Pomaire

Since we arrived in Chile, we've been living in Santiago, its big, modern capital city.  In many ways, it's even more modern than many comparably-sized cities in the US, when you take into account the kinds of apartment and office buildings that are going up in Las Condes, or the constantly expanding subway system, for example.

Living in a city like Santiago has been a great experience so far, revealing yet another angle in the multifaceted gem that is Latin America.  I've remarked before, surely, on the simultaneous unity and diversity of Latin America.  With a common language, history, and certain aspects of both traditional and popular culture, you can visit many places around the region and find common threads.  And yet the culture is so varied that you can go from one country to the next and discover the countless details that make each place unique.

Santiago, for its part, represents Latin America perhaps at its most modern, its most globalized.  Here, you haven't lost the charm inherent in any given latin culture, but you also find yourself surrounded by all sorts of conveniences, and big business.  Fascinating, and overwhelming at the same time.  A topic I will certainly explore further in later musings.  It will have to come later, for today's story starts here in the capital, but ends up elsewhere.

After a month or so of staying in Santiago, once work was lined up and a regular schedule began looming ahead, we thought we ought to get out of town for awhile.  As pleasant as it's been to be in a modern city, both of us come from smaller towns and after awhile, a city this size can start to feel oppressive.  Fortunately, once you leave town you go from urban to rural landscapes very quickly, and there are a number of interesting destinations within an hour or two from the city limits by bus.

One such place is Pomaire.  It has a very small town feel, with no buildings seemingly more than two stories, and most homes with a small but fertile garden.  Many of the houses look to be made with adobe, and either have flat roofs, or sloped and topped off with corrugated metal.  Or better yet, with the red ceramic shingles you can find all around Europe and Latin America.

Further contributing to the small town atmosphere is the fact that the people are much more likely to say hello to you as you pass by in the street, and on the day we went, there was hardly a car to be seen on the roads.

There aren't many destinations in central Chile lacking the ubiquitous grapevine, whether it is laid out in countless rows in a commercial vineyard, or spreading along a trellis in someone's backyard.  Nearly all the homes in Pomaire seemed to be graced with vines of this latter ilk, and since we found ourselves there in the late summer of mid-February, the grapes were getting plump and ripe, and looking mighty tasty.

Grapevines of this sort add an elegance to even the simplest home.  Really, if you're going to grow a garden, why not make it an edible one?

Before going any further, I should mention the main draw of Pomaire, which is its pottery.  Here, you can buy simple, functional and beautiful clay pots for use in the garden or kitchen, plus all kinds of utensils.  Oven-proof and purportedly even stove top-proof, we've been baking pizzas and casseroles in the ones we bought for the past several months.  We haven't risked filling one with soup and throwing it on the stove yet, but every vendor we asked boasted that it could be done.

While some of the shops had attractively designed showrooms, the majority were like this one, little more than an open warehouse.  Walking around a store like this, you had to assume that in the next room over the next round of pottery was being molded and fired by members of the same family who was sitting casually in the storeroom with you.

Pomaire is so close to Santiago that it's a popular weekend destination, a place to shop in some rustic stores and get out of the city, much as we had chosen to do.  So much so that its unmistakable style of pottery can be found in Santiago homes, up and down the socioeconomic ladder.

When you consider the sheer size of our new big city home and the popularity of Pomaire's products, you have to imagine that this town has potentially churned out millions of earthenware goods over the years.  There are dozens of vendors around town, and ostensibly just as many potters turning out the clay merchandise before throwing it in the kiln.  Each of them most likely has their own personal touch or specific technique that makes certain products better than others or unique to the eye of the trained beholder.  But from my layman's perspective, what we saw from store to store conformed to a signature style that is less individual overall, and more demonstrative of a sort of "Pomaire brand."

If my casual assumption is to be believed, we could go on to observe that the collective selling power of Pomaire's goods must be a well-recognized economic engine within the community, and the local potters may well have collaborated in designing such a recognizable style and functional quality.  This would help to guarantee that Santiaguinos keep coming back for more, and rather than one family cornering the market, the entire community benefits from the constant influx of visitors.  In other words, grassroots branding.  Who needs a corporate logo when you define your product with your own bare hands?  

