacific Ocean, the first white people to do so.  There is one account of an Indian, Moncacht Ape, who made a trans-continental trek a century before Lewis and Clark penned by a Frenchman named La Page; Lewis and Clark as well as Pres. Jefferson were well aware of this -- they all had the book, and the boys even took it with them on the expedition.  Unfortunately, the book never mentioned the Rocky Mountains, which makes it suspect in my view.  

Lewis and Clark took the first botanical, zoological, and anthropological surveys of the west, that is the first Euro-American surveys -- Native people already had names for all the things and all the places.  In short, without Sacagawea and the serendipitous meeting with her brother, there's not much chance for their success.  The greatest irony -- and of course the greatest tragedy from Native Americans' point of view -- is that Indians helped <ahem> pave the way for so-called Manifest Destiny and the next hundred years of white people moving into the neighborhood uninvited -- and driving up the real-estate prices.  Basically the same thing happened at Plymouth Colony as well as countless other places -- Indians help white people; white people then help themselves.

Aside from the mapping and the naming, there was a whole lot of claiming.  Having recently purchased the entire midwest and then some (from the French, it must be noted, not the dozens of individual Nations already occupying that space), the core purpose of the Corps was to check out the new lands.  Maybe, POTUS Jefferson thought, we'd even find a trade route to Asia -- but no dice, Jimmy.  (Unfortunately melting arctic ice is finally making that pipe-dream possible.)  Since I was talking about coins, by the way, Jefferson had the mint create special peace medallions (with his own portrait) as symbols of friendship and peace.  The Corps was to hand these party-favors out to the nations they met along the way.  Oh yeah, this medallion was also a symbol of US sovereignty over the land and its indigenous inhabitants.  In effect: a consolation prize.  The Supreme Court, under head-honcho Marshall later invoked the Doctrine of Discovery, which was essentially a legal hoodwinking for taking land from heathen peoples.

So yeah, anyhow, Sacagewea was a serious badass.  She was 20 years old, spoke four or five languages, and took her then one-year-old son (Jean-Baptiste) on a three-year trek from North Dakota to the Washington coast and back mostly on foot.  Even -- and perhaps especially -- Lewis and Clark saw that she was an invaluable mediator, literally.  (Originally, the word was used for Jesus, who mediated between god and man, as one who dwells in the divide between places.)  She was seen as a symbol of peace, since A., she was Indian, and B. she was a woman.  Clark himself wrote in his journal, "a woman with a party of men is a token of peace."  And there was eventually a very important C. as well: her son Jean Baptiste, born just eight weeks before the COD set out.  In my mind she is rightly celebrated on the dollar, and there's JB, riding shotgun on the backboard.  

The Corps, it should be noted, was regular army, and they were packing plenty of heat for the time: new-fangled .44 caliber air rifles and boatloads of black powder for their flint-lock rifles.  Understandable, for sure.

Also in from the irony department: Sacagawea was one of two (of the 33) members of the party who were not paid for their efforts.  Charbonneau got 500 bucks and a chunk of land.  (At this time, women still didn't inherit their husband's property or wealth.)  Clark's slave, York, wasn't paid either, but he was the first person of African descent to see the Pacific, so they say.  Sacagawea and York did, however, get to vote on whether the party made camp and waited out their second winter in a fort south of the Snake river before completing their Trek.  (Both voted for making camp, swaying the majority to the prudent course.)  Very progressive and democratic -- as always, we are beautifully conflicted people.   Or conflictedly beautiful -- it's hard to say.

Where was I?  Oh yes, Ecuador.  And I was talking about coins.  About currency, which, by the way, comes from the Latin currere, or "to run", to flow, to circulate.  And here I happen to live, according to my friend Pete, in a place with the greatest concentration of indigenous wealth on the planet (maybe with the exception of the Mohegans in Connecticut and their popular casinos).  The Indios here in Otavalo run the government, and they own most of the land.  But outside of Otavalo, literally just outside of the city limits, people of indigenous descent are still poor as dirt and live the type of lives that ought to make "poor" Americans blush.  So how did Otavaleño Indios pull this off?  I'd guess it's a combination of skill and luck.

I will oversimplify it for you (as I have everything else in this sorry excuse for an essay): they are exceptionally skilled craftspeople.  So great and widely known was (and is) their weaving and cloth-making skill that the Incas conquered this area of Northern Ecuador just 40 years before the Spanish came knocking.  The Incan colonizers, masterminds of efficient suppression -- and apparently fans of alpaca ponchos, rounded up all of the men of reproductive age and headed them back to the main Incan cities, and then they had Incan men come up here and take up with the women.  (Otavalo women, by the way, are famously beautiful.)  That way, within a generation or three, Incas successfully instilled their language and culture... just as Pizarro was showing up on Atahualpa's doorstep a couple hundred miles south of here.  

