Full Circle in the Valley of the Huilcos
Trip Start
Sep 27, 2009
1
19
Trip End
May 31, 2010
Vilcabamba, Loja, Ecuador
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
The first person we saw after heading to the square was Gavin, my good friend, a Kiwi cowboy with a colorful reputation as both a drunken loudmouth and as a defender of justice regarding a local rapist who was too powerful and well-connected to be arrested by the local commissary. It was Gavin's book, "Valley of the Rare Fruits" that ousted the accused son of a bitch, Mauricio Vivanco, and also illustrated with relentless detail the full history of the gringo invasion, starting with a cult leader named Johnny Lovewisdom in the eighties, a "hermit saint" preaching salvation through fruit-based nutrition and frequent San Pedro use, to the present day, making him both famous and infamous through the country overnight.
Around this time it became known to the world that there were many members of the Vilcabamban community whose age exceeded 100 years. Scientists arrived to study their lifestyles, and lo and behold, it was their exceptional poverty that determined all other life-extending factors: a minimal presence of meat in the diet, the inability to afford to drink alcohol more than once a week, the necessity of long workdays to produce one's own food, and the early nights that come after a day spent sweating under the Ecuadorian sun.
As I said, Gavin is a cowboy. He runs tours up the mountain and cooks incredibly well, drinks too much and gets beligerent, and I like him just like that. Along the way, we collected passionfruits hanging over the trail, ran the horses hard, stopped and had lunch of local avocados and cheese on bread with juice boxes. Then we sent the switchbacks up to 3,000 meters and ran the horses hard again through pastures to the refugio. In the afternoon we relaxed and chopped firewood for dinner, and drank rum and passionfruit cocktails, dining on Gav's homemade pesto and some pasta noodles that took far too long to cook.
Hunger is the finest spice, and perhaps Gavin has that in his corner, but the next day after an intense nature hike (better entitled, machete ride) where we saw puma and spectacled bear signs, orchids, crazy bugs and plants, trees with gigantic white leaves and lots more, Gavin made a chickpea curry that blew us away. I would be hard pressed to top it, especially at 3,000 meters, where rice is added to water after it boils, and boiled on high for at least 20 minutes. It didn't even have any cream or yogurt, just tons of curry spice and vegetables, some of which broke down and thickened the "sauce." It was brilliant.
That night we got even more drunk on rum and passionfruit cocktails and watched beautiful sunsets, forest fires marking the end of the dry season, and the ascension of a dazzling blanket of stars that seemed close enough to touch. Mollie had the wine to herself and a know-it-all Russian ballerina to chat with, so she seemed quite well entertained. And then we went to bed and Gav got beligerent and yelled at us for not staying up to admire the sky any longer.
The next day we went back down the same way, walking ahead of the horses on the steep parts. Gavin says a horse that won't take a man up the mountain isn't a horse, and a man that rides a horse down the mountain isn't a man. We got back to town and lost our "high" since the locals were drunk at 2pm, because a girl was turning 15, the latina sweet sixteen, and everyone apart from the gringos was invited.
Things have changed a lot in five years, let alone thirty. Gringos arrive and buy land at outrageous prices because the locals rip them off, then the locals blow their money and no longer have their land, which turns into an animosity for gringo landowners that is entirely the fault of the locals' own ignorance. The only way to truly gel with the community is to stay humble, greet everyone you encounter in the streets, apart from the drunks, work a lot and spend a little; in a nutshell, follow the example of those poor farmers who have since gotten rich, and drunk, and poor again, and as much as one can, stay up the mountain.
