Baños to Cali: Into colombia.

Baños is a place for tourists. Ecuadorians and Gringos alike go there to get a hot bath, go bungee jumping, whitewater rafting or to rent a mountain bike and cycle downhill to Puyo. It seems like the big cycling attractions are always downhill (the big hitter being "The Road of Death"). Its a shame as, truth be told, some of my favouirte cycling has been uphill.

I too headed to Puyo. I hadn't yet been to "The Jungle" and I fancied cycling downhill for a bit. (I know, I know, what goes down must come up...) Also, I had been told that the road from Baños to Puyo is a great cycle ride. And it was. Along the way there are many waterfalls and the scenery is never less than dramatic.

Puyo is a medium sized modern hot and sweaty place full of shops selling flashy jeans and people sitting at tables eating hamburgesas and wearing shiny jeans.

I resolved that it was probably too much of a detour to go further down into the rainforest (plus there are insects down there I'm told) and so I rode out to a zoo, of which there are 100s, in order to see some jungle wildlife. I feel a bit weird about zoos, but anyway I went. The place I wound up at had monkeys, turtles, parrots, crocs and some tigrillos (miniture tigers). All very nice. Most of the monkeys just run free around the place. Gringo volunteers were working in the zoo which I imagine must be a fun way of spending a few weeks, and really I think that would be the length of time required to get any enjoyment out of a place like that, or even to suss it out. Putting together a zoo like this would cost very little. Just knock up some cages from bamboo and chicken wire, drive 3 hours east, fill your van with animals, drive back, put up a sign, and charge people like me $2 for a 20 minute walk round. If you call yourself an "Animal Refuge" instead of a zoo, it makes people like me feel better. But in order to remain in existance they need customers and so they need animals, so the "refuge" aspect is only really wordplay. I suspect.

Anyway, I got back on the hot and humid road and cycled to Tena through countryside of strange trees and cobbled together shacks. In Tena, I stayed with a guy called Jorge and his father, called Jorge, and tried not to get confussed. We ate fantastic breakfasts, had fried fish and yuka dinners and went to a kareoke. Then it was time to head on.

From here the weather took a turn for the worse, and as I climbed back up into the mountains, it was cold. A stop in a small mountian town proved a lucky find as the hostal had a small scalding hot swimming pool in a basement.

I pressed onwards through Ecuador's hilly north, crossed the Equator and crossed into Colombia. The change is noticable straight away. You are no longer in an "Andean Country" but in a "Caribbean Country". People are more relaxed and friendly, you get given gifts of fruit on a regular basis and salsa-pop thumps louder than ever from every house.

Modes of Transport (Part II)

Following on from this. Here are some more methods of getting about.

Very Long Distance Walking
As I was packing up my tent one morning, about 100km away from Cusco, in the middle of nowhere, a rather odd man appeared. He was dressed in shorts and a bright red Peruvian Fire Brigade jumper. He had attached to his tiny backpack a huge Union Jack. I asked him where he had walked from. Mexico, he replied. How long did it take you? I wondered. Three and a half years. He had bits of car tyre glued to the bottom of his boots. He didn't carry a sleeping bag.

I think it is fair to say that walking is just about the slowest form of land transport. I can see a few advantages though. You are not stuck to roads, you can go just about anywhere, over mountain passes and through fields and forests. There is little to go wrong; the only thing to break is you. On the downside you can't take as much stuff and crucially you can't free-wheel down hills.

Other googlable or wikipediable (very) long distance walkers are:
Karl Bushby
Rosie Swale-Pope
Nicholas Crane
Hamish Brown
Colin Skinner
Chris Townsend
Ffyona Campbell

Hitch-hiking

Hitching like many of the best things is not easily pinned down. It can be fun, frustrating, challenging, dangerous or very boring. It can be a great way to learn a language, meet interesting people or even a dive-in-at-the-deep-end way to learn to drive. It is generally either free or low-cost, so in my mind that makes it better than buses. Jack Kerouac wrote a classic about it in On The Road. Douglas Adams broadened the scope a bit more in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Tony Hawks hitched round Ireland with a fridge. In the Mighty Boosh there is a weird green cockney with a giant polo mint where his eye should be.