Best of all, it's cheap.  We bought an armload of various clay pots and what have you, plus one of the lamps from the shop here, and a liter of local honey.  Each item ranged from only $3-$10 more or less.  But this also meant that as we made our rounds through the town we ended up spending a decent chunk of money before we were done.  We didn't mind; we were in the market for something to bake a pizza in, and a reading lamp.  Everything else was more of an impulse, truth be told.  But we haven't had any buyer's remorse so far.







The other attraction of Pomaire is the rustic food, baked in rustic clay ovens, and served up in equally rustic-looking restaurants.

We got there too early for lunch, which meant that the bread was just going into the hearth, and the stores were just starting to open.  The lady shown here was in the middle of turning her pan amasado around for an even bake just as we walked by, and was nice enough to pose with her modest yet enviable oven for us.  

Unfortunately, the bread still had some more cooking to do before it would be ready, and we never got back around her way to try it.  Pomaire is also famous for its over-sized empanadas, which can be described roughly as a meat pie.  Imagine a potpie, but wrapped up like a calzone, and you've got the basic idea.  

I've developed an unbridled appetite for the empanadas they sell in our neighborhood, which are big enough to fit nicely in your hand.  The empanadas here were about twice that size.  Or at least, that's what we saw as we walked by the restaurants.

We didn't know there were going to be empanadas in Pomaire until we got there, so we had packed our own lunch before we left home, and contented ourselves with a picnic lunch in the park.  We didn't feel like we were missing out; it's an easy and pleasant trip out of the city, and we'll be making it again.  The next time, we'll try the food.  For the time being, we had some nice sandwiches and corn on the cob, and shared our mealtime with a pack of hungry puppies who wouldn't leave us alone.  Hence lunch on a bench instead of in the grass, safely out of their limited reach.

Otherwise, we were in Pomaire for the day, so we had time to wander the streets for awhile. 

We've been told that Pomaire fills up on weekends, especially on holiday weekends when everyone is looking to get out of Santiago.  But the day we went was a sleepy weekday in the summer, so we got to enjoy the town during one of its quieter moments.  There were a few tourists wandering around besides us, especially after lunch when the weather warmed up, but as close as we were to the big city, I can imagine how different it could be on other days.  

Shopping and eating is what tourists do in a place like this, but for us, having been confined in the big city for more than a month straight, it was nice to simply waste some time in a small town.  That kept us entertained for at least an hour or so.


But eventually we made up our minds to call it a day.  We had scoped out the things we wanted to buy in the morning, and then systematically bought them up on the way out of town.  Once thoroughly loaded down with our weighty earthenware purchases, we found one of Chile's peculiar colectivos, a taxi with a fixed route and a fixed price per destination.  It took us to a dusty bus stop, where a bus quickly came along and whisked us along the highway back to Santiago, through some extensive stretches of agricultural land.

If you grew up in Ohio like I did, and if it weren't for the picturesque mountains in the background, you might be fooled into thinking that you weren't in South America at all when you look at a picture like this.  But that cornfield and barn are as Chilean as wine grapes, and a visit to the vegetable market in summer here will present you with plenty of sweet corn that's *almost* as good as what you can get where I come from.


While I'm on the topic, I'll also mention that on the four different roads that I've taken out of Santiago so far, each has a revealed a vastly different landscape.  The one to Baños Morales took us up a mountain pass that got drier and more deserted the further we went.  This one led through the cornfields you see here, and other crops you could find throughout the Midwest.  The road to Valparaíso runs past vineyards spread out amongst gently rolling hills.  Another, which I'll write about eventually, went along rows upon rows of the fruit trees that comprise central Chile's many orchards.  Maybe I saw the trees that will bear the apples you'll be eating next summer?


We've been talking about going back to Pomaire again soon, now that it's Spring.  We're all out of the delicious honey we bought, and there's a few more things we could use for the kitchen.  We won't see the grapes this time of year, but I imagine there will still be some giant empanadas. We'll be sure to stay for lunch.

Baños Morales

During our first months here in Chile, we had the opportunity to do some exploring outside the city of Santiago.  Rather than take long trips into the far-flung northern or southern regions of the country, we opted to stay close to home, venturing no further than two hour bus rides beyond the city limits.  One of the first destinations we chose was a set of hot springs to the southeast of Santiago through a mountain pass known as Cajón de Maipo.  