Consequently, Otavaleños and Ecuadorians elsewhere in the Northern Andes especially embrace the old Inca culture, and their heroes are Incan resistance fighters like Rumiñahui, Atahualpa's general who never gave up the gold to Pizzarro and this civilized thugs.  Rumiñahui means "stone-face" and his bust and uber-buff statue adorn many a plaza around here.  (It's also the name of our suburban-ish neighborhood.)  It is even said that Otavaleño traditional dress and style is closer to Incan than in Peru (a fact that I cannot verify, even if I were into verifying facts).   Many men -- and even more women still dress in traditional garb.  For the men, white pants, shirts, and blue alpaca vests and ponchos; for women, long skirts and embroidered blouses, with more fabric draped over the blouses.  Both men and women, but more often men sport fedora hats.  Both sexes wear a closed-toe sandal.  Both campesinos (poor, usually, country-folk) and urban middle/upper-class people sport the same fashion... often with more modern touches.  I am finally getting over being startled by seeing a woman in traditional wear, but sporting an American Eagle hat and talking on a cell-phone.  You still hear a lot of Kichwa spoken here, and bi-lingual in Otavalo typically means Spanish and Kichwa.  Indeed, many Kichwa words have crept into the general lexicon in the Northern Andes, like naño, for example, which means brother.

Otavalo's market was famous even since the Incas arrived, particularly with tourists, the Incas being pioneers in this department.  Aside from the Galápagos Islands, the market at the Plaza de Ponchos is the biggest stop for tourists in Ecuador.  And as we know in VER-mont, tourism is a mighty industry -- one that makes us fat and comfortable whilst our Adirondack neighbors languish in a much slower economy.  Tourism has made this town very comfortably middle-class, though many Americans might not recognize it as such.  The standard of living for the average Otavaleño is significantly higher than in the rest of the country.  Not all the people here are indigenous of course, and there is a subtle friction between different groups of people.  Just as it's ridiculous to refer to a "Black Community" in the US, it's dumb to assume a uniformity of opinion here.  The all-indigenous market, for instance, is intensely political, and getting a stall in the main tourist plaza is only done through inheritance.  

So the other day, when I bought four avocados for a dollar, paid with a five, and ended up with a fresh pocketful of change, including a couple of Sacagawea dollars, it struck me how perfect this coin is for this place, another country of stark contrasts and perhaps more subtle irony.  I decided give my class a lecture on the importance of Sacagawea.  Actually, as usual, I wasn't thinking about importance at all until I got to the end of the lesson and we were drawing conclusions.  After Lewis and Clark, things went downhill for the American Indians west of the Mississippi (they'd already been going downhill east of it).  And I'm "lecturing" to a group of indigenous (and a few mestizo) kids.  (Another time, I was trying to explain the word "tan" using a skin-tone anecdote -- "you know, when you are out in the sun for a long time"... until I looked up at the class, realized everyone already was deeply tan -- and I just said, "It's like light-brown.")

There is a strong affinity for the American Indian here, whether or not it's a stereotype.  (American here means North American.)  People at the Saturday market sell Sioux-like headdresses and dream-catchers.  There are T-shrits with American Indian themes.  There's even a chicken roasting place called Inti-pollo whose logo is a chicken in a war-bonnet.   So, after attempting to convey some of the history and the irony of American Indians through Sacagawea's story, I realized that for the indigenous kids in my class at least, theirs is not a tragic story.  

Finally, in struggling to wrap things up for my talk, I hit on the fact that too many Americans consider Indians a part of a nostalgic, if not tragic past.  Part and parcel of history, but not a part of a present that the romanticized Sacagawea coin risks obscuring.  But of course, this is not the case at all.  You see her all over the place in Otavalo -- few if any mothers  here use a strollers; babies are strapped to backs with bolts of cloth.  Sacagawea, though perhaps not well understood, is alive and well here in Ecuador. 

Big shout-outs to the following sources: Biography.com, PBS.org, Rootsweb, The Anti-defamation League, N. P. Shear, and good ol' Wikipedia

Field Trip: Imbabuela Downhill

To drop 1,000m from 3,500m of páramo to 2,500m at Otavalo, I took a camioneta (truck-taxi) 500m up to 3,000m where I started climbing to the trailhead (above) at 3,500m.    

Clouds over Volcán Fuya Fuya

Bromeliad city

Mmm -- singletrack at last!  A little sloppy and ripped up by motocross bikes, but pretty sweet nonetheless.

Into the clouds

Wishing for some Pam (tm) cooking spray  here, but the lower I got, the drier it was.

Abandoned shepard's shack in a clearing -- looking back up, I've dropped out of the cloud zone.

a well worn trail

Volcán Cotacachi emerging a low cloud deck

Newly "tilled" fields -- almost all is done by hand.  Note the field in the center where it is  actually too steep to turn the soil over, pretty much vertical

Volcan Imbabura in the clouds behind, Lago San Pablo to the right (town and lake), and to the left you can see the edge of Otavalo -- good vantage for seeing the city.  The shot below is slightly left (west-ish) of the shot above, with all of Otavalo in view.