Volcán Cotopaxi

New Blue

Looking back now, I’m trying to think of what in Ecuador reminds me the most of. The honest answer is slightly unusual in that, unless you’ve traveled here, you probably wouldn’t expect it as my answer.

It’s passing landscapes that bring back memories of Wisconsin most frequently. It’s the way an open road unfolds between wide-open fields between the peninsula and Guayaquil. It’s the way cows look drinking from a natural welling of water in the soil. It’s the way miles and miles of uninterrupted fencing—barbwire attached to sawed off wooden poles—moves with you as you pass through the world behind a pane of glass. Sometimes the reminder strikes me because the trees look so similar. Sometimes it’s because of a certain plant or shrub, or even a swing set, clothesline or some other inanimate object that brings to life the right connections in my mind. Sometimes it’s none of these things. But I’m quite certain, the vast majority of the time, it’s because I’m searching for an excuse to think of home. It’s hard not to miss it knowing that the weather is improving by you guys day by day. Late spring and early summer in Wisconsin are really special times of year.

So what the hell is new here? I’ll tell you… as I always find myself doing.

Tom’s going to be back again on the 10th. In case you need a little reminder, he’s been receiving additional teacher’s training at home in England. Carla has been keeping me updatesd on what he was up to all this time, and it always seemed to involve a lot of “deberes,” or homework. I’m sure he’ll be happy to be back in Ecuador and far, far away from the time-consuming demands of furthering his education. No worries, though, Tom! I’ll have some ice cold Clubs waiting for you when you make it back.

I get a message every once in a while from Peter. We mainly stay in contact through Facebook, and it’s always nice to hear from the kid (Hopefully he doesn’t read this. I’ve gone to great lengths to let him know he’s a total jerk for leaving.). I believe at this very moment he’s home in England, enjoying a little downtime with the padres. He’s managed to track down a job for himself in Bordeaux, France, which he’ll be starting up shortly. Although I’m not quite sure what he’s going to be doing. We haven’t managed to get around making fun of each other for long enough to talk about anything substantial.

One reason I get such a kick out of talking to Peter is because the kid is in a hundred places at once. After he’d first left, I got a message from him saying that he’d had a good time in Buenos Aires but was currently home in England. Sometime later I got another one out of the blue saying that he was having a blast skiing in France. A week later I got a message saying he was going to visit his girlfriend in Germany. Sometime after that I got one saying that he was headed back to France to find work. Now he’s in England for a while. Once he’s done there (for the second time), he’s going back to France. What’s the most incredible, though, is that the kid had the audacity to write in the last message, “I’m going to be happy to be in one place for a while,” referring to spending some time at home in England. But you’re going to be living and working in France before you know it, Peter! Crazy kid. He’s a traveler through and through. He knows it just as well as I do.

Now… despite all the attention I pay to the happy goings-on here, something absolutely terrible has occurred since the last time I wrote. Elsi quit! Oh God, the humanity! No more Elsi!

Elsi was the empleada, or maid, that worked for Sarah here at CasaLeon. You might not remember me saying much about her, but I’m pretty sure I described at some length her enthusiasm for local politics and, more selfishly, her incredible cooking. I can say with absolute certainty now that there was not a single thing that she cooked that I didn’t enjoy. In the eternal words of Peter, the woman was a legend.

Elsi’s resignation came about rather abruptly. Her children were still off from school and she decided to take a bit of time off before their school year started up again. Elsi has four children, the oldest of whom is eighteen and the youngest of whom is around twelve—this is the only one of her kids that I’ve met in person. Elsi had book a couple of weeks for vacation, but this free time continued to grow as the two-week mark came and past. Sarah was at the beach and Adam and I were headed into the centro for whatever reason when we ran into Elsi just outside the main gate. We were the first ones to find out that she wouldn’t be coming back.

Elsi attributes the reason to her children, specifically mentioning that she wants to be around after her youngest daughter has a minor surgery done. Where I still don’t know about how difficult it is to recover from the type of surgery she’s getting done, Sarah questions whether Elsi was just tired of working. Having children who can make an independent living on their own means that the tables might have finally turned and now they’re supporting her instead of her supporting them.

Sarah is a little bummed with the whole situation, and understandably so. Elsi had been working here for over six years and replacing her means teaching someone else the ins and outs of this place. We’ve already gone through one temporary empleada who was filling in for Elsi for a while. Even though the replacement knew her time here was short because of her own children she’d committed herself to taking care of, she recommended Justina, who is—at least seemingly so—the new permanent worker. I like her. She’s nice and she smiles a lot. Even though training her has put an additional strain on Sarah, I have confidence the new arrangement will work out for the best. One thing is certain… Justina makes good chicken!