If my map is a good indicator, we were closer to Argentina than we were to Santiago by the time we reached our destination, heading up and up into terrain that to me began resembling the dry landscape of Nevada's deserts, the further we went.  After more than an hour on a dirt road through a desert valley, I began to wonder if we were headed for a couple of pools in the sand with nothing else around.  We were on a morning bus whose only destination was the hot spring in question, full of other people, and with no return until 5pm that evening.  Would we be trapped under the sun all day in a hot pool filled with the several dozen other people on the bus?  As we bounced along the dusty road, our little day trip was starting to sound a little less pleasant than I had original imagined.  But with no way back until the evening, there was little more to do than enjoy the rugged scenery and wait to see how our destination would turn out.

Eventually, the bus turned off of the main road and up into a smaller valley.  We came around a turn, and the otherwise barren landscape was interrupted by a veritable oasis in the desert.  This was Baños Morales, a tiny resort town sprouted up from the trickle of tourism coaxed from the city by a couple of little hot pools in the desert.

We got off the bus and began to explore this haven of wooden cabins and trees resembling the aspens of Northern New Mexico.  Upon closer investigation, the slender trees had thick, rubbery leaves adapted to retain moisture despite the high desert heat, wind, and lack of humidity.  Most of the cabins, predictably, were given over to tourism, each one advertising food, beer, lodging, tourist transport, or all of the above.  As we explored, however, we noticed a few houses which were nothing more than homes, probably the weekend or vacation homes of Santiaguinos seeking respite from their urban surroundings.  

In addition, there were probably also at least a few full time residents, making a living in some capacity off of tourism or else living independently in homes that began reminding me yet again of New Mexico.  I couldn't help but make a comparison with the little mining village-turned-art community of Madrid tucked away in the hills between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.  Beyond the unorthodox style and decorations of the various cabins, and the arid backdrop that both places have in common, they also share a connection with the mining industry.  Madrid originally sprang up from the desert due coal mining, and from the right vantage point, you can see an active gypsum mine in current operation in Baños Morales, if you care to look.

As we walked around, we soon discovered the source of the local verdure.  In addition to the town's eponymous hot springs, a source of fresh water graces the hillside Baños Morales is perched upon.  It drives the whimsical waterwheel you can see over Nancy's shoulder in the previous photo, and intrigues my daughter, who didn't want to leave once she discovered it.  It also makes the town possible, gracing it with trees, green space, drinking water and gardens.  I found it incredible that from the desert could come such a gush of water, albeit a relatively small one.   Seeing the stark and nearly barren mountains standing over the valley, it seemed impossible for a stream to exist at all. 

Until we walked further down the hill, and looked back up the valley:

In the middle of the summer heat lies this beautiful glacier, atop an active volcano.  In a sort of environmental symbiosis, we find the glacier giving life to valley below it, and the volcano its mineral wealth.  Without either of them the hot springs of Baños Morales wouldn't be possible.  Residents told us that fumaroles have been visible above its peak in recent years, and also that some pristine hot springs lie on the slopes of the volcano, existing in a much more natural state than the man-made pools and surrounding facilities to be found in the village.  

We were destined for a mere day trip this time around, but that kind of information is all it takes to tempt me into the notion of a longer return.  An overnight stop in Baños Morales, followed by an early morning expedition to the volcano, some hot springs, and an up-close encounter with a glacier.  Or better yet, a night spent on the volcano itself, which, according to my limited studies of an area map, would appear to be designated a national park.  How does that sound to you?

After so much talk about hot springs, I should probably show you the real Baños Morales.  Here they are, three multicolored pools in the morning sun.  We glimpsed them from above, shortly after our arrival in the village.  We decided, based on the lack of shade, that we would try back later in the day.  Later in the day, we didn't get around to going back.  You might wonder why we would go all the way to a town famous for its hot springs and never get in the water.  Maybe it was the hot weather, or the less than crystal clear water.  My first hot spring experiences were in New Mexico, which has very nice, translucent pools to be found amongst the most beautiful of wilderness settings.  This type of wild setting, I've come to realize, is not always easy to come by.

Nonetheless, in Ecuador I learned to love the murky, steamy pools of Baños de Ambato, and other springs with pleasantly warm water, if not completely clear.  The pools of Baños Morales may be just as lovely, and someday, I might find out.  Or maybe I'll go instead to those tantalizing waters closer to the Volcán San José.  In the meantime, we had a fine time just wandering around town, meeting the locals, and communing with the goats.