Ah, whatever. Check out Road Junky for advice and for inspiration check out Tom.

Stowaways, Boathitching and Trainhopping

"Keep everything dark, dark clothes, dark pack, dark sleeping bag or blanket. This will make it harder to get caught by the railroad cops as you blunder around the train yards."

That is the sort of terrific advice you get from Wes Modes on his website that makes for thrilling reading. He also encourages Urban Adventures, such as sneaking around factories for a laugh and climbing buildings. Check out his great website The Spoon.

Stowing away obviously has a great history as a method of crossing oceans. And on a practical level you can see why. Once the boat has left port the captain is stuck with you. I can't see it all panning out like in Treasure Island thesedays. Starving to death on a long voyage, freezing to death in the wheel-well of a plane, or being hearded into the back of a lorry don't sound like much fun. But many desperate immigrants still resort to these measures.

Boat-hitching might be a better option. How to go about it is detailed quite well by wikitravel on this page. There are a ton of websites where you can look for people who require crew on thier yacht, such as crewseekers.net, or you could just turn up at a port and get to know people.

Vilcabamba to Baños:

For a few days in Vilcabamba a lovely retired couple put me up on their farm. In exchange I picked coffee for a few hours in the mornings, and did a bit of painting in a flat they are renting out. Then I loaded up the trusty steed and headed for the Panamerican. It rained most of the way to Loja and from there most of the way to Cuenca.


Weird that it is so cold so close to the equator. But then I was still cycling along above 2000m. Camping in an unfinished house that a shop owner said I could use kept me out of a biting cold wind. The next night I found a Wild West themed restaurant out in the middle of nowhere and the owner let me camp outside. There must have been something about the clay hereabouts as I saw many little brick factories as I climbed up, up, up.

Cuenca is a delightful old colonial city and so it is also quite expensive. I got my fill of architecture and slept in a bit too much comfort. Then I headed on towards Riobamba. Nice campspot in a corn feild with a beautiful sunset. Met a huge gaggle of cyclists heading south. Fully supported. There website is bike-dreams.com. Check out the price 8400 euros for 129 days. Phewy!



Also met Ewan McGreggor. Or at least someone who looked a bit like him...

Got to Riobamba and found my couchsurfing host, Wladimir who had also fixed me up with a climbing partner and guide to have a crack at Chimborazo. Dean and I got a bus to the national park and hiked up to the refuge at 5000m where we spent 2 days eating, playing cards, warming ourselves by the fire, eating, drinking tea, eating and waiting for Ediverto, our guide, to show up. Occassionally we went and lay down pretending to sleep. The weather outside shook the refuge and we saw nothing of the mountian we intended to climb. All this time we saw groups arrive and looking at the conditions, turn back. There was much discussion about an accident earlier in the week in which a climber was injured by a rock fall/avalanche. Very few even left the refuge. Also, a slightly creepy Russian bloke, called Igor, started probing us with questions. It was soon clear that he intended to follow us when we set off. Bit cheeky seeing as we'd paid for a guide and he hadn't.






Ediverto showed up and at 11pm we set off. The sky was clear now but it was very windy. The fresh snow, warmed up by that blanket of cloud, was described by Ediverto as suave (soft or gentle) and later on loco (crazy). I began to get the impression this wasn't going to happen. As we headed up we saw that Igor was following us. Then, as we stopped to have another good look at the snow, he overtook. At the base of "the corridor", the site of the accident, we couldn't see Igor above. Ediverto said he was very worried about him as it was a very dangerous part to be on your own. He decided that the risk of rockfall in this spot was too high especially with the strong wind. And higher up the chance of avalanche was also strong because of the poor snow conditions. He explained all this to us and we had to accept his decision. As we walked down he was very worried about Igor. Soon we saw his head torch following us down.

