Ecuador is just the right size for a country. You can get from the beach to the Andes, or from the Andes to the Amazon, in a few hours. This seems very sensible. I dealt with the ridiculous scale of the US by refusing to leave the tri-state area, but this left me with monotonous scenery. Ecuador may be compact in length and breadth, but it has the most ambitious landscape I’ve ever seen. It’s as though every other mountain valley I’ve seen is the smallest Russian doll in a series that keeps unfolding up and up.

I have no desire to conquer the high peaks here—I’m very submissive when it comes to mountains—but to walk and sleep in the Andes for days at a time has been the most humbling and uplifting experience of this trip. In the Himalayas, Dervla Murphy observes, the peaks are for mountaineers only; lowly walkers go through passes. In the Andes, though, hiking paths go right over the peaks, and as you gasp out the carbon dioxide that has collected in your wobbly legs, you look down and feel like a gnat on an elephant. Last week I saw a condor swoop not far overhead. What a world.

On the crowded little bus to Salinas, I was buttonholed by an excitable seventeen-year-old called Byron. He had never heard of the English Romantic poet, and he wasn’t too sure where Ireland was, but he was very proud of Salinas. I shared my fried chicken and he told me about his plans to go back there once he finished studying business administration in Guaranda. Already, he went back on weekends and worked as a guide. His mother worked in the village restaurant, and his father in the yarn co-operative, spinning thread from llama and alpaca.

In the early 1970s, an Italian Salesian priest called Fr. Antonio Polo was posted to the parish of Salinas. The village was ragged even by Ecuadorian standards, but Fr. Polo, it seems, was a gung-ho liberation theologian, interested in the material as well as the spiritual needs of his people. Several of his early projects failed, but then he got a successful cheese-making operation going with the help of a Swiss dairy expert. Salinas cheese, proclaiming ‘Swiss Technology’ on the labels, is now famous throughout Ecuador, and it’s not bad; imitation Port Salut and Havarti. Now campesinos for miles around bring their milk to the Salinas dairy, and the whey by-product is used for raising pigs. They’ve rigged special v-shaped wooden saddles for mules, donkeys, and even llamas, which carry two small churns apiece. As well as cheese, the dairy co-operative makes butter, condensed milk, and passable slabs of chocolate a notch above Hershey’s curdled horrors. They farm trout and make sausages. A reforestation project led to another by-product—boletus mushrooms—which they dry and sell nationally. Everything is marketed under the colorful label: ‘Salinerito: Proud to make quality products’. In yet another co-op, they make weavings and garments from the llama and alpaca wool that Byron’s Dad works on.

There’s a little tourist office now, though not many gringos pass through yet. My very comfortable hotel had mainly Ecuadorian guests, including a delegation of Peace Corps trainers scouting locations for the latest batch of volunteers. (I told them about my Peace Corps trainer friend’s horror stories. Once when she was posted in Mongolia they sent her a shipment of vegetarians for placement in a country that lives on mutton gristle and fermented mare’s milk. They agreed gravely that vegetarians were a problem.)

Fr. Polo is still the parish priest here, and the smaller villages in the parish are trying hard to be part of the success. In Chazo Juan, a one-mule town two thousand meters down the sierra, they make jam from tropical fruit and proclaim their mozzarella and provolone. There is a lot to be proud of in this hard-working, dignified community, where the greeting is ‘Buenos dias’ rather than the ‘¡Regáleme!’ (‘Give me a present!’) I’ve heard in similar-sized villages until now. Best of all, the town seems to be full of Byrons—dynamic young people who don’t want to be in Quito or Queens.

Salinas, oddly, looks exactly like Co. Tipperary. It rains constantly on sodden green hills, and people bundle up in shapeless fleeces and anoraks on their way to the creamery. Sleek little Friesians (Holsteins) ruminate on the slopes. I went there to start another camping trip, but for two days all I did was sample local offerings, stare out at the drizzle, and watch Saddam’s statue topple on CNN. Like Ireland, Salinas is beautiful, but damp and cold enough to snuff out all my drive. Unlike me, the locals are equipped with moral Gore-tex, and I’m glad.

At the bus station, an Indian shuffled past bent forward under the weight on his tump line. Tied carefully to the leather band on his forehead was a backpack, stuffed to bursting and almost as big as himself. The shoulder and hip straps flapped freely behind him. I cinched my own a little more tightly and glanced around.