A Chilean goat, with her cabra chica.  These were two of the many goats to be found wandering around the upper reaches of Baños Morales.

Didn't I tell you?  That's a lot of goats.   Goats belong in the mountains.  These aren't really mountain goats, but they must feel a little closer to the essence of their nature with a glacial peak within sight of their foraging.  The dirt road that led us to them continued up the hill, and the name of the road, Calle Volcán San José, would suggest that it leads at least part of the way up to the mountain itself.  But we chose the goat sighting to be the limit of our wanderings for that day, as the hour of departure was starting to get closer.  We didn't want to miss the bus, so we thought we'd hang around a little closer to where it would pick us up, for the rest of our stay.

This also provided the perfect opportunity to relax in the shade on the patio of a nearby restaurant, and sample the cheap beer options of our new country of residence.  Escudo comes by the liter, and is, therefore, for sharing.  Chile has other cheap beer options, and even quite a few microbreweries, which was an exciting discovery for me.  On other occasions, I will doubtlessly explore such topics, for your consideration.  For now, I will go so far as to say that while Crystal is the ubiquitous draught beer to be found at any bar, Escudo is my personal favorite for an unassuming drink at home.  And when you're on a patio of a restaurant far from the city and regular delivery of kegs, Escudo is what you drink to cool off after a long day of exploring a high desert town.

It wasn't long before the bus came down the hill and all the people we rode up with began showing up, filing back on to the same vehicle that had taken us here in the morning.  In fact, as we walked around we noticed our bus parked behind a building not far from the foraging goats.  The driver was inside taking a nap, perhaps, or else enjoying the town like the rest of us.  And after a long day of ostensibly not doing much, he was now back to work, ready to take us on the two hour ride back to Santiago.  Not a bad day's labor, hopefully he gets enough for it to pay the bills.  

As for us, we were happy to have had a chance to get out of the city and into the Cordillera de los Andes for the first time, setting our sights on some of its iconic snowcapped mountains, and breathe some fresh alpine air.  Maybe we'll get back there some day, or maybe we'll be drawn deeper into the country's more extreme reaches.  It's hard to say.  Our time in Chile is just getting started.

First thoughts on Valparaíso

As many of my readers must already know, my family and I are now living in Chile.  We got here around the beginning of the year, even though the stories I've been writing for the last several months have still - until today, at least - taken place in Ecuador.  It's hard to believe, but we've been here for half a year already, forming our first impressions and opinions about our new place to live.  

We had been planning to move to Chile for quite awhile before we actually came, and all the way up until we arrived in Chile, our target for a new home had been Valparaíso.  As such, I spent months researching it on the internet.  Looking for jobs.  Searching for apartments.  Checking out other blogs, looking at photos, and going to Valparaíso's website, which is one of the best I've seen from any city.

The photo above, taken during our first weekend here in Chile, really sums up what I had anticipated for our potential new hometown.  Artistic graffiti, gracing the pastel walls of a building perched on a narrow cobbled street that runs sharply down a hill, affording a glimpse of the inspiring blue waters of the bay below.  Before we came, lots of people told us that we wouldn't like it as a place to live.  It was lovely, but disorganized.  Bohemian, but dangerous.  Despite all of that, we looked at more photos and contacted more employers, and kept our sights on Valparaíso.

Our first weekend there was our chance to hit the ground running.  To take in the sights, to get a feel for the area and also to think seriously about work and apartments. We came to Valparaíso by bus, which left us at the bus station in the only flat part of the city I've seen. Our hostel was in the heart of the city's colorful hills.  When in any new place, what better way to get anywhere than to walk?  It took us awhile, but our journey to the hostel also served as a nice impromptu tour of the city.

The first half of our walk was through El Plan, this decidedly non-hilly business district near the waterfront.  This is where you'll find the concentration of Valparaíso's tallest buildings, and on any day but Sunday (which is when I happened to take this photo), its highest concentration of people, as well.  Valparaíso is said to have once been of more importance than the capital city of Santiago, in the days before the opening of the Panama Canal.  At that time its port was thriving, contributing to the city's economic growth.  Many Europeans also wound up here as new residents, during those times when other cities like New York, Buenos Aires and San Francisco were also booming with immigration.  This has led to some interesting effects today in Chile, where many people have English or German last names, for example.  

