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.

Amateur zymology

I, my friends, am a brewer.  I like beer, and I like to make beer.  I wouldn't say I'm a pro at it, but I've been doing it off and on for many years.  I started brewing in college, and anywhere I've lived for more than a few months, the urge to gather the materials and ingredients necessary to brew up a batch begins to occupy a prominent place in my thoughts.  Not long thereafter, the kitchen fills with a sight like the one you see above.  An over-sized pot on the stove, filled as close to the brim as I can manage with sweet liquid goodness and topped off with a foamy head evocative of the first sudsy glass I'll be pouring in a few weeks' time.

There are surely plenty of websites out there that will do a better job than I will of explaining the brewing process.  And there are excellent manuals on the subject, like the one I use: a beer-stained volume entitled The Complete Joy of Home Brewing.  Rather than walk through the process then, I'll instead be sharing some of my own personal experiences with brewing, along with some photos that will hopefully get your mouth watering and mind turning over the idea of trying to brew it yourself someday, if you don't already.

All homebrewers in the US, and therefore all microbrewers there, as well as everyone else who enjoys drinking something beyond commercial pilseners, all owe the fine hobby to an enlightened Act of the 95th Congress which was later signed by Jimmy Carter.  Before then, homebrewing was illegal in the United States, ever since the days of Prohibition.  During all those years, there weren't many people in North America who were drinking anything more innovative than beers like Rolling Rock, Heineken or Michelob, if they got that far beyond your standard commercial beers.  

I imagine during that time the reputation of North American beer was deeply sullied in the eyes of beer aficionados throughout the rest of the beer drinking world, even while the commercial Pilsener style was turned into big business and exported around the globe.  Such that one can drink a Japanese Sapporo, Jamaican Red Stripe, Colombian Aguila or Belgian Stella Artois and still be drinking what is essentially the same beer: a light, bottom fermented lager brewed with barley in addition to adjuncts such as rice and corn to thin out the malt flavor of a heartier ale or dark lager.

As I've said in an earlier post, the Pilsener style is great, and especially enjoyable on a hot day.  But home brewing offers the opportunity to delve into the much simpler and yet incredibly diverse realm of top-fermenting ales.  Without worrying much about the difference between top and bottom fermentation, suffice it to say that top fermented beer is essentially achieved at room temperature, and is thus a low-tech method to make alcohol out of sugar.

Every batch of beer I've made has been an ale, and usually with an assortment of equipment and ingredients thrown together from any source I had access to.  The first batches I made were crafted from materials bought at the local home brewers' supply store.  When I was brewing North American ales in Ecuador, I did my best to time the batches of beer I made to coincide with visits to the US, when I would bring ingredients down with me, like these pungent hop pellets.

Even with personally imported ingredients, brewing beer in Ecuador always presented its challenges.  Virtually every culture in the world is steeped in some sort of alcoholic beverage, and Ecuador's mestizo heritage has each foot in a different mash.  But neither of them involve beer.  From its indigenous roots comes chicha, a fermented beverage made from native corn.  From its history of colonial plantations we have such beverages as rum, which I wrote about before, and aguardiente, which is to rum more or less as moonshine is to American whiskey.  

Today, one can still try all of these fine imbibes, and while rum tends to be produced in commercial distilleries, chicha and aguardiente both hale from the same homebrewing spirit as beer does in the US.  My weekend bike rides in Cuenca often ended with a stop at a roadside stand selling mapanagua, for example, which is aguardiente mixed with fresh squeezed cane juice and a lime.  The gentlemen who sold it to me grew their own cane and distilled their own aguardiente, and each visit brought some nice conversation while they ran the cane through their on-site mill for my drink.  Truly, these fellows were fine examples of small batch distilling, and were certainly working within their own element.  I, on the other hand, was obstinately dedicated to making North American beer in the tropics, where neither hops nor barley have historically been grown.  Before I could even get started, I had to get my equipment together.

The first and most difficult step was getting myself a couple of big, glass bottles.

