I love coffee. I used to drink coffee to keep me awake during 24-hour halibut fishing openers in Kodiak. I has a skipper on my crab boat that brought a 50lb bag of Espresso beans on the boat and would make the crew freshly ground super strong coffee BEFORE he woke us up every day. I really came to love coffee shortly after I met Michelle. I was at her cabin on Goldhill Road one night and she made me coffee with vanilla ice cream in it. It changed my life.
I prefer my coffee in a large cup with a teaspoon and a half of sugar and Coffeemate (TM). Many people have suggested cream or half and half to me, like I’m missing out on something. I have to say here that Coffeemate (TM), for me, adds a wonderfully delicious flavor to my sweetened coffee that I totally enjoy. No other non-dairy creamer adds the same flavor as Coffeemate (TM), nor does cream, etc. Just to be clear.
Michelle and I have been drinking hazelnut coffee for as long as I can remember. It used to be that the only place in Fairbanks you could get it was at Country Kitchen, but as the coffee movement in the USA grew, it became more widely available. At some point we switched from fresh ground coffee to Folgers hazelnut coffee. With six kids, you do what you can to save money.
Coffee availability in SA was a big concern for us. Mary and Brian had been to Ecuador not too long before we were heading there and told us there was no good coffee in Ecuador. This was pretty horrifying What about the rest of SA? We were going to Colombia so thing should be pretty good, right? Just in case, we stocked up on Folgers in Florida before we shipped the camper over. I think we had like 8 cans of coffee. We also had a giant can of Coffeemate (TM).
In Colombia it turns out that most of the coffee there is for export. When I was picking up the van and trailer from the port I was in a warehouse filled with coffee. And I mean filled. One hundred pound burlap sacks stacked on pallets and then stacked on top of each other something like 40 feet high. It was all unroasted coffee beans. It reminded me of the warehouse they stuck the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was an unbelievable amount of coffee. Inconceivable really.
As we drove south all too quickly through Colombia we came to the city of Caucasia. We saw our first supermarket in SA and screeched to a halt on the side of the road to head in. We stocked up on many groceries, but one of the things we bought was a 5 kilo bag of ground coffee. It was something like $35. It turns out we should have bought more.
Our giant bag of coffee was pretty good stuff. I have to say, Colombian coffee is really good. We didn’t have any coffee worries at all through Ecuador. We didn’t run out until our lengthy stay in Puno. At the supermarket in Puno (Plaza Vea) they sold some coffee that turned out to be tolerable. Altiplano was the brand. It was pretty expensive, at least compared to the prices of other things in Peru, which were generally pretty cheap. It was about $7 a pound. One night we stopped into a smaller market that had coffee for sale in plastic bags. It smelled pretty good so we bought it. It was $5 for two pounds. It was terrible and still sits in the cupboard to this day.
We has a lot of hopes for Chile after spending two months in Peru. Good coffee was one of them. Oh well. So far we have tried four or five different brands of coffee in Chile. They were all OK, but Chile itself is pretty expensive and coffee is no exception. It runs $10 a pound for cheaper stuff (Haiti brand or Colombia brand) but quality coffee is way up there. Juan Valdez brand (REALLY!) from Colombia is $20 a pound. We have not bought it.
We have quite a bit of our Folgers hazelnut coffee left, but it turns out that we are not liking it so much. We ran out of Coffeemate (TM) a long, long time ago and it seems hazelnut Folgers is not the same without it. Especially black. Many of you who have been to our house may already have known this. We did not, since we had been adding stuff to our coffee. I don’t know what this means for us when we get home. Will we continue to drink strictly Folgers hazelnut? I don’t think so. I am looking forward to moving back to fresh ground coffees of many varieties . I am hoping to have a few or several different types of coffee on hand for whatever mood suites me. But first I must talk about an unforeseen development. NESCAFE!
The coffee aisles in supermarkets (or any market that has coffee) are filled with instant coffee. Seriously. There is something like 3 feet of shelf space for ground North American style coffee and then 25 feet of instant stuff. Ryan had brought some Nescafe from the US with us and we (Michelle and I) decided to try it. It turned out to be not so bad. Really. We followed the directions exactly to see what it would be like and it was pretty good! Best of all, it was really easy to make. Just heat up some water and pour it over the instant coffee in a cup. No need to get out the generator and the coffee maker, find the filters, measure out X amount of coffee, make sure we have enough water (always an issue in SA since any water we consume, we buy), etc. Most importantly, since we have all moved to black coffee (except for Ryan, who was already there), it tasted good. And we can make it quickly anytime anywhere, which can be pretty important when you’re traveling like we are.