Because of the Latin American habit of naming streets after people, lots of streets have English names too, which then get run through the filter of Spanish pronunciation.  That's confusing at best, especially when you're trying to ask for directions.  As for some Teutonic cultural references, you can find sauerkraut at many restaurants and markets in Chile, for example.  And draught beer abounds, bearing the decidedly German-sounding name of schop.  Loan words in Spanish are quickly assimilated into the language's abundant list of suffixes, and so you can get a frothy schop at your local schopería, for example.

The next leg of our little tour took us up into Valparaíso's famous hills.  By popular count, the city has no fewer than 42 hills, all spilling over with buildings in various states of repair.  Valparaíso is defined by its port, and its prosperity as a city has hinged upon it.  But its hills define it every bit as much, governing its shape and design and giving rise to modes of personal transportation unseen in most other towns, as we will see.

Some of the hills, most notably Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepción, have become dominated by the tourist industry and the predictable changes that come with it.  Beautifully and tastefully restored buildings help draw in tourism, which then brings more money to these neighborhoods for even further restoration to take place.  A positive feedback loop that brings about a positive change for a neighborhood.  On the other hand, prices go up, to be sure.  And some level of authenticity is somehow compromised in the bargain, as a neighborhood transforms from something real into something more of a dream to be sold.

Which then leads us to ask, what is the authentic reality in a city like this?  Can it be found in the other hills, in those places still very much unrestored?  In some cases, this might mean that you'll find some seriously run down buildings and sketchy neighborhoods.  I would imagine that like most cities, you'd have to really spend time there to find out what it's really about.  But the layout of this city upon such unlikely geography means that even if you lived there, you'd have to be dedicated to doing a lot of determined exploring if you wanted to see it all.

Unless you're downtown, every street you take winds unpredictably through the hills, and to complicate things further, many of the streets are sewn together by staircases and alleyways spiraling up and around, so much so that you have to wander up or down in order to figure out where they'll end up taking you.  A cartographer's nightmare and a photographer's dream.  Many houses, like the hostel we stayed in, have their only entrance in an alleyway like this one, making most of them thoroughfares unto themselves with names and addresses.  

You would think a town like this would defy motorized transportation altogether, with so many hills, narrow streets and cobblestones.  Not entirely true.  There are still plenty of cars and buses around.  Splitting the difference between the two, there are even taxis called colectivos that work just like buses.  They follow a fixed route and you pay a fixed price, and you get on or off where you need to.  Try to imagine a bus on some of these streets and the colectivo concept starts making a lot more sense.

The indisputably most unique and iconic way to get around Valparaíso, however, is the ascensor.  So iconic are they, so synonymous with the city in the mind of the tourist, that I won't show you a picture of them.  The fact is, none of the pictures I took of them were very representative.  Instead, I give you an image of the antique wheel that pulled the one we took.  We paid a small fee, we boarded the little metal box with windows with a view over the harbor, and up the hill we went.  At the top was a beautifully restored lobby where people must have once waited to go down to work from their home up above.  Today, the ascensores are mostly for tourism, but they are as practical a form of transportation as ever, and the cost isn't so bad.  If you're interested in seeing what they're really like, wait until I write about Valparaíso again someday.  Or check them out online, as there is no shortage of photos and videos of them.

Our next image will serve, among other things, to demonstrate that at no point during a visit here are you ever far from the sea, and Valparaíso's port.  In the background you'll see three aspects of the port, if you look carefully.  In the back right are some military vessels, symbols of Chile's naval history.  Over my wife's shoulder is a big cruise ship, lots of which now stop over regularly in Valparaíso along tours of the south Pacific.  And finally, behind the cruise liner is the top portion of the big blue workings of commercial port machinery, busy manipulating multicolored containers from ship to port and vice versa.  The Panama Canal may have put a prolonged hurting on Chile's historical port, but today's biggest commercial freighters and tankers are bigger than the designers of the hundred-year-old canal ever imagined.  As such, massive ships once again plow through the Drake Passage and around the South American continent, giving Valparaíso a newfound relevance as a port city.

No mention of Valparaíso would be complete without talking about the street art that exists there.  At the same time, no single mention of Valparaíso's street art is capable of capturing it all.  The city is overflowing with graffiti, in every neighborhood and every alleyway.  Commissioned or clandestine, and from fine art to random black-paint tributes of adolescent love.  I won't even try to explore the the street art of Valparaíso any further than to say that as much as the port, as much as the hills, the art on the walls around the city help make the city what it is.  Like the other aspects of the city, the many murals are supremely photogenic.  Reviewing the couple hundred pictures I took during our three days in Valparaíso, I now find myself comparing them with my memory of the many things we saw.  I can't help but feel like I did a lousy job of documenting our trip.  I guess we'll have to go back.

