Overdue Ecuador Recap

Ecuador was our 5th South American country and 3rd South American trip, so we went into it with a certain amount of experience and expectations.  But it was our first trip with either of our parents; Nora's came for the entire 4 weeks, and my mother flew down for 8 days.  This made it a rather unique trip for us.

(Ecuador's flag flying over the presidential palace)

Ecuador is a beautiful country, with very diverse geographic regions thanks to the Andes.  We started our trip in Quito, which for an Andean city was a bit disappointing--it reminded us a lot of Lima, in that it had good food, good weather, and very friendly people, but didn't feel all that special or unique. We've found that most big cities end up feeling very similar to one another these days (in South America Cuzco is a notable exception, and Buenos Aires deserves honorable mention).  This is not to say we did not enjoy Quito; on the contrary, we had a lot of fun there, and would consider going back.

(a brother and sister waiting on the bus after school)

From Quito we took a day trip to Otavalo, where most of the region's handicrafts originate.  We went to see the market, but were unlucky as only a few vendors were open.  It rained, so we ducked inside a cafe for a few drinks, and Nora found a "green" beer--beer mixed with creme de menthe.

Leaving Quito, we stopped overnight in Banos, famous for its hot springs--which ranged from ice cold, to lukewarm, to a scalding 120 degrees F; no tolerable soaking pool there, but it was still very relaxing.

We journeyed on to Cuenca where we had rented an amazing apartment with a long balcony.  This was probably the nicest place Nora and I have ever stayed. The neighborhood was a couple km from the sights in the city, but as taxis are so cheap (about $1.50 for a 10 minute ride), it was not a problem at all. And there was a Chilean empanada place around the corner that was fantastic.

(Cuenca crafts market)

                 

Cuenca we liked a lot, but for different reasons than Quito. It is still a big city, but it feels a little smaller, a little greener, and the weather is a little better--not withstanding the sudden rainstorm that Nora and her parents got caught out in. There's a reason so many Americans are retiring to Ecuador, and specifically locating in Cuenca.

(women in traditional dress, Cuenca)

(the central plaza in Sigsig)

From here we went to Salinas and spent a week on the beach, and from there to Puerto Lopez and spent another week on the beach.  Puerto Lopez was interesting for the place we stayed--Hosteria Mandala--and its host's whale obsession, as well as a boat trip we took to Isla de la Plata.  Otherwise, our time on the beach can be summed up as a lot of beer and wine, a lot of good food, and general relaxing fun all around.

(the porch of our cabana at Hosteria Mandala in Puerto Lopez)   

  

(a beach vendor selling cold coconuts in Salinas)

On back to Quito, and from there homeward.

The really exciting part of Ecuador was, like most trips we take, the food.  Ecuadorean food is generally very good, though you can get--and we certainly did on several occasions--garbage versions of it.  Beach towns don't seem to care about flavor or quality as much unless you're spending a lot more (notable exceptions: in Salinas there was a corner place that grilled over charcoal, and an English fish-and-chip shop; in PL a tiny Spanish restaurant run by a couple).  The Andean food was the best: secco de chivo (a thick stew of lamb or goat), llapingachos (cheesy potato griddle cakes), and locro de papas (a potato soup with chunks of queso fresco and avocado in it). The ingredients were familiar to the Peruvian food we've had before, but used in new and delicious ways.

 (locro de papas on the left, and llapingachos with lomito on the right)

(choclo con habbas -- large kernel corn with something like a lima bean)

(secco de chivo) 

Overall, I'd say if you can only take 2 weeks for South America, go to Peru or Argentina, depending on what you're hoping to find.  But if you have longer, or if you can take several trips, Ecuador will definitely reward your time and curiosity.

Happy travels.

 - A

Hong Kong

We've been lax in keeping up with the blog, but here's the long and short of it:

We returned to India from Sri Lanka, still did not enjoy ourselves, and so flew home early.

We spent a lovely 4 weeks in Ecuador.

We moved to Hong Kong, arriving just over a week ago.  We have a tiny, wonderful apartment in Kennedy Town overlooking the harbor, there are supermarkets and bakeries within walking distance, and we are very pleased with our decision to relocate here.

More details to follow in the coming days.  And pictures, naturally.

Hope your summer was as great as ours.

Sri Lanka Update

We've been here four weeks now. We also skipped almost all the cultural, historical, and natural sites/sights that most people come to the country for (Adam's peak, the cultural triangle, World's Edge, safaris in the national parks, etc.).  What we did do was eat--a lot--get work done, and for the last week try to relax by the beach.