Weather

I make this a section only to make it all very apparent that la temporada, or Ecuadorian summer, has officially come and gone. While the sun stills peaks out from time to time, the best of the weather is gone. I’ve finally reached that terrible nexus where, once again, Wisconsin weather is probably more pleasant than it is here. Sarah went into detail a few days ago to tell me about how cold the water had become and how cloudy the sky was going to be from here on out. I thought about mentioning that the water would never get cold enough along an Ecuadorian coast to prevent a Wisconsinite from swimming, but it didn’t seem prudent at the time. I certainly don’t fear the temperatures, but it’s nice to see the sun (and why would I ever want to lose my tan?).

So, at this juncture, I’d just like to take a moment to publicly declare: NOOOOO! Damn it… it’s over. Chaocito, la temporada. It was good while it lasted. I’ll miss you, sol, and all of the underdressed Latin women you brought to the playa….

Teaching

My English teaching career can be summarized with one word as of late: compromise. In the last post, I talked about “reviewing” with my new class at Nuestro Mundo (as I’m now a fixture of private high school education in Salinas), which was a nice way of saying that my classes hadn’t been properly organized. I had a class but I didn’t have my class.

Well, now I have my classes, but I don’t have my materials. I’ve been teaching the last week or so without the benefit of a textbook. We were given a pair of copies of the first three unit’s workbook exercises to act as a general guide, but even so, these are simply a collection of questions and answers that don’t act as a comprehensive learning guide for students. The resource problems I’m having really haven’t caused too much of a problem for me because I’ve taught beginner speakers before, so I have a fair amount of experience with the target language, how to teach it and, perhaps most inconspicuously, the grammar rules I should be emphasizing. I suppose who I now feel the worst for are the new teachers who still lack a lot of experience, namely Adam and Daniela. Before me, they’d been “reviewing” with students for an additional two weeks, and now they have to continue with new classes but next to nothing for accompanying texts.

I hope I don’t sound too harsh on the administration. I don’t mean to blame someone like Humberto for this. I know it’s not his fault when he’s traveling to Guayaquil at least twice a week to secure our payments and the teaching materials we need. This is a problem that comes from a higher source than him, although I really blame anyone outright. Without having more information to base my decision off of, I believe this all goes back to the person in charge of CELEX and his ultimate decision (or should I say indecision?) to neglect programming here on the peninsula. Humberto’s fought really, really hard to keep things going for students and teachers such as myself, but that doesn’t mean that, short of being cut off, our programs still aren’t being ignored.

My classes changed two weeks ago. Logistically, I can hardly complain with my new schedule. I now teach in the early mornings, classes starting at 7:30 A.M. The schedule just underwent another minor shift yesterday (I pray this will be the last), which gives me an hour break between the two one-and-a-half hour classes—one class full of middle schoolers, the other with high schoolers—depending on the day of the week which of the two groups gets taught first. Therefore, I’m done teaching on any given day by 11:25, leaving the rest of the day open to my usual shenanigans.

Since things have changed, I’ve been given two new groups of students to work with. Even though each class’s average age is rather close in a relative spectrum—however incomparable when it really gets down to the core of it—I can’t decide whether the middle or the high schoolers are more savvy English speakers/learners. Depending on the day, I might say that either group responded more intelligently or would have scored better on a test. Whatever the case, it’s nice to only have to prepare one lesson plan (he he). I was skeptical at first, believing that teaching the same material back to back would be remarkably boring. But it turns out it’s not boring at all. Each class has different questions, different obstacles to learning and different things that happen during class (a lazy, looping hornet flew into the room to terrorize my high schoolers earlier this week) to remind you that life can be a total crapshoot.

In getting used to these new students, I wouldn’t say that the ones I have now are any less crazy than the ones I had before (the ones I struggled with during the “review” week), just that they’re crazy in different ways. My latest and greatest teaching problem has been dealing with random English swear words that seem to pop out from nowhere when my back is turned. The first f-bomb was thrown last week and we had another one this week, this time from the high school-aged kids. I do my best not to get pissed off, explain to them why it’s an offensive word and why it would offend me, but these little talks always end with my students discussing some random topic between themselves in Spanish more often than they end up achieving anything resembling a newfound understanding. I need to continually remind myself that these are high school kids, and they just don’t think the same way I do.