Once I decided I wanted to brew, I started looking around for these iconic vessels, beloved to home brewers as the place where their beer comes to life, frothing prodigiously with yeasty bubbles.  I like having two of them because I follow a two-stage fermentation technique.  Such bottles were once used in Ecuador for delivering drinking water to people's homes, but since the advent of cheap plastic, they have become an oddity found in few other places besides traditional drugstores, who have them on display to contribute to their boutique image.

In fact, I found more than a few of them in some such pharmacies, but the owners were unwilling to part with them.  Simultaneously, Ecuador's government had enacted a stiff tax on imported goods weighing more than 4 kilograms, and anyone who has had to lift and shake a 5 gallon glass carboy to clean and rinse it knows it weighs a lot more than that.  So importing them from the US was also out of the question, even on an airplane, where their bulk and fragility made it prohibitive to bring them aboard as either carry-on or checked luggage.

And so my ambition for craft beer in Ecuador was put on hold, even as my personally imported ingredients aged in what I hoped was a graceful way under refrigeration.  Until one day, when I was walking home from lunch with a friend from the coast.  I had been telling him about the big bottles I needed, and after lunch we walked by an antique shop he suggested we check out.  Inside, sure enough, were precisely two dusty bottles of exactly the kind I had been waiting for.  I bought them, took them home, washed them over and over, and was ready to brew.

The only other equipment that presented some challenge to acquire were brown bottles for storing and pouring the beer once it was ready for drinking.  Fortunately, while there isn't much craft brewing going on there, Ecuador does have an active beer drinking culture in the form of its beloved Pilsener.  It also has a bottle deposit program which has left the country replete with durable glass 22-ounce sized bottles.  A big supply of those was all I needed, and Nancy's family had a collection of neglected specimens that I could use.  Rather than try to clean out the mold that had grown at the bottom of them, I decided I would just return the bottles one by one for fresh, beer-filled ones, and clean out the new bottles right away once they were empty.  5 gallons divided by 22 ounces is about 29 bottles, and so for good measure I made sure my friends and I drank about 30 bottles of Pilsener in the coming weeks.  This left us in good spirits, and with all the fresh and clean bottles I needed.  

Now that I review the photo, I see that I ended up with 36 bottles after all.  It's always better to have too many than not enough.  Also featured in the above is an empty of one one of my favorite North American craft beers, personally imported and consumed for inspirational purposes.

The rest of the equipment I needed was easy to find, and so it was time for brewing, at last.  For an amateur brewer like myself, that means a process that includes cracking grains, like the ones you see in the plastic bag.  Ziploc and a rolling pin is the way I crack them, short a hand-cranked grain mill as I am.

For the batch of porter I happened to be making, I was using some of the darkest roasted barley I could find, which gives the beer a nice brown/black color and an even nicer malted flavor.  Put that together with your malted grains, hot water, and when the time is right, your favorite assortment of hops as pictured above.  Then you end up with an aromatic stew that fills the house with a pleasantly sweet smell for the next several hours.  And of course, eventually you get beer, which is ultimately the point of all of this.

Once you're satisfied that your beer is well cooked, you fill up one of those big bottles with it.  If you're as lucky as I am, you even have an assistant who smiles and holds the funnel.

Once you've brewed your beer, you mostly have to wait.  You've stacked up a sugary solution with the natural preservative power of hops, and then loaded it with activated yeast under more or less controlled temperatures.  Often overnight, all those natural forces you've set up begin to have their way with one another, bubbling away in a sure sign that alcohol is being coaxed forth from sugar molecules before your very eyes.

But once all that initial activity is over, the beer will just sit there for quite awhile longer, and unless you look closely it doesn't look like much is happening at all.  But at the bottom of the barrel you'll see a bunch of thick residue forming, and the idea is to keep your tasty beverage away from it.  That's why many brewers, even low-tech ones like me, opt for a two-stage fermentation in which the liquid is transferred carefully to a fresh vessel and the detritus is left behind.  This all ads up to invoking yet another scientific principle in your own kitchen, that of the siphon.  And that's about all the action you'll get from your beer for a couple of weeks or so.

