The coffee was good, despite the volcanic ash blowing into it, and the humitas, a kind of Ecuadorian tamale, were excellent. Sitting nearby, on another outdoor plastic chair, was a man with a Glock stuffed into the waistband of his jeans. He was just waiting.

Soon a couple of small policemen in gray fatigues came by.
‘Who owns the car? It has to be moved.’ one said, pointing to the Eddie Bauer Edition Ford Explorer blocking the street outside the cafe. A car like that probably costs about fifty thousand dollars here. There was a small Golf parked behind it.
‘My boss,’ said the man with the Glock, jerking his thumb at the enormously fat man in a business suit inside the restaurant. He got up and went to the Golf, and took out a couple of slim, glossy books.
‘Here. You might be interested in these.’

On the back was a photo of the owner of the Ford Explorer. The book was an anti-corruption tract, as far as I could make out, titled something like Towards a Free Press—Exposing Corruption. The young policeman took it, looked it uncertainly, and then walked away. Leaving a gringa thinking, what the hell?

At the saints’ parade in Riobamba, men in purple robes and Ku Klux Klan masks shouldered glass cases holding statues of the Virgin through the streets. The cases kept snagging on bunting, and the bearers had to squat to release them. Like the Inca, they provoked a desire to tell them about the Wheel.

Each Brotherhood of the Virgin, proclaimed by a different banner, was led by a burly man with a mustache and aviator shades, a nice South American touch. I found these Brotherhoods unsavory. While the men marched in KKK masks to show their devotion to Mary, their wives straggled behind or did not march at all.

Small Roman centurions toddled behind one Jesus. He could have taken them for sure were it not for his cross. Other centurions wore yellow hard hats.

There were several marching bands, none as good as Guaranda’s, and platoons of schoolkids in lovely uniforms. Variously they wore sailor suits, red checked skirts and matching bowling shoes, and jaunty striped tunics. Clearly, uniforms are bought every two years here, as they were when I was growing up. The girls were either swamped in skirts nearly to their ankles, or tugging at hems that were indecently short.

Several very bloody statues of Jesus passed in glass coffins. The night I moved to Brooklyn, on Good Friday, the old Italians had paraded similarly septic visions outside my gate. Then, as now, it reminded me how austere is Ireland’s brand of Catholicism, compared to the gory, baroque excesses of the Latins.

Guaranda is the provincial capital of Bolívar province. It has no tourist attractions, but I am oddly taken by it. An air raid siren blares three times a day: at six in the morning, six in the evening, and nine at night. I was startled the first time, wondering what George had done now, but it was laconically explained to me that the Indians don’t have clocks, and this was to tell them when to go to bed and get up.

There is a hyperactive marching band that plays at all hours. It may be a measure of how much I’m adapting to Ecuador that I enjoyed a particularly rousing tune under my window at 6.30 this morning. The band wears snazzy white uniforms, and the horns are white, too. As I write this by streetlight they’re playing again. Last week it was an anti-war rally, then there was Palm Sunday. Yesterday was a funeral, and today, who knows?
Oompah. Oompah.

A small platoon of marines takes a training run through the city streets shortly after the morning siren. They wear fatigues and shout army songs.

‘…lo me-JOR
de Ecua-DOR!’

They look very young.

The town is mostly mestizo, and therefore much friendlier than the indigenous villages I’ve hiked through so far, where people are reserved to the point of being dour. (As well they might be; their history justifies suspicion of strangers.) In Guaranda, people want to know how long I’m staying and when I’m coming back. They seem slightly hurt by any answer of less than two weeks, even though there are no other tourists, and this is as likely a vacation spot as, say, Dayton, Ohio.

I am staying at the Café Siete Santos, as the first ever overnight guest. It’s an unusual find. The café is in a colonial house arranged around a courtyard. It’s hung with good artwork, eco-posters, and anti-war stickers. They play Rubén Blades and Beethoven and serve excellent coffee in a Nescafé part of the world. There’s a bookshelf full of mildewed Southern gothic—Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, Faulkner, Truman Capote—and a single issue of Men’s Health from 1996, which I have pored over. They light candles and a woodfire every night to keep out the chill of the sierra, unsuccessfully. It has all the trappings of a gringo haunt, but the gringos don’t come to Guaranda much. Instead, it’s filled with schoolkids who nurse coffees—indolent girls in white kneesocks who bat away the darting boys—and prosperous grown-ups.

The café is run by two nunly sisters and a son, who are the kindest hosts I’ve had on this trip. They opened a lovely sunny room for me, with wooden floors and good paintings, and then unlocked the formal parlor next door so that I would have a place to ‘converse’. They ply me with cookies and spirit away my laundry. The place has an air of an old family home with gracious hosts who cannot any longer afford to host for free, though they would like to.

The local indigenous used to come in much more often, they said. They wanted the café to be a place for the whole community, and for a while it was. There was an indigenous mayor, very dynamic, and a lot of confidence in the town. But he died two years ago and the Indians started to melt back into the countryside. Mestizos are pushing them around again, and the town is disintegrating. The owner was sad.

A few blocks up the street, La Madrina Cevicheria was full at 11.30. My guidebook warns darkly about cholera from raw fish, but if I still paid attention to the Lonely Planet I’d be much skinnier, and I wouldn’t be in Guaranda. The ceviche was very good: a tepid black broth tangy with lime rather than the iced, pallid fish I’ve tasted in New York. It comes with a dish of popcorn and plantain chips to dip. I enjoyed it more before I discovered that concha was not conch but giant black sea snail, but the fresh little prawns made up for the the slimy mollusc. When I finished, La Madrina herself—Do�a Blanca—waddled over, frizzy and gold-toothed. ‘Good, eh? Sweetheart, this is the only place to come for ceviche in Guaranda. None of the others make it good, because I’m the only one who’s from the coast, and I go down to Guayaquil to pick out the fish myself. Then I prepare it myself so I know it’s right. You won’t get better. Unless you go to Charo, then you can eat at La Madrina 2. And there’s La Madrina 3 in Cuenca.’

