This week I finished the last of the books I had brought with me from home and was thrown into a bit of a spin. Our South America on a Budget is frankly a depressing bedtime read, filled as it is with places to avoid if you don't want to get mugged (basically, everywhere) or food poisoning (ditto). In the office there is a small library of books abandoned by former volunteers. Here I realised that despite the repeated application of germolene my fly-bites (still unhealed!) had developed into a dangerous brain parasite, as I finished the latest Dan Brown novel without wishing to kill myself, the author and the entire universe more than a handful of times. Dark days. So it was with something approaching orgasmic joy that I discovered that there is an English bookshop in the Mariscal that does swaps and furthermore, a curry house two doors down from it. Armed with all the books that I thought we could usefully recycle into society we headed to the largest repository of Dick Francis novels and Harry Potter hardbacks that I have ever seen. Naturally it was also the graveyard for every Dan Brown novel on the continent but after some hunting, we emerged with some fat paperback novels that should stave off madness for a couple more weeks.** In fact I did quite well as other people asked me for book recommendations and in this way I managed to ensure that the volunteer library now reflects my own personal tastes. And then we ate a chicken tikka masala and a garlic naan bread. Yes, yes- experiencing a different culture blah blah but trust me, it was a relief to encounter rice in its natural habitat (curry sauce) again.
A word on guidebooks. Chris purchased a hefty, sharp-cornered tome,which I shall not mention by name here, which appears to have become totally out of date within a year of publication. Thus far it has directed us to a bus terminal that hasn't existed for five years and to restaurants which never seem to have existed at all. It just about manages to accurately place the cities in Ecuador in a loose approximation of their relative geographical positions but then lies about the distances. Although at 1000 pages we are sure never to run out of toilet paper. How anyone is supposed to navigate around this country remains a total mystery to me. The buses make absolutely no sense- you essentially have to make friends with an Ecuadorean to avoid ending up on a non-stop rattletrap to the Colombian border. However, they do have one extraordinary redeeming feature which is their price. You can travel cross country for eight hours for about $8. Transport for London, take note.
Given the mendacious nature of guide books and bus timetables it was something of a miracle this week that we managed to get ourselves to the mountains to go hiking around a little village called Peguche. The scenery was absolutely spectacular, culminating in a 100ft cascade waterfall in unspoilt Andean forest. (Unspoilt except for a bad dog that bit our friend Eva, but that's another story). We lunched on bread, cheese and olives on the mountainside. I saw another hummingbird. A wrinkled old shepherd with a panama hat on gave us directions. I don't think he'd moved from his stool for about a decade. Put him in the guidebooks!
** If anyone feels the need to point out that this whole problem could have been avoided through the purchase of a Kindle, eReader or similar diabolical contraption- don't.
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