Until it's time to bottle, which means more siphoning, and also the satisfying task of capping your carefully kept empties.  Looking at the progression of photos, it would appear that I had nothing better to do between the various steps in the process than let my beard grow.  And after this fateful day, when the beer found its final resting place before its eventual consumption, came more waiting.  Once in the bottle, the beer is conditioned.  It sits undisturbed, naturally clarifying thanks to the forces of gravity drawing the final remnants of particulate matter to the bottom of the bottle.  It also develops carbonation naturally, due to the extra sugar solution I introduced upon bottling.  In the presence of this fresh dose of sugar, the last vestiges of active yeast living in the premature beer awaken one last time.  It produces carbon dioxide and pressure to preserve the beer for months within the bottle, and also puts bubbles in your beer - again, with time.  If you're impatient, you could drink the beer the moment it's bottled.  Just throw it in the blender before you drink it, and it will be just as bubbly as a well-finished product.  But most brewers will agree that a couple more weeks and it will naturally develop the perfect foamy top, all by itself.





And that's the end of the story.  Bottles full of beer are like potential energy, and you get to choose when to unleash it, and with whom.  But after all that waiting, you've had lots of time to consider what to do with your newly found powers. Choose wisely!

The long, winding road to Zaruma

Zaruma.  A beautiful town in the province of El Oro, tucked deeply within the green mountains of southern Ecuador.  Far enough away from any other major tourist destination to remain largely unknown to many travelers, it took me more than three years of living in Ecuador to finally make my way there.  With less than a month left in the country, though, we decided that one last road trip to a place neither of us had ever been would be a fine farewell.

We planned to leave Cuenca on a Saturday afternoon.  Time enough to have a quick lunch downtown after Nancy's final class.  I had already finished teaching a week prior, and thus we embarked on our trip unemployed and with no particular leads on jobs once we left Ecuador.  A potentially ominous beginning to a weekend getaway, and yet neither of us were particularly worried about such things as work.  After all, we were now officially on vacation, and what better way to enjoy vacation in South America than to get on a bus and go somewhere new?

The ride to Zaruma from Cuenca begins along the highway to Machala, which we both knew well.  I had been as far along it as Girón half a dozen times for various reasons.  Nancy had traveled up and down its length as far as Santa Isabel countless times since she was a little girl, in tow as her family made the rounds as young teachers in Ecuador's rural schools in the area.  She knew it well enough to begin to sense that something wasn't right as the bus made what I had assumed was a routine stop to drop off and pick up passengers on the side of the road just beyond Santa Isabel.  I too began to rouse myself from the half-sleep I had learned to fall into during long bus trips, as I picked up on the nervous tone of an increasing number of voices sounding from around the bus. 

I couldn't see much from where I was sitting, but apparently the driver was attempting to haltingly maneuver our bus down a road which had been washed out by a landslide.  That's not a particularly rare occurrence in a country built upon mountains of loose topsoil, where it is common practice to build farms and highways right on the open faces of hillsides.  Many techniques have been applied to reinforce the roads that twist their way around unlikely geographical contours, but give them enough time and rainfall and sooner or later they'll all go tumbling down the hill.

Apparently, the one we were headed down had done just that, and the driver was obstinately pressing along it.  I'm thankful I couldn't see just how close we had gotten to going over the edge, judging from the kinds of language issuing from the mouths of my fellow passengers.  Maybe the litany of voices in protest grew to enough of a crescendo to finally persuade the driver, or else we just got too close to rolling down the mountain for his personal sense of safety.  Either way, he threw it in reverse and resignedly headed back up the way we came.  Until the bus pulled off onto a side road, which was apparently a detour to where we were going.  And so we began wheeling our way around this loose dirt path never intended for bus traffic, and I occasionally glanced out the window to see how close we got to the edge.

That road, simply put, is not safe.  A look further along reveals at once how steep the hillside is below, and how loose is the rock, sand and gravel making up the terrain itself.  The total lack of any sort of guardrail, combined with the traffic coming from the other direction (not pictured) and the haste of the driver trying to make up for lost time will complete the sense of impending death for most people, I think.  To say I had never felt at risk on buses in Ecuador would be a lie.  But after my first few trips with no incident, I had learned to go along for the ride without worrying too much about my safety.  This particular trip admittedly put me on edge, though.