Back in Riobamba I got a full day's sleep and then set off again. Due to my lousy sense of direction, and Ecuador's lack of sign-posts, I ended up going up a very long hill in not quite the right dirrection. I ran out of water and had to top up from a village tap, bit risky. Then got some dry bread to eat for lunch. In the end I managed to work out roughly were I was and the bonus of all that climbing was I got to freewheel for thirty odd kilometres down to Baños.

Next, I head for the jungle town: Puyo...

Ecological Farming on a Ecuadorian Mountainside

"We are stardust. We are golden. And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."
-Woodstock by Joni Mitchell


My friends Ryan and Jenn travelled through South America a few years ago and visited an ecological farm called Sacred Sueños. Jenn wrote an article about Permaculture farming in a Canadian magazine. Ryan recommended the place to me so, with my bike safely locked up in a garden shed at the base of the mountain, I hiked the two hours up the mountain to the farm.

Yves Zehnder bought the land here 7 years ago. He is a ginger haired Canadian driven here by his frustration with modern society. He put up his tent and set about trasforming the 10 hectares of land. The soil was very low quality, years of slash-and-burn farming had left only bracken fern. He built himself an adobe brick house which now acts as the kitchen and communal area for the volunteers like me who come to live and work here for a few weeks.

In his first few years the local Ecuadorians thought this young gringo who had bought land would make an excellent husband for their daughters. They would bring their loveliest seventeen-year-olds which he would politely decline. Rumours spread that he was gay. One day, after a hard day building the kitchen, Yves decided it would be fun to strip naked, jump in the mud pit, used to make the earth bricks, and splash around and make monkey noises. Perhaps too much time alone on a mountainside was to blame. Unbeknownst to him a local farmer was on his way with another angelic young daughter. They got the shock of their lives and Yves pulled on his jeans. His muddy legs stuck to the inside.

Seven years on and things are in a little more order. Yves and his partner Jenn are live at the farm and a stream of volunteers come up to help out for a few weeks. The farm has been designed along permaculture principles and aims to become self-sufficient and sustainable. All sorts of trees are in the ground such as Hazelnuts, Avocados and Peach, but it will be several years still till they reach maturity. The garden is fairly fruitful especially with salad, beans and grenadilla. I spent 3 weeks digging trenches, building trails and steps, building new raised beds and helping to build a new water tank. Here is a summary of the kind of thing they are doing.

Improving soil
Chicken Tractor (Chickens are kept in a movable coop. Their droppings help to improve soil fertility)
Humanure (The result of the composting toilet. One of the best fertilizers on the farm)
Compost (Layers of dry grass, donkey shit, kitchen scrap, ash, fresh green matter and more donkey shit. Turned infrequently in the hope that nutrients don't escape to the air)
Compost tea (Fish beans and comfrey mixed in water or urine. Water soluble nutrients are more likely to form in a liquid, bit smelly though)
Planting native species
Planting dynamic accumulators such as nitrogen fixers.
Heavy prunning
Protecting with mulch, contour ditches, bunds and tree roots (to stop all that good soil being washed down the mountian).

Building
Cob - A building technique using clay, sand and earth bonded together with straw fibres tradditionaly but recycled plastic strips can be used. The dormitory where I stayed had a "Bodega" built from cob with a wooden structure above.
Adobe bricks - Tradditional building material in South America. Bricks are made from clay, sand, earth and water and dried in the sun. The communal kitchen is built from adobe.
Earthbags - Another technique using earth, this time in polypropelene bags (3 cents each) which are filled and rammed in place. Sucessive layers are tied with string and help in place with barbed wire. The water tanks are built in this way.
Natural timbers and rocks.
Cement, Tin roofs, transparent plastic sheeting and lumber from down the hill

Animals
Donkeys and horse (used for logistics, i.e. for carrying food/gas/people/building materials up the hill and thier shit is collected to go in the compost)
Goats (Yves runs a small goat cheese business so he can afford to pay the weekly $25 for food)
Dogs (companionship and security)
Cats (companionship and pest control)
Chickens (eggs and soil fertility)
Bees (polonation, in the future hopefully honey, wax and propolis)