The food here is very good, and they always give you far too much.  The novelty of it wears off quicker than in India, though, because there isn't as much variety. Even rice and curry, with its half dozen side dishes, can begin to grow old when it is the same half dozen side dishes every night. We still love the food, we just want a little variety now and then, which is what drove us to KFC yesterday.  I swore off KFC over a decade ago, and here I found myself walking into one with thoughts of spicy fried chicken and no remorse. I suppose stranger things have happened, but that's up there.

We're heading to Negombo today, mostly because it is closer to the international airport and has a modest beach. We're also not looking forward to going back to India. We're trying to book things well in advance to avoid some of the headache of a month ago, but it's already a headache.  For one of the most visited places in the world, India is not tourist friendly at all. Our plan is to find somewhere quiet and cool up in the Himalayas and lay low for four weeks.  Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, it's nearly time to say farewell to Sri Lanka.  There are a few things we missed: I would have liked to see some of the ancient cities, and would very  much have liked to have climbed Adam's Peak at sunrise; Nora would have very much liked to go on a blue whale watching tour, and eat tiger lobster (the last are out of season, unfortunately). But overall we're fairly well pleased with the country, and would recommend it.  It comes with its annoyances--mostly people trying to sell you something, take you on a tour, recommend a hotel, etc., and most of whom will brazenly lie to your face to try to convince you--but these don't seem as aggravating after a month in India.

I read Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains of Paradise while here, and the novel takes place between the future and a distant, only slightly re-imagined past on a Sri Lanka set closer to the equator.  I can see why Clarke loved this island so much and chose to make it his home, and reading his re-writing of history, and seeing how he weaved it into his vision of the future, was an interesting experience. I'm going to miss Sri Lanka somewhat, but convincing ourselves to come back will be a little harder than for many other countries we've been.  A re-visit, in other words, is not high on our list.

This trip has been fairly draining, overall. It feels as though we're always anticipating with dread our next move, because trains and buses and dealing with all the touts is a hassle--though not nearly as much as in India.  It's been a little more frustrating for Nora, who has had to (twice) step down from a moving bus and (once) jump off a moving train--no mean feats for someone with a movement disorder. There's also the stares, which again are not so bad as in India, but still make one uncomfortable. Sometimes it's hard not to feel very dispirited, but then other times we find somewhere we love and can relax and everything seems fine again. We're taking it a day at a time.

Early Impressions of Sri Lanka

It is nice here in the "undiscovered kingdom."

Lodging is comparably priced to India, but food is about twice as expensive.  Taxis and tuk-tuks (auto rickshaws) are slightly more expensive as well.  The food is very good, but they're keen on over-sized portions, which usually ends in us ordering two menu items for $5 each and then lamenting that we could have just split one.  Yet we never learn.

(Colombo seaside)

Colombo is a nice city.  It probably wouldn't be very fun to stay as a tourist for more than a couple nights, but it is a very livable city--the air is fresh and the sea breeze very nice, it has a beautiful, long coastline, a very nice sea walk, good roads, clean streets, lots of restaurants, etc.

(Colombo sea walk and pier, with the Sri Lankan flag flying above)

Another big factor in its favor is that the people are extremely nice.  We were helped by any number of people who went out of their way to assist us, without any thought of recompense.  (One woman in particular, an employee at a travel agency that we had not booked with and were not interested in booking with, spent 20 minutes making phone calls for us so we could find where we needed to go to validate a train ticket. She then made another employee accompany us to the place so we didn't get lost.  And not once did she try to sell a flight or bus pass or tour.  She just smiled and said she hoped we had a wonderful journey.)

(Lani's Place, a seaside restaurant in Dehiwala, Colombo)

In our experience, this kind of thing does not happen elsewhere in the world (and certainly not in India, where any request for assistance is either ignored or followed by an immediate appeal to a quorum of passersby until a small crowd has collected to discuss; the crowd will usually decide that it is unimportant, but occasionally they will provide conflicting instructions).

As it turns out, that kind of thing doesn't seem to happen elsewhere in Sri Lanka, either, for that matter.

Kandy is a lovely, hilly town overlooking a lake. It has a great climate, and even better views.  It also has one of the most sacred sights in all of Buddhism, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth.  But it is clearly a town that has grown accustomed to moneyed tourists. Every person we've run into who has wanted to talk to us has tried to convince us to go to a different hotel, or a different restaurant, or to a cultural show, or to buy something. 