In the end, I found myself thinking the same kinds of thoughts that I always did on what I considered a dangerous bus ride.  The bus wouldn't be turning around, and we certainly wouldn't be getting off of it in some show of protest, in the middle of nowhere.  And telling the driver to slow down would either have no effect, or would just get him more frustrated.  Plus, as I've seen before, there are often passengers on board who thank a driver at the end of the journey for getting them to their destination sooner by driving faster (read: recklessly).  And so who was I to add my voice to the speculation already whirling around the bus.  When would we arrive at our stop?  When would the main route be opened back up?  Was this an official detour, or were we headed down an unknown route?

These concerns were soon replaced by new ones, as the bus stopped yet again.  Looking out the window, I saw a line of vehicles ahead of us.  Several passengers began to get out of their seats and leave the bus to check out the situation, and eventually curiosity got the better of me and I did the same.  A quarter of a mile up the road, heavy construction equipment high above the road was busy shoveling tons of dirt and rocks down, directly onto our path.  A sight like that made it very clear that we wouldn't be going forward anytime soon, and as I walked back to the bus, a line of vehicles had already formed behind ours.  We were stuck where we were.  I climbed back on board and curled up with my wife and daughter to the green, flickering glow of a poor copy of a Jackie Chan movie, dubbed into Spanish and showing on the built-in bus TV.

That movie had ended, darkness had set in, and an extended reel of Jackie Chan bloopers had begun before we started moving again. Earlier, I had gotten off the bus once more to check the progress of the road work, and saw that the dumping of dirt and rocks onto the road had stopped, and a new set of equipment had begun clearing it off and loading it into dump trucks.  An earth moving operation beyond my understanding.  Nonetheless, we were back on our way, and half an hour later we got back onto what Nancy recognized as the road to Machala.

We arrived in Machala that night around 9pm, having left Cuenca around 3.  A trip to Machala can normally be made in three hours according to our understanding, and we had hoped to be in Zaruma in about three hours more.  But travel plans must sometimes change, and instead of spending our first night in Zaruma, we found ourselves a hotel in Machala and called it a night. 

The next day we were back on the road. 

The ride to Machala, by any route, will inevitably take you from the cool heights of the Ecuadorian sierra down to the perennially steamy coast.  The ride to Zaruma takes you back up the mountains again, albeit not to the same altitude as Cuenca.  Along the way you pass through countless villages during that fascinating transition in climate and terrain.  Every small town brings a stop, a change in passengers and a sudden wave of vendors with baskets full of homemade snacks and plastic sacks filled to the brim with iced tropical juices.  Pan de yuca, pan de maíz.  Fresh oranges with the tops sliced off for easy access to their juicy interiors.  Corviche, cocadas, papipollo, plátano con queso.  And the list goes on.  Yum!

So many small towns come between Machala and Zaruma, all of them tiny, squeezed into spaces between leafy banana plantations or else clinging improbably to the side of a mountain, all of them brick and concrete buildings huddled around a tidy town square.  So many, that you begin to wonder between naps if Zaruma will be any different.

Then the bus stops again, and people start getting off.  More people, until the seats are nearly empty.  Finally, you hear the driver say "servidos," and you know you're not going any further, at least not on this bus.  So you must be there.  You get off the bus, on a street like this one, and you realize that after all, amongst so many other nondescript towns sprinkled throughout the valleys of southernmost Ecuador, Zaruma is different.

Small and remote enough to receive few international travelers busy checking South America's hot spots off the list in their guidebooks, Zaruma is missing the gratuitous tourist shops and hostels.  It has still managed to catch UNESCO's watchful eye, who are considering it for admission to its growing list of World Heritage sites. 

With some luck it will receive that noble designation while still managing to stay off the tourist's radar, and the next time I go back some of the faded glory of its oldest buildings will have been rightfully restored, without having been turned into the next high-dollar bed and breakfast.

