Ecuador Tales I: "Gringas In The Mist"
Saturday, January 8th
Quito, Ecuador
Altitude: 9,000 feet
"Where everything is possible and nothing is easy."
Since landing in the second highest capital in the world, Quito (9,000 feet), we've been falling more in love with Ecuador every day. The people have been amazingly warm and proud of their country. The capital is really tranquilo and easy to get around whether by foot, taxi or bus. Food and lodging are really inexpensive...our private room and bathroom only costs $10 and we can eat a meal for under $5 each.
Ecuador has been a perfect choice for our trip this year....while it's a small country for South America (it's around the size of New Zealand) it has an incredible variety of climates within only several hours away...the coastal plains, tropical forest, cloud forest, a portion of the Amazon basin, the Galapagos Islands, and the crowning glory of the Andes which stretches right down through the middle of the country. Named a biological hotspot, this little country contains some of the largest diversity of plant, animal, and insect life in the world. They have 1600 different species of birds (more than all the birds found in North American and Europe combined!).
In addition to their physical diversity, Ecuador is home to over a dozen different ethnic groups who speak at least twenty different languages. Around a quarter of all Ecuadoreans are Quichua and speak Quichua as their first language.
Gringas In The Mist
Although we would like to spend the majority of our trip here exploring the mountains we thought it might be fun to go for a sojourn into the cloud rainforest for a few days to acclimate and chill before we start hiking, trekking, and climbing our butts off at altitude. We signed up for a super cool trip to stay in a small, humble cabana several hours from here called "Cocoa Lodge." The small cabana is nestled along a river and a two hectar tropical fruit farm and is run by Ecuadorean Gabriel and his wife Maira. Together they have six young kids who run around the farm like wild monkeys and are so adorably cute that Mom teased Maira about stealing the littlest one away in her pocket. Although Gabriel and Maira don't have alot of money, their kids seem to have such an incredible quality of life there eating fresh foods grown organically, running around barefoot through the selva, playing with their dog and cat, and giggling as they swing across the river.
It took a day or so to get acclimated to the extreme mugginess, heat, and heavy rains that come through in the afternoon but life is super tranquilo there and the experience was unforgettable. We laid in hammocks and listened to the rain crashing down on the palm thatched roof, drank fresh melon and pineapple juice, swam in the river with Gabriel's adorable kids, learned how chocolate is made from cacao beans grown on the finca (farm), carved and sanded our own rings made from a palm nut, and walked for hours through a tropical fruit farm sampling over a dozen different fruits cut straight off the tree by Gabriel and his ever-trusted machete...starfruit, the floral essence of pera australiano, Ecuadorean pineapple, fresh coconut water drunk right out of a green coconut, the sweetest orange I've ever tasted, limes, mandarin limes, starfruit, the outer sweet flesh of a cacao bean (before the bean is fermented in the chocolate process), coffee beans (too bitter to eat), giant toronjas (grapefruit), slivers of green mangoes which taste like a cross between a Granny Apple and a barely right mango, Arasha which reminded us of a lemon with a chalky aftertaste, and coca leaves which I chewed on for energy when the heat started to wilt me (they're supposedly really good for acclimating at altitude as well).
The Food, Oh The Food!
For several days we feasted on the best food I've yet had in Ecuador (much of the typical comida here includes intestines and multiple parts of chickens, pigs, and cows which is then deep fried and mixed with rice, potatoes, or yucca). Gabriel's wife (who is as tiny as a doll and looks to be about 13 years old but is almost 30) created these fantastic meals which were largely vegetarian and often starred fruits grown on their finca...fresh squeezed juices (melon, pineapple, tomate de arbol, limon), broccoli empanados (broccoli which has been rolled in egg and breadcrumbs then fried up until its so tender and crispy on the edges that it melts in your mouth and nearly caused a fight between Mom and I for the last pieces), fresh bits of banana, pineapple, and melon, fresh coffee grown on the farm without any chemicals, empanadas de verde (an Ecuadorean specialty in which a green plantain is fried, mashed up and rolled into an empanada dough, filled with cheese, and then fried), homemade salsa, pasta with steamed cauliflower, and pan de yucca (homemade bread made from mashed yucca, stuffed with cheese, then deep-fried).
The Art of Chocolate Making: From Bean To Table
One of our favorite moments was Gabriel's chocolate demonstration in which he taught us about the cultivation, fermentation, and process of cooking with chocolate. We took locally grown cacao beans, heated them over a burner for fifteen minutes, then separated the thin shells from the beans, and laboriously ground them in a chunky grinder until a thick, shiny cacao paste came through. It was bitter and dark and so fresh tasting. We mixed it on a stove with milk and panela (cane sugar) until it bubbled and thickened then we enjoyed bits of banana dunked into our very own homemade chocolate fondue. Mom moaned as she ate every bite and spent the following afternoon threatening to break into their kitchen to see if any other chocolate had been left behind.
Although Chocolate comes from MesoAmerica originally and was used by the Aztecs...Gabriel proudly claimed that the best chocolate in the world is made in Switzerland but that the best cacao beans in the world are grown in Ecuador! I have to agree that his chocolate fondue was incredibly rich and even more magical to taste when we'd been a part of its process from bean to table.
Though the tropics are not a place that are good to my body...I seem to suffer a lot from the heat, the cloying humidity, and the insect life (I have over 150 bug bites on both of my legs up to my thighs...and yes, I actually counted them!) is especially hard on me...the mosquitoes and little black flies think I'm some sort of postre...I enjoyed meeting Gabriel and his family and being reminded of how bountiful the rainforest can be and how magical it is to have such a close connection to where your food comes from. Gabriel has such pride living in the rainforest and having the opportunity to teach extranjeros about the different plants´culinary and medical uses. We couldn´t help but be caught up in his enthusiasm even if we were sweating like crazy and scratching our legs til they bled.
We're back in the cool, high altitude city of Quito again where we're getting the chance to make some red blood cells and prepare for our trekking at even higher altitudes. We're planning on trekking through a couple of Quichua villages in the Andes and then head to Cotopaxi National Park where we're going to take a high altitude mountain climbing course and try to summit three volcanoes (from 17,000-19,000 feet with snow and ice).
In the meantime, take care of yourselves and enjoy all the work that went into the chocolate you might be enjoying this week...and be thankful you're not living in a biodiversity hotspot that requires a litre of bugspray everyday....
con mucho amor,
Raquelita y Su Mama Chihuahua
Friday, January 08, 2010
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