Now I’m not saying we are switching to instant coffee on a permanent basis. I don’t really know what this means. I am still looking forward to stocking up on coffee as I mentioned earlier in this post. I am curious to see what happens when we get back. I can certainly see the advantages instant coffee can present when you need coffee pretty bad.
One thing I know, I sure do miss good coffee.
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A lot happened in Otavalo. Our dog died, I fainted, I bought a few things, bad surgery was performed, and all in all, it was a pretty dramatic and stressful week. Otavalo has a major market that sells things that tourist typically buy, like jackets and blankets and low quality instruments and marijuana cream. The people all wear shawls and ponchos which adds a very authentic atmosphere. We visited a few shops that were outside of the extremely large and vacant seeming market, one of the paces we went was a wool works shop. Everything there was semi expensive and we left without buying anything. Next we headed to this music shop where they make Andean instruments for selling. I bought this flute like thing called a quena and a pan flute like thing called a rondador. I still can hardly play my quena but my pan flute and randador playing has gotten better. We adopted a stray dog and took both her and our remaining male dog to get fixed. The vet who did the job wasn’t very good at neutering animals or giving stitches. I’m a gentle man and the whole thing caused me to faint a little bit, but the vet had a nice wife and daughter who gave me some chamomile tea and took me to their plastic surgery office so I could lie down on their operating table. Our dog is still recovering and has a massive gash on his swim suit area.
We finally left Otavalo and headed towards the town of Banos. Banos is Spanish for bath or bathroom and the town was named this because it was built on a volcano and had several hot springs. We camped outside of a small restaurant that had a few, kind of big spiders on the ground and in the shrubbery. I was slightly disappointed with the public baths, they were extremely developed and were built into pools, plus they were full of the elderly. Banos had a lot of this drink made out of some kind of cane plant. I really wanted some but it probably had alcohol in it so I never got to taste it. One time, during our stay in Banos, I bought lunch inside a giant food building where people would set up small restaurants. I got rice with and egg on top plus a little bit of pork meat.
South America, or at least Ecuador and Colombia, have a really nice attitude towards hitchhikers. People hitchhike everywhere. You don’t even have to put your thumb out you just have to stand on the side of the road and you get picked up. Everyone hitchhikes. Someday, I’m going to come back and hitchhike all over South America.
Right now we’re outside of Cuenca at a gas station. I’m leaving now. Bye.
We crossed the equator – which is very exciting. It is summer here now. When we got there, several old British people were planking across the equator and having their photo taken. The water goes down the drain in the other direction. It’s pretty exciting.
What was also exciting was that we came across a Ford dealership! This is exciting as we needed new rear leaf springs for the van. Apparently it is hard work, pulling a 29 ft camper over the Andes.
Mark ran inside Ford and we headed to the Latacunga Mall where we shopped in a glamorous, new and nearly empty mall. The food court had a restaurant called King Cuy Cuy (kwee) – that means guinea pig.
After shopping, we went looking for Mark and the Ford guys said he was around the corner in the shop. Which was here, in the street by the train track.
Ford fixed the leaf springs and then somehow jacked them up to be modified leaf springs while Ryan wandered around Latacunga. Here is a photo of driving the Pan American through Latacunga. It can be pretty stressful, bigger cities.
We drove on and found a weird playground with weird, dangerous (actually deadly) slides and such. Alpacas lived there too.
This slide was built on cement and the ladder up is widely spaced monkey bars. I wouldn’t let anyone but Jack & Jen climb up.
Jack went to the top of this thing which is like 30 ft high and has a hole at the top so you can climb out – and then fall to your death as it is a ball of wire above cement. A little kid kept trying to climb out. I couldn’t watch any longer – I had to leave.
We drove to Baños to soak in the thermal springs by the volcano – on the advice of Mary and Brian. We found a great parking spot, a restaurant parking lot that was only open for lunch. We disconnected the camper and drove to Tena (again on the advice of Mary & Brian). It was a great drive through these handhewn mountain tunnels and such. The jungle was beautiful.
Mark and I liked Tena so much, we talked about retiring here! Ryan got a poster of the President of Ecuador Rafael Correa from the campaign office in Tena – he had wanted one for awhile.