A stroll around the winding streets of Zaruma's historic center carries you through neighborhoods that were never quite like those of other towns in Ecuador.  Houses built in a style not unlike those you might find in Cuenca, yet unique for their ground floor portales supported by columns.  Plus, they're all made from wood rather than adobe and brick.  Cobbled streets rambling up and down hills and sewn together by narrow walkways rather than the endless square blocks of other old Spanish settlements.  Maybe there were other places like this in Ecuador, strewn out across hills and carved from wood, like Guayaquil's Santa Ana, but most of those have burned down.  But so far, these remnants of Zaruma's past have managed to survive, protected by their isolation and by the stewardship of generations of the thoughtful holders of the deeds to these classic buildings.

Our own stroll around town was led by our stomachs, arriving in Zaruma around lunchtime as we did.  I had heard from friends who had visited Zaruma before that I ought to try the coffee, and the tigrillo.  Several consecutive semesters of teaching 7am classes turned me into a coffee drinker, and while I was enjoying a respite from work at the time, the need for caffeine still lingered on.  We were deep within Ecuador's coffee growing region, and the fame of Zaruma's coffee was second only to Loja's around the country, so I was determined not only to sample it while we were there but to bring some fresh roast back home with me as well.  Fortunately for us, every restaurant we walked by had tigrillo and coffee on the menu posted out front, so neither would be hard to come by.  The real question was which place to try, and ultimately we decided that location was the key.

We found a restaurant in Zaruma's town square, surrounded by some of its most well-preserved historic buildings and - like every square in every town I've ever visited in Latin America - a church.  The service was slow but it was only the second day of our extended time off work, so we were in no hurry.  While we waited we observed that the students of the Catholic schools in town appeared to be celebrating their confirmation, as dozens of young people in their uniforms gathered on the other end of the plaza near the church. 

Then, our food came, two plates heaping with deliciously chewy steamed and fried green plantains.  I love green plantain, and the texture of these was the best I'd tried at any restaurant.  On top was a generous helping of cheese melting from the heat of the starchy banana dumplings.  So that was tigrillo.  On the side was a nice, greasy pork chop.  There was nothing fresh or leafy on that plate, nor would we eat anything like that throughout our stay in Zaruma.  We got our vitamins and minerals from the fresh juice served with every meal, and otherwise filled up on tigrillo with every meal.  The coffee came at the end, and was as strong and rich as I'd hoped.

We didn't get up right away after we ate, but once we did it was to explore the city some more.

We had no real agenda throughout our stay in Zaruma.  We knew there were sights to see outside of town, and that you could hire a driver to take you around to them.  But we were there to do nothing more than wander around on foot and enjoy being on vacation in a beautiful and quiet town.

Every street was on a hill, and every corner led to four new streets of lovely buildings to see.  Some have been ushered into modern times with grace, and a hats-off bow to their origins.

Others sit with their paint peeling and windows broken, revealing with their sheer size a once-portentous purpose, and now waiting silently for one fate, or another.














Zaruma's historic section isn't huge, and the further you get from the center of town, the fewer the historic buildings become, outnumbered increasingly by uninspired, modern cement construction.  But eventually we wandered up a road until we left downtown and didn't turn back towards it, opting instead to see where it would lead us.  It was our fortune to have chosen a road that led to one of Zaruma's nearest tourist sites outside of town.

We had found El Sexmo, a now-defunct mine dug out in search of gold.  Gold is why Zaruma was given royal designation by Spanish king Felipe II in the 16th century, and is the name of the Province El Oro itself.  El Sexmo refers to a Spanish system of colonial taxation, in which the sixth part of all wealth exploited from the colonies would be owed directly to the Spanish crown.

We wandered up to the closed gate of the mine - now museum - late on a Sunday afternoon, but the children playing outside assured us it was still open and that we ought to ring the bell.  We rang it, and a quiet young woman came down to meet us.  While looking at no one in particular and saying softly that it was already after 5pm, she invited us in.  We told her we'd be happy to just have a look around, take a few pictures, and be on our way.  But as she walked with us up to the main buildings, she told us about an introductory video she could show us, and that we could take a self-guided tour of the mine shaft, if we were interested.