Tickets to Otavalo cost $2.50 for a two-hour ride, but there was an additional 20-cent fee to use a turnstile leading to the yard from which the buses left. Until I coaxed myself around to the idea of a departure tax, this bugged me. It also explained why the bus was less than a quarter full when we set off, though this was an early morning bus to the biggest weekly market in Ecuador. Locals prefer to wait along the highway, where there are no turnstiles.The driver’s assistant hung out the doorway as we swung out.
   ’ ¡‘taVAlo! ¡‘taVAlo! ¡‘taVAlo! ¡Directo!’ We picked up fifteen more passengers just outside the station. ‘¡Directo! ‘taVAlo.’

In theory, the bus went straight to Otavalo. In practice we spent an hour driving slowly through the city shouting our destination and picking up passengers. Competition on this route is fierce and requiring people to go to a designated stop would be uncompetitive. So we lurched down the highway, swinging towards the traffic island in the middle whenever a likely prospect raised an eyebrow or scratched a nose. No one hailed the bus; we hailed them.

Ecuadorian bus trips make me wish I’d packed a sports bra. Despite the jolts, they are tremendous fun, these colorful little vehicles that belch diesel and are named like pet calves. Service, even to remote areas, is remarkably regular, punctual, and cheap, and even though in every other country I’ve made myself sick reading on the bus, here the scenery is enough entertainment even for me.

There haven’t been any other gringos on my bus trips yet. I sit quietly behind rows and rows of Indian trilbies and pork pie hats and feel like I’m on my way to a remote Blues Brothers convention. Once a fight broke out between the food vendors at the Latacunga station: a donut seller with a large backside blocked the narrow aisle so that the fruit ladies couldn’t pass. They were polite at first, but when he hogged his sales advantage they shrieked and threatened to seize his trays. My bus snack of choice these days is mote con chicharron, a small paper bag filled with white corn, fava beans, tiny potatoes, pork crackling, and salsa.

As I’ve learned since Otavalo, there’s no need to buy a ticket in advance. Drivers shout their destination, you jump on and pay on the way. They are very obliging and will stop almost anywhere to let you on or off. Once we stopped to haul a screaming piglet to the roof by a rope tied around its neck. At first I was terrified he would strangle as he kicked my window with little hooves. When he still squealed in rage above, I was afraid he would eat my rucksack on the long journey.

Ecuadorian buses are the donkeys of the vehicle world. They patiently climb improbable hairpin bends and washed out surfaces high in the clouds. They bear their loads patiently, and though they may shy from crossing a landslide or a stream that has burst its banks, with encouragement they generally make it. The drivers are my heroes: implacable, kind, and not prone to the macho antics of their Mexican and Thai counterparts. That they play cumbia and salsa, not Southeast Asian pop music, is so much the better.

   ‘Are you Spanish?’

Every few days, someone asks me that, and I am flattered beyond reason. Granted, it’s usually fairly early in the conversation, and for all I know Spaniards are famous in the Latin world for their tenuous grip on the grammar of their own language. I have real trouble with the direct and indirect object, and though I live my life in the subjunctive tense, I cannot clearly express myself in it. But still. I glow.

I studied Spanish by accident, and never much cared for it. The Irish university system is unfortunately rigid, and at seventeen you choose your subject for your whole college career—medicine, English literature, engineering. We liberal arts students were given some leeway, mainly because we were cheap to teach and considered a bit dim. In first year, we picked three subjects, then dropped one to continue with a double major. One of the many drawbacks of this system was that it encouraged us to stay with subjects we were already familiar with from secondary school. It was too risky to sign up for four years of philosophy or Greek and Roman civilization. What if it didn’t suit? Transfers were difficult to arrange. Ireland is not famous for forgiving mistakes.

Girls, especially, were encouraged to ‘pick up another language’, so I thought I’d try a year of Spanish along with English and history. Unfortunately, at the end of the year I realized history was not my bag. I was already in the grip of an English department obsessed with the question of post-colonial Irish identity, and couldn’t face chewing the same cud in the history department. I loved the French Revolution and the Renaissance, but the endless drab near-misses of Irish history seemed better told by our poets and novelists.

That left Spanish. Almost everyone else had studied it for six years in secondary school, and I felt like the class dunce. Spanish was rarely taught outside Dublin, so I was further alienated by the fact that my class was largely comprised of posh South County Dublin girls who knew each other from hockey practice. I tolerated them at best—‘Eau, roiysh‘ (‘Oh, right’) was their favorite affirmation—at least until I developed a braying Dublin accent of my own.