Do�a Blanca could be transported straight to a Brooklyn pizzeria to boast about her marinara. I was enchanted: she was the furthest removed from the reserved mountain types I’d met so far. Then her son, Carlos Alberto, sat down, though it was the lunchtime rush. Happily assuming I spoke fluent Spanish and was a hiker, he offered to let me join him on a caving trip with some friends at the end of the month. Also, they could take me in a dug-out canoe to the Amazon jungle—he had a friend from the tribe that used to be headshrinkers, and if I was prepared to eat pre-chewed yucca and a saliva cocktail, he would introduce me. And there was an amazing waterfall a few hours from Ba�os… He wasn’t a guide, he said, but he loved hiking and camping, and it was fun to show foreigners around. Ecuadorians generally thought camping was weird, and we were more receptive to exploring.

He didn’t like Guaranda much. Mountain people were so closed off compared to the coastal types he grew up with. They called coastal people monkeys, he told me indignantly. They had no idea how to enjoy themselves, or how to be hospitable.

We made plans to meet in Ba�os on the first of May, and then Do�a Blanca posed like a professional outside La Madrina 1.

Back at Siete Santos, a very pretty girl in a convent uniform edged up to my table. Leah was from Madison, Wisconsin, it turned out, and was one of three international high school exchange students who had been posted to Guaranda. She was seven months into her year abroad and hungry for company. She talked about racism in Ecuador and the US with disconsolate passion, and worried about going back to a country so obsessed with ‘body and stuff.’
‘In my tiny town outside Madison, there were five girls in my class alone who had anorexia. And here having enough to eat is a big deal.
That’s just sick.’

It was hard being the resident gringa.

‘The men—well, the mestizo men—just look you up and down and leer, all the time. It took a while to get used to. And all the rumors are about the gringas. Nobody cares that there’s no truth to it or that we’re a lot more conservative than previous students. If there’s a bad story going around, they just attach it to us.’

‘My family here, they don’t have running water or a phone. And that’s fine for me. They’re happy, and I like them. I don’t need running water any more. But next year I’m going to private school, and I know there will be people who are depressed because they don’t have the latest car, and it’s going to be a big adjustment. On the one hand, I’m really homesick, and on the other, I’m kind of dreading going back there. Though I think I might want to come back here to work some day, in some kind of ecological tourism.’

At the market, where Indian women in flat straw hats sell bananas and lurid ice drinks, a huge St. Bernard pads around like the mayor. He looks perfectly at home here, and so he should, for Guaranda is 3200 meters above sea level. I may strap a flask of brandy under his chin and drag him on my next hapless Andean stroll, if I ever leave Guaranda.

I am drawn to supermarkets, and cruelly deprived of access to them. Growing up, Thursday shopping meant sweets and fresh bread, and I was more driven by blood sugar than most, even then. Five Star, which then became Quinnsworth and is now Tesco, was the highlight of the week, and it didn’t even bother me that Mum insisted on saving the off-brand Yellow Pack Cola for birthdays and the odd Sunday treat.

London, with its Sainsbury’s, Tesco, and M&S, spoiled me. I was shocked at the cramped, dirty, extortionate supermarkets in Manhattan, and found my friends’ enthusiasm for Fairway, Whole Foods, and even Zabars pitiful. (My friend Joe calls Whole Foods ‘Whole Paycheck’, and he’s right.) You could barely get a shopping cart down the higgledy-piggledy aisles. Very soon after moving to New York, I started to eat out all the time, like everyone else.

So the supermarket in Campeche, Mexico, was a treat I kept returning to. Really, it was no better than a provincial French hypermarket, that sold ladies’ knickers, bowling balls, and picnic tables by the checkout. But it was luxurious to me, and I prowled for almost two hours, stroking shiny packaging and greeting long-lost brands. I treated myself to shampoo and a new toothbrush, murmuring ‘Proctor & Gamble. Mmm.’

   ‘Where’s the dental floss?’ I asked a shelf stocker at the end of a gleaming aisle filled with Colgate, Oral-B, and Steradent. With a grisly sawing action I mimed flossing just the way my dentist told me not to. ‘¿Hilo dental?’
   ‘For that you have to go to the pharmacy,’ he said, as if I were an idiot, and crass, too.

I needed this stuff badly. How else would I hang my laundry and sew holes in my pack? Sure enough, in the tiny, unattended pharmacy kiosk outside hung three dusty boxes of unwaxed thread among the Trojans. No Satin Glide Tape here. I considered asking for a spermicide and some head lice lotion to mask the embarrassment of buying dental floss, which is clearly no cooler than having a full set of white teeth instead of snazzy metal caps and gaps.

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.

I got through 49 hours in Quito without being robbed. It couldn’t last. I am now without my Hanoi spectacles, which I need despite my fancy-pants Park Avenue laser eye surgery three years ago. So it’s back to wearing prescription sunglasses at the movies.

At least I’m not alone. The noticeboards at the hostels are full of stories of new Quito robbery techniques, the most straightforward of which involve requests strengthened by knives. More complicated manoevers involve spraying mustard on the victim and then helpfully cleaning up the ‘birdshit’ while liberating wallets. At the laundry, the girl ahead of me arranges to meet her friend after she picks up her police report. Polite notices on the lampposts offer rewards to the ‘Senor Ladrón’ who made off with a Range Rover containing fabric samples valuable only to the owner.

Bastards. I live in fear that they will swipe my notebook.