Still, I hope I’m not becoming more of a lax teacher as I near the end of my (at least foreseeable) teaching career. More frequently now than ever, my classes are distracted when regional conversations throughout the classroom repeatedly emerge. Telling my students to shut up (A habit of mine they most definitely find more enjoyable than threatening: Some of them have even taken to telling each other to shut up when they sense the times that I’m going to first.) is like playing the game at Chuck E. Cheese where you pound the purple gophers that peak up with the leather mallet. There comes a point when I just don’t care anymore, that I either can’t or don’t want to find a way to quiet my students down enough to continue teaching all of them. At these points I take a short break, usually reclining in a chair at the front of the classroom, before continuing to teach those few students who continue to pay attention to English despite their surroundings. These are the students who are the easiest to love.

Discipline is certainly not my strong point. I’m of the mindset that if you don’t want to learn, you don’t have to, and it’s not my job to make you. However, maybe this is precisely the mindset that enables me to avoid becoming a stronger disciplinarian. Greater still, I have to wonder if a middle/high school is really the ideal environment for me to be teaching in. I highly doubt it….

Volcán Cotopaxi

While I could probably go on quite a bit about Sarah’s host grandfather’s 80th birthday party in Guayaquil the weekend after last, this blog entry is already too long and it’s going to be significantly more interesting (however much longer) for me to stick to this one topic: the Cotopaxi climb.

I’m not quite sure whose idea was the original inspiration for the Cotopaxi climb, but I know I heard the first real push to do it from my buddy Isaac. Even before Easter, he’d been hyping the idea to me, even though I remained skeptical that I would do it until I put my final payment down. Whatever the case, I’d known about the climb since before I left for home. A flurry of emails started to fly in every which direction around that time, preparations being made and commentary issuing from different corners of Ecuador, but I remained strategically silent in telling others that I would be one of the participating climbers. Not only had I not researched the climb enough on my own, I didn’t want to do anything to encourage my mom to conduct any research of her own, thereby feeding any of the worries she might have been experiencing (Sorry, Mom. I hope you’ll accept it if I say I had your best interests in mind.).

Sometime during my two weeks back home, Peter, a volunteer who took the lion’s share of the initiative in organizing the hike, put down $50 in my name. Knowledgeable or dumb, now I felt compelled to do the thing.

The timing of the hike was planned when it was with good reason. Last week Thursday, May 1, was the equivalent holiday here as our Labor Day. In an almost whimsical show of generosity (after all, the same guy essentially removed a holiday previously in the year for all governmental employees), President Rafael Correa declared that Friday a national holiday as well, extending the weekend and giving all of us English teachers the necessary time to do something like this.

Anyway, I bolted from the coast last week Wednesday after teaching classes in the morning. I hopped a flight Carla and her friend miraculously helped me to book the previous day in spite of the holiday crowds. AeroGal got me into Quito around 4:00 that afternoon, after I went through a bit of the run around in the Guayaquil airport on account of my Swiss Army knife pen drive. I met up with a couple of other volunteers at the climbing company in Quito, finished paying up what I owed and sympathized a while with Morgan, the gregarious (and questionably sane) Swedish climbing aficionado at Moggley. I slept by a volunteer couple’s pad that night and a group of us got on our way toward Moggley’s climbing hostal, Valhalla, near Cotopaxi semi-early Thursday morning.

To give you an idea of the challenge we were pitting ourselves against, Cotopaxi is dormant volcano rising over 19,500 feet into the sky; it’s also the highest peak in Ecuador. The volcano is located about two hours south of Quito and many of the guides, like the ones who work for Moggley, climb it more than once a week. The nice thing about climbing Cotopaxi is that it isn’t a technical climb at all. You don’t need any “classic” climbing experience in the sense of having the proficiency to work pulleys and belays or being able to Sylvester Stalone your way up the sheer face of a cliff. You do, however, need to have the physical capacity to walk, step after arduous step, up slopes as steep as black diamond ski runs. The crummy thing about climbing Cotopaxi is that: one, 19,500 feet is no piece of cake even for experienced climbers; and, two, a body’s adaptation to the altitude and all it has—or lacks—to offer is potentially more essential to completing the climb than one’s physical capabilities at a lower elevation. As such, those among us living on the coast (raise your hand, Mark) certainly had our doubts close in mind. I will mention, however, that the Moggley guides were confident we’d allocated enough time to acclimate by arriving in the mountains by Wednesday afternoon.