Then it was date night in Baños which was not as fun as it may sound. Seems like everything in Ecuador closes at 7pm.
Ecuador has a lot of ice cream which keeps Sylvia happy.
Ryan got more posters of Rafael Correa when we stopped at the Oldest Church in Ecuador and camped in the massive parking lot. At 7pm, the police set up a road block directly next to our camper so for the next three hours we were extremely safe but the police had their lights on the entire time. And there was a lot of megaphone talking. People here love megaphones.
We were unsure if we wanted to continue across the Andes to Peru or head down to the lowlands and cross into Peru that way. Both had good and bad points. Driving through the Andes is beautiful but slow. Driving through the lowlands is fast but hot. We finally decided on the Andes route.
We arrived in Cuenca and have been here for three days. Mondays & Tuesdays are work days for me and we also had work samples for school due. We found a GREAT place to stay – a gas station and parqueadero just south of Cuenca called Rancho Alegre / Petro Comercial. It has a mini market and it is on a field of cows and they have free wifi (a life saver!) and the people here are really kind. One of the people here is from Peru and he gave us a long list of good places to camp. We are planning to leave tomorrow.
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It’s been a long time since I last posted. A lot has happened. I have been busy. I almost missed the entire country of Ecuador.
I had to check my website to see where I last left off.
I have a couple of gigabytes of photos to sort through; I haven’t uploaded yet. I dislike scenic photos—they hold no artistic value beyond a certain point. Anyone can go to a beautiful place, like Andean Colombia, and take a good photo. There’s no challenge. I don’t want to look through a book of photos of beautiful, over saturated landscapes. I much rather would look through a book of interesting and unique photographs—ones that capture a unique and interesting point of view.
^This, is my paragraph explaining why I don’t plan on uploading many scenic photos. If you want to see them, I’ll be happy to email them to you, or, better yet, come over to my house. But I don’t want a website filled with mediocre photos of excellent, albeit uncaptureable, subjects.
I have ~3GB of photos to sort through, then once I have the good ones, I need to mark them up digitally, adjust color spectrums, or the lack there of, adjust settings… Then to upload them, I have to condense the 5MB files and put a stamp on them. It’s an arduous and time consuming process especially when I have so much other stuff to deal with.
Enough with photos.
I have a new dog. Her name is Lucy—or maybe Salchi. It’s actually both, she’s confused enough already, why not add another thing? I found her in Otavalo, where she started following me in the town square. I’m nice to animals, I give food to stray dogs if I see them when I go out for lunch, those sort of things. But I didn’t do anything to Salchi when she started following me. She followed me, my brother and my dad five or six blocks one night to a restaurant, then found me again when I walked by the square. The next day she followed me all day long, sleeping under our trailer. It was really impressive for a stray dog, let alone any dog. The second day, I went out to the square to ask if she was anyone’s pet—she wasn’t.
It’s a bad idea to take a stray dog from urban Ecuador. That’s where we were for a few days. But she was extremely well behaved, and she followed me for four miles the one day while I walked all over the city. I asked the veterinarian across the street if he neutered dogs and gave vaccinations; that would come to $120 total, he told me. We decided to get Trek fixed as well, and that we were going to keep Salchi.
These two operations have consumed my past week almost entirely. I already wrote an incredibly dry page on it for my Veterinary Science class. In summary, the vet screwed up Trek’s surgery, never sealed off the blood vessels, and didn’t put stitches in. I got him to put some in after the fact, but it was a little late, and the stitches were awful. Trek broke them open three times before we left Otavalo. I took Trek to a Veterinarian in Latacunga, and she put in another set of sutures and gave him half a dozen different medications. But Trek broke those stitches open. Now I’m going to head into town today or tomorrow to try to find surgical glue. Because it’s so much fun to try to communicate something that may not even exist down here. I had to ask eleven people in Latacunga for directions to the vet. But doesn’t it seem like surgical glue might be more common down here? The FDA didn’t approve it in the States until; the late 90s, but it had already been in use in the rest of the world since the 1970s.
So, in Otavalo, I lost a dog, then gained a dog, then had a dog injured by an incompetent veterinarian.