The Spanish department staff were hoary Golden Age traditionalists, not trendy Latin American specialists, so I ended up parsing Garcilaso’s 17th century rewrites of Virgil’s Eclogues before I was able to use the past tense. Mine was the first year of an experimental program in which students from the Commerce department took Spanish as part of an international business degree, and these go-getters were horrified at being forced to read Don Quijote and El Cid instead of being drilled in derivatives terminology and international law. I didn’t know enough day-to-day Spanish to cash a traveler’s check.

So I went to Spain for a year at twenty, and half-heartedly taught English to middle-aged engineers who were wasting their money. I learned fluent bar Spanish, hung out with kids from New Jersey, gained twenty pounds, and developed a lifelong distaste for the Spanish bourgeoisie—the pijo kids with helmet hair, neatly-ironed Levis an inch too short, and penny loafers. Spanish family culture is very strong, and it easily excludes timid young outsiders.

I came back wily and cynical, and despite limited choices picked the courses and teachers that would guarantee good grades. Poems and plays were much easier than novels. It was a question of volume for a reader who still moved her lips reading Spanish. I knew what a synecdoche was, and I understood that Spanish literature was relentlessly obsessed with female honor. It all seemed like poor stuff compared to Joyce and Shakespeare—Iberian Spanish literature (as opposed to Latin American) still seems low-grade to me—but it was easy. I graduated, and didn’t speak Spanish for ten years, except when ordering tamales in Sunset Park.

But now, in Ecuador and Mexico, I am glad for the first time that I made the effort, and I enjoy the physical act of producing the sounds of Spanish. I’m a reasonable mimic, and the shrugs and gestures come naturally now too. Perhaps it’s a sympathy with fellow post-colonial nations that I lacked in Spain; maybe it’s just that I’m older. It’s a great joy, after months in Southeast Asia, to be able to chat casually for hours and to learn about a country from some of its people rather than from mute observation and reading. And I’m highly surprised to find myself flattered at being taken for Spanish, in spite of my crumpled jeans.

(A short, slightly whiny entry to indicate that I’m still alive despite silence since Quito; thanks to those who asked. Suitably rapturous entries will follow—despite complaints below I’m taking to roughing it in Ecuador surprisingly well. A tent is not that much smaller than a Manhattan apartment.)

I have a new fear to add to my already long list. I am afraid of falling arse over tip off the Andes while still strapped to my large backpack. Unlike most of my other worries, which are mental chewing gum to keep me from accomplishing anything useful, this one has some basis in reality. On the ‘Moderately Difficult’ Quilotoa trail from my Hiking Ecuador guidebook, my backpack skidded down a near-vertical scree slope and bounced gently to the riverbank a thousand feet below. I was not strapped to it at the time. Nothing broke. Still, it’s clear the thing is incompetent, and shouldn’t be on the mountains.

Hiking Ecuador keeps quoting an Antonio Machado poem: “Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace el camino al andar.” (Traveler, there is no path. You make the path by walking.) This is not uplifting in a trekking handbook, especially a copy whose pages are now soggy with sleet. Twenty minutes after I retrieved the backpack, I was trying to follow a ‘very faint trail’ up another near-vertical slope. Though I couldn’t see a trail at all, I was optimistic that sheep footholds and the odd flattened tussock counted, and reluctant to waste my investment in the dreadful scree slope. So I inched straight up on my hands and knees, clutching at razor grass and wondering why in the name of God I was carrying lipstick and mascara—not to mention a tin of smoked mussels and a Carl Jung collection—on my back in the Andes. I knew that if I lifted any part of my body more than six inches off the ground I would tumble backwards into space. So I didn’t look around until the very top, when I saw the so-called ‘very faint trail’ zig-zagging clearly up the next slope over. The scree and the sheep meadow, which had taken me more than two hours to climb, were not on the program at all.

I cried like a nasty supermarket three-year-old, snotting and swearing and blaming. The women tending sheep down by the real trail giggled as they watched me inch back down on my bum, no longer caring about ripping my sister’s Miss Sixty trousers.

I’ve lived all my life at sea-level. On the third and last day of my trek, gasping on the sandy caldera wall of the Quilotoa lake, I realized that I’d once sky-dived from a point lower than this. I would count ten steps and rest, and each step was a pitiful shuffle that sometimes ended with me sliding lower still in the volcanic ash. When I reached the rim of the crater, a hundred-mile-an-hour wind nearly knocked me straight onto my backside, pack and all. I would have welcomed the rest. I was filthy from three days of camping, and nearly insensible from the fatigue of actually carrying my own stuff for once, let alone to 3800 meters.

Ah, but a sight like this has to be earned. A bus window is the wrong lens.