As a couple of go-getters, Isaac and Charlie, who’d arrived at Valhalla a night earlier than us went on a test hike of a nearby mountain called Illiniza, the rest of us allowed our lungs the benefit of relaxation as we sat back and watched Casino Royale, all the while drinking mate de coca, a sort of herbal tea drink made from the leaves of the same plant that can be methodically manufactured into cocaine. (Supposedly, it’s good for altitude adjustment.) By that night, our entire group was assembled, minus a rather significant number of our group’s original signers. Due to some untimely sickness, Peter and his girlfriend Ella had been forced to drop out. Another volunteer couldn’t make it for a similar reason. Even among those who’d shown up at Valhalla, two of us weren’t doing so hot: digestive problems here as opposed to respiratory infections elsewhere.

The next day the guides appeared in a bus as Isaac, Josh and I were taking a little hike, being barked at by a different pair of country dogs for every fifty steps we took. After we’d returned, everyone got his or her equipment, the lot of us loaded up the bus and we got on our way to Cotopaxi.

Driving up the base of the mountain was like stepping through the Wardrobe and into a winter wonderland at the wrong time of year. Powering up switchback after switchback, the misting rain became a steadier downpour, which was eventually turned into a free falling snow shower. I’d been to Cotopaxi once before, but the number of people who were out last Friday made it seem like a whole new place altogether. As the hoods of cars and tops of buses were increasingly blotted out, Ecuadorians reveled in the snow, mashing gravel-laden groundcover into snowballs that they appeared fearful of throwing at their siblings. The guides informed us in Spanish to hold tight, that we’d make our way to the mountain refuge, our lodging for the night, as soon as the snow let up. My head felt funny; a number of others among our group were feeling the same way. I was thankful, however, that at least my bowels weren’t overactive, as they were for Kane’s friend who’d come to visit for a week from California. Poor guy.

Eventually, the snow did relent a bit. We emerged off the bus, threw on our water repellent clothes and tossed our gear over our shoulders as an Ecuadorian raced down the mountainside seated on a makeshift sled, a piece of plastic or glazed wood about the size of a paper plate. At the base of the refuge, only about a half an inch of snow had fallen, just enough so that when you stepped, enough of the surface was scraped back by your heels and toes to reveal the black rock beneath. Isaac compared it to walking over a trail of crushed Oreo cookies, which I found apt, delicious and salutary to the Brothers Grimm all at once. Needless to say, I was quite encouraged when the three of us from the coast were among the top four to arrive first at the refuge. If climbing 300 meters was this easy, we’d only have to do ten times that to take us to the summit!

Friday night involved a lot of eating, hydrating and resting. We familiarized ourselves with our surrounding, the guides climbing philosophies and as much hot cocoa as we could get our hands on well into the afternoon. After a few hands of cuarenta, a sizable spaghetti and vegetable dinner and the safety pep talk that I was so damn proud I didn’t need to ask to have translated, we were told to hit the sack. By then the refuge had all but been emptied of the Quito folk milling about before the descents to their cars, and all that was left was us “serious” climbers.

The plan was to begin our adventure at 1:00 that morning. It’s important to get this early of a start so as not to be caught in the snow later in the day. Weather conditions are fairly constant on Cotopaxi, and the snow rolls in—just as it had that day—in the early afternoon. If we were going to make the summit, we’d be hiking all night and would arrive there a few hours after sunrise. This would allow us enough time to make it back before things got sticky. The guides informed us that if we weren’t able to make it all the way up Cotopaxi by 8:30 A.M., we’d be forced to turn back, so as to arrive at the refuge by noon.

I don’t think a single person among us slept more than an hour Friday night. Between the nerves, the 700-meter elevation jump since the night before and Isaac’s incessant farting, sleeping conditions were just not what they’d been at Valhalla. I was feeling claustrophobic as hell in the army style bunks, made worse by having squished into a sleeping bag that was much too small for me somewhere in the pitch-dark refuge loft. I was a happy camper when one of the guides woke us up to get things underway. One of Kane’s friends who’d been feeling under the weather made the last minute decision to try the hike. This brought the total number who would attempt the summit from our group to eleven. Things were looking up!

Changing into our gear was fast but chomping through a breakfast of bread and cheese was even faster. I goofed around and shot a few photos (with the new Olympus FE-340 camera I picked up while home—yeah!) before getting in line to take our mostly ineffective turns at trying to go to the bathroom. I was the last one to step outside the refuge doors, thereby the last to be stunned by the dazzling star field dangling overhead.

The first part of the hike was the easiest. Immediately outside the refuge, the landscape was—on the scale we were about to encounter—relatively flat and walking was easy. The guides stressed that we take things slowly. That, in fact, would be the key to our success. I began to think of myself as the Turtle in that beloved fable of ours.