Which leads us to the ultimate question of today's missive.  What happened to living in Valparaíso, after so many months of talking about moving there?  Rather than going into an even lengthier explanation, I'll say that this has been a fine example of the delicate balance between lofty dreaming and basic pragmatism. 

Many of these posts descend at certain moments (as this one is now doing) into indulgence. Imagining a life high up in a green tropical valley, in a cabin on some lost beach, or in a city more romantic than practical.  Deep down, the habit of traveling and living in new places rather than just visiting them for a week might satisfy in some way this latent urge I seem to have.  Anywhere I visit, my mind begins to turn, entertaining the notion of what it would be like to live in this place for longer.

Then the other side begins to emerge, as these imaginings begin to reveal certain real complications.  The mundane concerns of every day life cannot be ignored.  And so we have found our home in Santiago after all, where it's simply easier for travelers to settle down and get started.  Here, we have discovered pleasant parks and a level of organization I've never seen elsewhere in Latin America.  After years of living in less regulated places, I have to admit there's something satisfying about the added structure to be found here.  We also have friends here who we met in Ecuador and who have since established themselves in Chile long before our own arrival, which has been a boon to our little family in so many ways.

In the end, I don't feel as though we've settled for Santiago over Valparaíso.  Since the day we came, I've been pleasantly surprised by how much I like it here, in this city I had essentially ignored as a place to live.  One of the greatest things about traveling is discovery, finding the places you like, and learning from yourself about what places you end up finding yourself at home in.  Future musings will no doubt explore such notions in time.  For now, know that we have landed nicely, a little to the east of our original target, two hours by bus through the sun-kissed valleys of Central Chile.

One last ride

In what may be the last entry on Ecuador for awhile, I'd like to share a little more about one of my favorite pastimes, in Ecuador and anywhere I go, really.  For me, there's nothing much better than getting on a bike and finding some dirt roads outside the city to ride around on.  I don't mind if it's single track in the woods or a country road winding between small towns.  Either way, it's a great chance to get out of the city, and to find beautiful places not far from where I live.  More often than not, these aren't the kinds of places with anything to attract tourists, and the population of these areas is low enough that there aren't buses that go to them very often.  So unless you've got a car (which I don't), the only reliable way to get there is on your bike.

Cuenca is blessed with dozens of tiny villages surrounding it.  While you won't find much natural forest nearby the city, there is plenty of farmland and rural community.  This kind of low density population means that there is a complex network of dirt roads tying them all together and connecting them to the hub that is Cuenca.  For a cycling enthusiast living in the city, it's perfect.  You've got countless routes to choose from, and on the weekend you don't have to worry much about traffic.  I was never able to find a comprehensive map of the area, and even Google Earth was lacking in accurate imaging of most of it.  So I was pretty much on my own in finding good places to ride.

One of my favorite places to ride is the road to Soldados, as I have come to call it.  Soldados is a remote village far outside of Cuenca, and the road to get there, as I've been told, was once the way to get to Guayaquil.  It runs roughly parallel to the highway that goes there today, and covers many of the same changes in altitude and ecosystems along the way.  I've occasionally plotted to make the ride to the coast by that road, but so far, it hasn't happened.

It's a beautiful area that I've written about before.  Always green, with very few houses and a constant but gentle climb upward on a well maintained road running alongside a picturesque mountain stream.  An agreeable daytrip indeed, which stops whenever you're ready for it to.  You simply turn around and go back the way you came, much faster than when you went up.

If you go far enough up the road, you get to some hot springs.  They are the reason why I know that the road exists, as the story in the link goes on to explain.  I've been back to them a couple of times since the writing of that story a few years ago, by setting out much earlier in the day than I did at first.  But even when I have no intentions of making it that far, the road to Soldados has proceeded to become one of my preferred routes when I can't think of anywhere else to go.  Predictably, it also happens to tie into a few other roads, a few of which lead to the little town of Baños.  Now practically absorbed by the city of Cuenca, that village takes its name from the piping hot spring water that occurs naturally in the area, and has given rise to a number of resorts and spas.  The combination of a long ride, a soak in a hot tub and a subsequent cold beer is undeniably excellent.  And the ride home, as it always seems to be when you live in a valley, is all downhill.