For example, we met on the sidewalk a toothless old man who recommended we go see a cultural show (fire dancers, baby elephants, the President of Sri Lanka would be in attendance!).  It was $5 a piece, and we walked away thinking about it.  He caught up to us, told us if we bought tickets early we could get very good seats, and weren't we lucky the president would be there today of all days?  We followed him to a school (was it a school for teaching dancing?  a school for children?  a workhouse for children?  it might have been all of the above).  The man claimed to be a firedancing instructor, showed us an album of photos featuring a man who looked nothing like himself.  He saw Nora had allergies and found some green menthol stuff the consistency of glue (think of a really potent, soupy Vicks rub) and massaged it into her temples. For good measure, he put some on his fingertips and stuck it into her ears.  This, he claimed, would cure her allergies.  After all, his hand was very lucky, he assured us.  Then he began a 30 minute sell of the dyed wall hangings covering his office (made by schoolchildren, half the price of the tourist places, all the money goes back into the school, he can give us a very good price, how are Nora's allergies and would she like him to rub some more green stuff?).  He was very disappointed when we told him we just wanted the tickets to the cultural show and did not buy any $30 wall hangings.  Needless to say, the president was not in attendance at the show (nor were there any baby elephants).  

Many of the people who we pass by on the streets have the familiar staring/pointing/laughing complex we remember all too well from India. It's not as ubiquitous, and it's not as aggressive, but it's still uncomfortable and completely unnecessary. From what we have observed, older white people don't get this treatment here, either (they do attract the touts in droves, though).

Our hotel in Kandy is great, however.  It's outside of town, across the lake, on the hillside, and has a balcony that looks over the town.  The room is large, the hot water in the shower actually hot (too hot, as it turns out, but that's a small problem compared to the icy showers of India).  It gets noisy early, and we have to be up by 7:30 to get our included breakfast, but it is a large breakfast (plate of fruit each, choice of style of eggs, toast, a pot of Ceylon tea to share), and it is pleasantly cool on the terrace.  Walking down into town and around the lake is nice, but walking back up the hill is not very enjoyable.  Then there is the unfortunate problem that Nora is allergic to something in the room (we suspect dust; there is a horizontal concrete support beam that, when I stood on the bed to get a look, displayed several years worth of accumulated dust).

We have discovered there are two pubs in town (100,000 people live here) and both close at 11.  There is also one shop to buy beer/wine/liquor to take home.  Apparently a few restaurants also serve beer, but that's about it for nightlife.  We're not big drinkers, but after a long, hot day of walking up hills, a nice, cold lager can really hit the spot--it's just a rather difficult to actually find one.  It is the little things that count, as they say, and the difficulty to find a drink has joined the touts and the stairs and the midday sun in a cloudless sky to knock Kandy down from our list of must-visit places.  

We'll be here a few more days, then we're heading higher into the hills to a smaller town where, hopefully, there will be fewer people preying on tourists, less traffic, less noise, and a little more peace.  If we want to be really hopeful, there might even be a terrace with a frosted mug containing an ice-cold lager.  Keep your fingers crossed.

India Break

3 weeks into our trip, and we've decided to quit India for awhile.  We've been to 7 different places (Mumbai, Nasik, Aurangabad, Pune, Panjim, and Anjuna) and 8 different hotels, and until the last two places and hotels we had the same opinion everywhere: this is not a very fun vacation.

Some of the reasons why I detailed below.  Suffice it to say that both of us were having to work very hard to enjoy ourselves, and we weren't very successful.  We had a long talk and both admitted we were trying to make it work, which is kind of the opposite of a vacation, so we decided to pick up and go somewhere else instead.  We thought about flying back to the States and renting a shack on the beach somewhere; we thought about going to Samoa or the Maldives; we even considered going to Israel.  In the end, we settled on the short trip to Sri Lanka.  

Of course, by the time we had made this decision, we found a place where we actually enjoyed ourselves a bit.  There are some downsides to being here in Goa: there are a lot of aged white hippies all around, the power goes out all the time, it is hot and humid constantly.  But it is much more relaxed, less conservative, and the people are more used to seeing white women, so not as many stare at Nora and for not as long.  It's the little things that really add up.  There are even more white people in Anjuna than Panjim, and the dress is even more relaxed (first place people regularly wear shorts), but most of those white people seem to either be 70 year old burned out hippies or young 20-somethings with a chip on their shoulder, out to prove how cool they are.  Still, aside from a very frustrating driver yesterday who refused to take us where we wanted to go, we mostly like it here. It's the most relaxation we've had so far, at any rate.

Beginning to have a good time once you've decided to give up: This is how things usually go in our world, but we're making the best of it. This guest house is well shaded by trees, and there's a pleasant breeze blowing, which also helps keep the mosquitoes away.  There are lots of places to sit outside and watch the sunburned tourists zip by on scooters. We've got a mini-fridge in our room now, and it's filled with beer and white white and cheese and other snacks.  In fact, that sounds like a good idea right now...