We soon arrived at the glacier on Cotopaxi. Had three or four inches not been covering the ground, the hike to here wouldn’t have involved any snow at all. The glacier itself, however, was the beginning a thick, crusty sheet of ice that doesn’t disappear seasonally. I wouldn’t have necessarily known that had I not been to Cotopaxi in the past. This was where we put on our crampons, the spiked attachments worn on the bottom of our rented boots, and ran ropes through our harnesses. Each guide had been charged with a team of two climbers. Charlie, a fellow coastal volunteer, and I decided to team up. A quick sip of water and the real hike began.

The next part of the climb turned out to be the hardest of all. The hiking route can be broken into sections, and the section that began next was little more than a super-steep, super-long asskicker of a mountainside. Charlie and I took it slower than most of the other teams of three and, before long, I found myself with my head turned up, watching the headlamps disappearing over the ridge far above me. Seeing them fading away with the white sheet of snow laid at my feet and the vast array of stars piercing through like the gaping acne of infinity’s dimensionless face, impacted footprints carving my vision in triangular segments, I felt more on a Martian landscape than I did on Earth.

Charlie had to drop out before too long. He was feeling weak and wisely chose to cut his adventure short. Chris, another volunteer, and his guide were nearby, so I tied on with them. We continued a long ways up the mountain, but I knew Chris wasn’t going to make it either when my toes began to get cold from stopping too often. The last group behind ours was another guide and a Japanese man about our age who’d come to Ecuador to sightsee. I tied on with them, which would turn out to be the last change that I’d do.

As night gave way into morning, more and more parts of me began to ache. The first part of me that felt it was my calves. They burned like a mother in no time. The next part was my shoulders, a result of the daypack that carried some food, water and a few extra articles of clothing. I always made sure to keep my breathing in check. That was the most important thing to me: to make sure I was getting the oxygen my body required. Only for a little while did I begin to feel dizzy, a sure sign that the altitude is getting to you. But, then again, there are varying degrees of dizziness, and some just have to be endured.

By the time morning broke and the sun had risen, our guide, the Japanese man and I had made it to 5500 meters. Cotopaxi’s summit still loomed in the distance; it would’ve been laughing if it had the vocal elements to do so. I’m not sure what time it was then, but our guide regrettably informed us that we’d have to turn back—a Gatorade break first. Even though it was still early, the summit was still a three-hour hike away by normal standards and a five-hour hike by the pace we’d set. Two other groups had already past us on their ways back down the mountainside. The early morning light like a new hope chiding me forward, I asked myself to understand it was the prudent decision to get down now. Still, a part of me wanted to see exactly how far my body could’ve withstood….

Getting down was a workout for the quads instead of the calves, so we were all-round exhausted by the time we made it back to the refuge. I climbed back into my sleeping bag and tried to convince myself this pounding headache was simply a product of dehydration. The Motrin would work, I told myself.

Hours later and the only one group remained on the mountain. To make a long story short, Isaac, Josh and, not surprisingly, their guide made the summit. Isn’t that great? Despite Isaac and all of the preparation he’d put in before the Cotopaxi climb (putting many of us to shame really), Josh, I think, deserves even greater applause. He was one of the three of us coastal volunteers and managed the climb without much specialized training at all; he is, however, a pretty well exercised dude. We joked at the tables inside the refuge as they went through their stories at the cumbre. The most remarkable part to me (besides their sheer endurance) was how they came back down. Apparently, by then the snow over the mountainside was partially melted and clung to their crampons whenever they took a step. Each time they had to use their ice picks to hit the sides of their boots and dislodge the snow. What a frickin’ pain! I’m so proud (and kind of jealous) of them.

What an intense experience. I can’t seem to quit saying that word in relation to this past weekend.

How’s It?

I’m pretty much in the exact same emotional state as I mentioned the last time I posted. I’m doing well but I’m split between enjoying the rest of my time here and feeling a yearning to be back home for good. I don’t know whether or not that will change until I’m too close to coming home anyhow.
What I should mention, though, is that my plane ticket home has been finalized. Unless plans change (which I doubt they will unless the unexpected occurs… always a definite possibility), I’m coming home for good on July 1st. My journey starts from Quito this time around and instead of heading through Houston, I have to return home through Miami (another minor stipulation I have to abide by). I’ll be in the air or hanging around an airport for nearly twelve hours, which will put me into Milwaukee at 6:20 P.M—we’ll see is the airlines keep to that. Come by to welcome me back. Sí, sí, sí. ¡Hazlo!