After we had seen the short video and learned about the mine, the woman returned to invite us again to walk into the mine, if we wanted to.  We didn't want to impose, and told her we'd just walk around the grounds for a few minutes.  After we'd walked around a little, a group of twenty or so university students from Quito had wandered up and were gearing up for a tour of the mine themselves.  The woman came back again and quietly insisted that if we wanted to see the mine, we ought to go ahead of them and avoid the commotion of so many people inside the mine.  So finally, we took her up on her offer.

We put on the prerequisite rubber boots and hardhat and headed for the mine:

Wife and babe (who didn't like wearing a hardhat), and some college kid.

The mineshaft led half a kilometer straight into the hillside.  Or so we were told.  We wandered back as far as this mannequin in a hardhat, and decided that once you'd seen a hundred meters of a mineshaft, you'd probably seen it all.  Plus, we could hear the troupe of college kids tramping their way noisily into the depths of the hillside behind us, and decided to head back before they caught up with us.

A gold mine in the literal sense, and the reason for Zaruma's very existence and prosperity.  Were Zaruma's streets once full of saloons and shoot-outs, like the boom-and-bust towns of the Old West?  Chances are it was more of a miniature Potosí, with Spanish criollo nobility trying out their new titles and doing their best to have their mansions built in the latest European style.

By the time we made it back into town, the sun had set and the streetlights had come on.  The next night we'd be back home already, and soon we'd be preparing for Christmas and our last weeks in Cuenca.  Zaruma was the first of many different kinds of goodbyes we'd be saying to Ecuador in the coming weeks, a chance to travel around some of its beautiful small towns and countryside one more time before our travels took us somewhere new.  Traveling gives you a lot of experience in saying goodbye, as it carries you into and out of the presence of other people and places.  Never knowing what the future may hold, we often ease the sense of loss we feel from a departure by speaking of how and when we'll see each other again.  So it was, that night in Zaruma, that we talked about going back there, someday.

Barrels of Rum

Anyone standing at the foot of a rack like this, staring up slack-jawed at the myriad of barrels towering above and knowing that each one is filled to the brim with distilled spirits will react in a predictable way, I think.  My personal reaction, one shared by the group I was with, was something like, "Damn, that's a lot of rum!"  I imagine that's generally the effect that the proprietors of Ron San Miguel expect.

Months before, as I was reading a description of the place, it was undeniably the sheer quantity of rum that caught my attention: "200 million liters of rum in oak barrels."  Hmm.  There I was, absentmindedly browsing a bulletin board at work as I passed the time during a break in a workshop for teachers at the beginning of our fall semester.  It was that day, incidentally, that we were all placed on spontaneous lockdown at the office, due to the news that the national police force was rising up in rebellion against the president.  But that, as they say, is a story for another time.  Because it was that day also that I hatched a plan to organize a trip for a select cadre of our teaching staff to go and see those 200 million liters of rum for ourselves.

Perhaps an alcohol related outing was not an appropriate one for working professionals to embark upon, or for me to organize.  But on the other hand, the bulletin board I had been reading was for our organization's department for US college kids studying abroad.  So certainly if university students could be considered for such a trip, older, more mature educators such as ourselves would be fine.

Ever since I was pulled aside during a trip to Isla de la Plata near Ecuador's coast to do some Spanish-English interpretation between our tour guide and the rest of the non-Spanish speaking tourists, I've entertained the thought of organizing tours as an alternative or supplement to teaching English.  So as I turned the notion of this trip to Cava Ron San Miguel around in my mind, I decided it would be a decent way to actually see how complicated it is to put a trip together.  That, in addition to seeing the aforementioned millions of liters of rum.  For this one, transportation and the entry fee at our destination were the only real costs involved, and as such, it seemed simple enough to set up.  Since I was a novice at organizing trips, I didn't want to actually make any money at it, so I just calculated the per capita cost for the prices I'd been given, which turned out to be only about $5 per person.  You've got to love Ecuador for its low cost of living.