One of my favorite places for the post-ride beer and accompanying meal is Che's.  A much-underrated roadside attraction in the nearby village of San Joaquín, the restaurant serves all kinds of grilled meat, beer and chicha, all best consumed on the outdoor patio.  And of course, Che himself.

Never falling out of character, the proprietor sits iconically at the grill when he isn't talking with the clientele.  After a beer we once decided to ask him for a photo, to which he responded by inviting us inside for another drink and some conversation.  Once indoors, we discovered the main hall, covered from floor to ceiling on all sides by the biggest collection of Che Guevara memorabilia I've ever seen.  Featured also in the above is Louis, who can also take credit for a couple of the photos in today's story.

Another ride worth mentioning is the road to Aguilas.

A little further up the highway from San Joaquín, you connect with a road heading up to Cajas National Park from Sayausí.  And in that neighborhood is a nondescript dirt road heading up into the mountains, much like any other.  This is the road to Aguilas, which I assume is the name of yet another distant mountain village.

But the road to get there is a destination unto itself, one of the many unspoken mountain biking routes for aficionados around town.  Any Saturday or Sunday will find it almost entirely vacant of automobiles but bristling with cyclists, either heaving their way up or barreling back down.  Much like the road to Soldados, it will afford you many unique perspectives on the gorgeous landscapes that make up the countryside outside Cuenca.  From up here, you can even get a good look at the city itself:

But while the road to Soldados is a relatively mellow ride, this one I would call much more technical.  That is to say, steeper.  Lots steeper.  The way up, you're in your highest gears.  In order to maintain your resolve, you look down at your front wheel and not up at the indeterminable length still above you.

On the way down, you've got both hands on the brakes the whole time, rattling over rocks and around curves.  I'm far from being a professional, but it generally takes me an hour and a half to get to my preferred stopping point from the trailhead, and twenty minutes of blurred scenery to get back down.

The road is evidently a road for pilgrimage as well, if the thirteen crosses along the way are any indication.

A cross alongside a country road is a symbolic reminder that our journeys are sacred, the transformative means to an end that ought to be an end unto itself.  Where have your roads taken you?  Even in today's world of motorized transportation, modern day pilgrims still often choose to undertake at least part of their spiritual journeys on foot.

Practitioners of Buddhism also speak of something known as walking meditation, to which a pilgrim from any spiritual tradition could relate.  By acknowledging this most basic human form of motion as an innately profound activity, the act of moving around by your own two feet becomes suddenly more powerful.

There are arguably far fewer proponents of cycling meditation, but if you ask me, there is an undeniable source of perspective inherent in a peaceful ride along a gentle country road.  There's an unequaled sense of accomplishment upon reaching the top of a steep hill without stopping, and an unparalleled exhilaration that you feel at the end of an adrenalin-fueled downhill.

When you have a destination in mind, especially a far-flung one, there's also nothing like making it there after hours of riding.

I was raised Catholic, but I admit I don't usually go to church on Sunday.  But Ecuador is a country steeped in Catholic traditions, and so it's not uncommon for a Sunday ride to have a few churches along the way.  This one is really far from any towns, and at the end of a side road opening into a large clearing.

It did happen to be Sunday on the day of this photo, but there was no sign of a Mass having happened any time recently.  In fact, this place looked deserted, from all indications.  Every time I went up the road to Aguilas, I considered trying to take it all the way to whatever Aguilas was, but each trip wound up at this abandoned church instead.  At one time, perhaps it was the destination of the pilgrimage for those who followed the route of the crosses on the way up the same road.  This particular day, the breaking of bread was not the Eucharist, but rather a tuna fish sandwich, followed by a few swigs of plain water instead of communion wine.
  
I imagine it will be awhile before I get to see these roads again.  The bike in the photo is in storage at the moment, and there are still plenty more country roads in Ecuador I haven't explored yet.  Fortunately, I've got a different bike now, and in the meantime, there are plenty of country roads in Chile, too.

