Bumps and Bruises
I’m about to head out of the city on Thursday for Semana Santa. I’m off to the Galapagos, Guayaquil (the largest city in Ecuador), a small colonial city called Cuenca, and then several nights in a surfer town on the beach called Montanita. I am living the good life. I’ve had some extra time and better internet access lately so I’m going to try my best to keep posting frequently once I return. I won’t have internet access for about 12 days, so hang tight until I come back to share what I am sure will be some incredible stories and photos.
I take a pretty full course load here at USFQ (Universidad San Francisco de Quito), but despite the fact that I have 5 classes (each 90 minutes long twice a week) I managed to arrange my schedule so that I have Fridays off. I figure that my reward for making it through the week here is a three day weekend every weekend. Some Fridays I reserve for Quito exploration or lounging around my house in La Granja, but when the timing is right and the week has been grueling, often friends and I will hop a bus late Thursday night and escape the traffic and smog for several days.
This past weekend we decided to head to Tena, a small jungle town on the edge of the Amazon, famous for its beautiful winding rivers and white water rafting. We took a bus at about 8:30pm from the south of the capital and five hours later found ourselves soaking wet, ringing the bell outside of a hostel at nearly 2 in the morning. I was feeling a little sick to my stomach at the time and the bus ride had given me a pretty atrocious headache, so on top of the malaria pills and daily vitamins I was taking, I was jacked up on all sorts of medicine and prepared for a full day on a river. Malaria only exists in certain provinces of this country. I don’t have to take pills everyday when I am at home in Quito because mosquitoes (and pretty much all other bugs) cannot survive at such high altitudes (9300 ft). When I head down to La Costa or El Oriente (the coast or the Amazon), I take the pills as a precaution.
We got up early the next morning, paid our bill at the hostel ($5 for the night – private bathroom included) and hitched a ride in the back of a truck to get to the rafting company. We took a short hike through the mud, helmets and life vests on, paddles in hand and started out along the river. The day was absolutely beautiful, the rapids were intense, and after about 8 hours on the water with our guides, we reached the end where dry clothes and cold domestic beer (what else?) was waiting for us. I reapplied sunscreen six or seven times during the day and sprayed myself with nearly an entire bottle of bugspray. I felt pretty well prepared and other than the scrapes and bruises I got from falling out of the raft, I was sure I would return home in one piece.
That night we took the bus back to Quito and at about 1am pulled into the bus terminal in the city. After a very satisfying night sleep, I awoke on Sunday to sore arms from paddling, a sunburn on my legs that was radiating heat, and about 150 of the itchiest, most atrocious looking bug bites I have ever seen. I hadn’t felt anything bite me on the river and I was pretty much a fortress of deet the entire day. My friends had received a couple a bites but my legs were swollen and it was pretty clear that I had had a bad allergic reaction. I was so freaked out about the bites that I actually took off my pants to show my host mom. “¿Tengo que irme a un médico? (Do I have to go a doctor?)” I asked her nervously. She told me, “Tranquila.”
Here in Ecuador, as I have said before, nothing is ever as bad as it seems. Everything is tranquila and completely fixable, no matter the problem. All my host mom did was cut some Aloe Vera off a plant in her garden and instruct me to smear it all over the back of my legs. “Ellos les gusta tu sangre gringa. (The bugs like your gringa blood),” she said laughing.
A couple of weeks ago, while climbing a mountain to the south of the city, I took a pretty nasty spill into a ditch. I woke up the next morning with bad pains in my side and what I thought might be a bruised rib. I asked my host mom if I she could take me to the clinic near our house to get checked out. She told me, “Si no hay sangre en tu pipi, tu estás perfecta. (If there’s no blood in your pee, you’re completely fine.)” When our program took us to the Amazon for several days, some students were nervous because they hadn’t brought malaria medicine. Our Ecuadorian program director simply told us that there was no malaria in the jungle (false), but that if we did get it, we’d take care of it when we got back to Quito. “They’ll just give you some pills to get rid of it,” she told us calmly.
When a friend got a pretty serious case of conjunctivitis a few weeks ago and needed an antibiotic, her host mom told her to throw away the pills and just keep tea bags on her eyes for 48 hours. “I have to go to school tomorrow,” my friend told her host mom. “I’ll make you a mask and you can wear them in class!” she replied.
I’m sitting in my room right now as I write this, covered in strange goop from plants in our garden, sipping a tea made from some sort of root vegetable and I think maple syrup. I was wishing I had some Benadryl or Hydrocortisone cream, but the itching has actually subsided and the swelling has gone down. Maybe I’ve been too paranoid, too dependent on the small pharmacy worth of pills and products I brought with me from the US. Once again, everything turned out alright, just as everyone here assured me it would. It’s hard to believe I’ve got only 6 weeks left of this adventure at the middle of the world. On the bright side, I will have some good battle scars to show for my time away. Everyone, por favor, stay happy and healthy.
Off to see the finches,
Ariel