Salchi seems to be a really great dog so far. She’s small, she has Doberman Pinscher eyes (though it’s not unattractive) and an almost Siberian Husky body/coat. She’s about thirty-some pounds because she’s really overweight—she subsisted almost entirely off of French fries in Otavalo—but she should be about twenty when she’s down to a normal size. She’s about sixteen inches tall at the shoulder.
We left Otavalo late in the day because of veterinary problems, and made it to the other side of Quito by about 8:00pm. Quito looked beautiful, but we couldn’t stop because the trailer was too unwieldy. We stayed at a gas station covered with beetle carapaces—piles of them, all about the size of a penny.
The next day we got to Latacunga. We saw a Ford Dealership on the way in, so my dad stopped to see if they sold leaf springs for the van. The rest of us went to the huge mall to wait. I got my Claro problems sorted out at an office there, so I now have data on my iPhone. I also realized that my Galaxy S II retails for $1100 down here, and my iPhone 3Gs would probably get $600. Anyone from South America who’s reading this: I paid $150 for my iPhone used, and $200 for my Galaxy S II. I’m not nearly that rich. The mall in Latacunga had a fast food cuy restaurant named “King Cuy” and wallpapered with anthropomorphic guinea pigs.
Someone offered to fix our van for cheap, so we drove it down the road about 500 meters to his shop, and waited. About this time, we decided that Trek needed more medical attention, so I left to look for a veterinarian. An hour and a half later I found one, then called a cab back to get Trek. Once I got the dog to the veterinarian it took about two hours. He needed to be anesthetized again for more stitches, and he had several more injections. I bought him an e-collar, which it turned out was two inches too short.
We left Latacunga late and drove to a gas station where we could park for the night, about an hour’s drive from Banos.
Banos, had giant spiders. I haven’t seen many bugs since I’ve been down here, the Washington DC greenbelt still holds the Western Hemisphere record for incredible amounts of bugs. Nothing has even come close. But Banos did have very large spiders. I saw a two-inch, yellow one in a web near the ground while walking my dog, at which point I decided the walk was now over, and then turned around to see a 4+ inch spider run under a rock. At that point, I had had enough of Banos for quite some time.
We drove down the valley that day, and then took a spontaneous detour to the Amazonian city of Tena—something you can do when gas is a dollar a gallon. It was a great trip, completely exotic. Somehow, we had managed to drive from Cartagena to here without actually seeing the rainforest. It was like being in a completely different country. One website described it as a town where Indiana Jones would stop for supplies before venturing into the jungle. It’s an apt description if Indiana Jones also had a passion for cellphones and playing MMORPGs or updating facebook at one of the numerous internet cafes. Tena even had this awesome rickety suspension footbridge made out of rusting steel beams and heavy steel chains over a jungle river. We didn’t have a lot of time to spend there as we wanted to get back to Banos by dark, and it was a two hour drive away.
Back in Banos, we spent the night in a parking lot and got up the next morning to go to the thermal baths, then we left town. We spent that night in the parking lot of the oldest church in Ecuador that was also the cross roads for the mountain highway and the coastal highway. We decided to go through the mountains the next morning to avoid the coast. It turned out to be a good idea, and we drove for several hours through what looked like a mountainous Shire, until we hit clouds on the other side of the mountain range. We got into Cuenca at about 6:00pm, where I’m at at the moment. It looked like a beautiful city when we drove through, and we’re going to drive in tonight. I need to buy some surgical glue, which I’m expecting isn’t going to be pleasant.
We had plenty of time to explore the town. We drove up to the Parque Cóndor one afternoon and we drove to the village of Peguche where Jack bought a, rondador, quena and chacchas and Ryan bought an ocarina. The days are now filled with haunting Andes music. The drive was straight up, about 2000 ft above Otavalo.
The market is every day but on Saturday it triples in size. During the week, it takes up the entire town square and on Saturday the streets surrounding the square fill up.
In another section of town is the food market. It is filled with flowers, fruits, vegetables and every single part of every animal. Stalls of chicken feet, pig heads, tongues – very colorful.
Louie got hit by a car here and his death was very hard on everyone. Two days later, a little dog showed up when we were in the market and followed Ryan all day. The dog continued to follow Ryan, sleeping in the road outside the parqueadero every night. We didn’t feed her or anything. She was particularly devoted to Ryan, waiting for him to come out of stores and waiting for him to wake up in the morning. She even tried to follow the van. She got shooed away from stores and restaurants and still persevered, we could not shake her. She is quiet and low key and seems happy to have kids who pet her.
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