Market Day

One of the things I remember most fondly about growing up in a small town in Ohio was going to a neighborhood fruit stand.  In the same part of town where I went to school, and where my dad had a car lot that he ran after work, was a shop run by a man named Tony Catanzaro.  I don't remember what he looked like or what kind of a person he might have been.  But I do remember the sights and smells of being in a store like that, especially in the summer when the ripest fruit was on the market.  I remember the signs with the removable numbers for the ever-changing prices, the fresh samples, and the hanging scale at the cash register that the lady behind the counter would obligingly allow me to pull down and watch the numbers spin around on the wheel.

But mostly, of course, I remember the fruit.  The bright colors, the mixture of aromas, and best of all, the taste of it all during the ride home afterwords.  The watermelons were maybe the most intriguing for me at the time, as I would watch my dad go about deciding which was going to be the ripest and juiciest.  Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but I recall a time when the knife went into the melon and it actually split open on its own, ripe as it was.  Then a huge slice would go on a plate and I would dig into it, spitting seeds and slurping up the red interior with true childlike abandon.

Catanzaro's market is gone now, and today it seems rare to find a place like it.  Except in the summer, when you can still find plenty of roadside stands selling fresh sweet corn, peaches, chili peppers and other summertime specialties.  The rest of the year, most people resign themselves to the supermarket produce section.  Bountiful as it may be, and carefully designed to appeal to the modern consumer, such a place lacks a certain quality that a simple corner store has without trying.  

In the US there is also a modern day resurgence of farmer's markets, and many local governments are smart about supporting them in various ways.  But in many communities, for now at least, the old-fashioned fruit and vegetable shop seems unable to compete with big grocery chains.  But maybe I'm biased, having had the good fortune to get a taste at a young age of such a fine local business, albeit on its way out.

All of that probably has a lot to do with how much I enjoy a simple trip to buy food for the week, in a place like Cuenca:

 

Cuenca certainly has supermarkets that look and feel much like any in the US, but it also has lots of neighborhood stores like this one.  In fact, in towns of any size, and in every country I've been to so far in Latin America, you'll find a no-frills store every few blocks in most neighborhoods.  Boxes full of fruit, boxes full of veggies.  A scale, and one or two people helping customers and otherwise shucking peas or corn.  It doesn't get much simpler than that.  In Ecuador at least, you've got to know your product, as the prices usually aren't posted and a fair amount of bargaining is expected.  While we were living in Cuenca, we used to feel like we spent a lot if we paid $14 for all of our fresh ingredients for the week.

In our family, the overwhelming majority of our meals are prepared and eaten at home.  Like in most households, I'd imagine, our tastes often change over the course of the months.  But during our last days in Cuenca, we were making lots of pizza with fresh sauce, and fresh dough:

And once you start making fresh dough for pizza, it seems only natural to start to wonder what else you can make with flour and yeast.

While I tend to focus on baking with salty and savory flavors, Nancy has a talent for turning out desserts.  Mmm, cherry pie, with fresh cherries!

Another one of her talents is to turn virtually any tropical fruit into delicious fresh juice, which is as enjoyable for adults as it is for kids.

Another Ecuadorian delight is corn, from which you can make all kinds of dishes.  Like tamales, humitas, quimbolitos, chibiles, motepillo, and many others.  Or you can just have the Ecuadorian version of corn on the cob, with big white kernels that might not be as sweet as US sweet corn. But they're still tasty, and they make a satisfying popping sound when you bite into them.

We ate a lot of corn at our house, but when you looked out the window, it was easy to see why:

Also featured in this photo is the vine of the gigantic and delicious camote squash, also known as zapallo.  It could be considered the big, green South American cousin of the pumpkin.  In between the corn grew bean plants.  

Corn, beans and squash are colloquially referred to as the three sisters and can be found growing in traditional farms and gardens throughout the Americas.  They sustain each other in a perfect three-way relationship: the corn stalks provide structure for the delicate vines of the beans, and shade for the squash.  The beans fix nitrogen from the air into the soil, for use by the corn and squash.  And the ample leaves of the squash muscle out weeds which would otherwise compete for space in the garden in general.  It's hard to imagine packing more growth into that little garden plot!  But in my layman's opinion, there is no environment better on earth for a plant to grow than the mountains of Ecuador.  The eternal Springtime, and the perfect balance of sun and rain makes for ideal and uninterrupted growing conditions all year, and the fact that these conditions have existed for centuries means that the topsoil is thick and loamy.

From farm to table.  And a market in between.  That's the way it should be when it comes to putting food on your plate, if you ask me.