Human Services
Toilet (Composting toilet for poo. Essentially just a glorified bucket. Sited with great views of the mountian. A scoop of sawdust (which they get for free) goes over the shit. The bucket is emptied into a pile where it decomposes into a firtile soil called Humanure. Wee on trees, or collected for compost tea).
Shower (A lovely outside heated shower with a coil of black pipe that heats up in the sun)
Laundry (bucket and washboard. There is also another spiral of black pipe to heat up the washing water.)
Cooking (gas bottles from down the hill)
Food (some fruit and veg from the garden plus $25 a week each for food from the market in Vilcabamaba)
Light (candles and headlamps)
Computer (solar charged)
Batteries (charged down the hill)
Cell phone (solar charged)

Stimulus
Music (mp3 players and a solar powered amp and speakers)
Musical instruments
Books (well stocked library)
Animals
Radio
Games box
Firepit
Conversation and stories

Recycling
Food scraps and peels is used for compost or animal feed.
Paper is burned.
Plastic is reused where possible. Milk and oil containers are turned into planters. Other plastic bags are either reused or cut into strips to be used in cob building.
Only the most scanky of stuff, and non-rechargable batteries, go down the hill.

Water
Water tanks
Dammed creeks
Drainage ditches and contour bunds
Ponds
Gutters to collect rain off roofs which is then diverted to plants.
Mulch
Micro catchment (when a new tree is planted, ditches are dug to provide proper drainage)
Greywater system (waste water from washing up, showering, laundry etc is used for irrigation)
Dry toilet (so no water lost in flushing)


Sucessful Plants
Naranjilla (for juice)
Granadilla
Tomate de arbol (for juice)
Scarlet runner beans (causes lots of farting)
Lettuce and salads
Herbs (oragano, thyme, basil, rosemary, lemon verbatim, mint)
Aloe
Raspberries
Blackberries
White carrots
Tomatoes in greenhouse and outdoors
Uvillas
Capeberry
Kale
Zuccini
Tarro root
Laconi
Zambo (a type of squash)

Gardening Methods
Grow from seed
Biodiversity to combat pests and disease
Hand watering
Free labour from volunteers
Pollycropping
Plant with moon

Future Ambitions
Self-sufficiency
A small permanent community
Reforestation
Edible forest garden (trees are all too small still)
Juice bar (for sale to passing horse riders and hikers)
Herbal medicine for use and sale
Preserves for use and sale
Honey and bees wax
Social Projects (Yves set aside the most firtile part of the the land he owns for a future project. He invisages that a women's refuge, a rehab clinic or something like that might be built and run by future residents.)
Internships (They hope to get people willing to stay for several months (rather than a few weeks) so they can take on more responsibility)
Free festivals (primarily just to get more shit for humanure)
Free permaculture design courses for Ecuadorians subsidised by pricey courses for westerners.

Challenges and Setbacks
Doing everything manually (screws up your back and takes longer but is free (especially with help of volunteers))
Poor soil
Unpredictable climate
Runoff
Mosquitos
Cultural separation (Jenn is having a hard time learning Spanish even after living here for 2 years as the volunteers mostly speak English)
Isolation
Social dynamics (During my stay there were a few moments of friction between Jenn and other volunteers. I think she would freely admit that at times she is not the easiest person to get along with. At one stage, when I was amidst a frustrating plumming dilema (I put the faucet on backwards) this included me, but when she made us both a vodka and freshly squeezed orange juice our differences where set aside.)
Transitory nature of community (It is hard for Jenn and Yves to invest much effort into getting to know people who will be gone in a few weeks.)
Exposure to wind, rain, sun.
Limited personal funds (Jen has a dwindling savings account and Yves is, more or less, broke).
Distance from medical assistance
Mistakes
No refrigeration
Animals (unpredictable)

Best things about living here
Healthy diet
Plenty of exersize
Beautiful setting
Meeting lots of interesting people
Closer connection to food/land/environment
Not wasteful
Learning/experimenting
Sunsets
Donations from people inspired by the project. Land, books, seeds, tools, clothes, animals.
Tranquility
No city bullshit, usually
Waterfall
No boss or 9 to 5. (7 to 7 instead!)
Stars
Animals