It took me a couple of months to get around to actually making the trip happen.  And so it was on a rainy Friday in November that an assortment of English teachers boarded a red tour bus and set off to see all that rum for ourselves.

When we arrived at our destination, we were surprised by how beautiful the location was and how close it was to the city.  Cuenca, like many Latin American cities, tends to be pretty dense.  But once you leave the city, it's striking how quickly the scenery turns from urban to rural.  As such, Cava Ron San Miguel can just about be reached by Cuenca's public bus system for its proximity to town, but at the same time it is situated in a wide open estate with far more green space than building.  We were later told that the distillery takes its name from its location, which is on the former grounds of a beautiful old eponymous church, within sight of the building we toured.

As we got off the bus and walked into the dimly lit barrel house, the unmistakable aroma of rum immediately filled our noses.  A woman came to meet us and led us up to a platform with heavy wooden tables where we sat and watched an introductory video about the distillery.  From there, as our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we also caught our first glimpse of the many enormous barrels resting in the bodega below us.

There they were, the 200 million liters of rum, aging in their oaken barrels.  Numbers that large are difficult for the human mind to truly conceive of.  As I tried at that earlier date to reckon with the idea of what that quantity of rum really looked like, the image came to mind of a sight not unlike this one, with big wooden casks stacked up and extending as far as the eye could see in any given direction.

The eye could see far less here, however, due to the low light.  As our guide explained, wood essentially breathes, permitting vapors to escape from the aging rum.  Hence the undeniably boozy smell as we entered the building.  And also the reason for the low lights.  Apparently stronger lights, among other things, run the risk of igniting the highly flammable gasses in the air and causing a massive explosion.  With such a thought in mind, so much rum resting in silence demands much more respect from the little people walking among it.

And walk among it we did.  The "cava" in Cava Ron San Miguel refers to the barrel house itself, a sort of cave if you will, where the rum sits in oak and takes on all the oaken characteristics in regards to color, flavor and aroma.  Prior to the aging process, the rum is a clear liquid, highly concentrated and not very palatable.  Sugar cane grows best in a tropical climate, and thus all the production of the rum takes place at lower elevations.  In the case of San Miguel rum, near the coast.  There, the cane is grown, the sweet liquid extracted, fermented, and distilled.  Once distilled down into high concentrations, it is transported up to Cuenca and its perennially cool climate.  Upon its arrival here, it is diluted with spring water and aged for about two years before being blended and bottled as a finished product.

Many Latin American countries have a geography and a climate perfectly suited for this paradigm of rum production.  Ecuador, like many surrounding nations, is hot along the coast and further inland, as the terrain rises up into mountains, it is met with cooler air.  Combine this with low latitude and you have year-round warm weather suited for cane production in one region, and nearby an equally predictable climate suited for aging.  Warmer, more humid temperatures would wreak havoc with liquor in oaken barrels, causing rotting of the wood and spoilage of its contents.  Conversely, cane grows poorly in Cuenca due to the cool weather.  Access to both climatic conditions within short distances of one another means that San Miguel can conveniently contract the production of cane along the coast.  Rather than shipping tons of raw sugar cane up the mountains, the distillation takes place near the coast as well, so that only the lighter and more compact unfinished rum needs to be transported.

A fine means of production, indeed.  And how about the finished product?  No tour of a storehouse full of rum would be complete without a sampling.

We were served.  None of us were shy about asking for seconds, nor in the case of some, thirds, nor fourths.  It was Friday afternoon, and it was raining outside.  And our noses had long ago been permeated with the smell of rum, beyond the saturation point.  What better conditions could you ask for to sip on San Miguel's priciest imbibe?

Alcohol is a mysterious thing.  Throughout time and around the world, it has been devised from essentially anything sweet, and the people who appreciate it must cooperate with invisible natural forces, like yeast, for it to be made.  In so doing, we fundamentally transform something like sugar cane into something very different indeed.  The process is long and demands our time and patience, as though to temper our enthusiasm upon its consumption.

Perhaps as a result of this question of time, those who are responsible for producing rum and other alcoholic products often have a penchant for the antique, I've noticed.  San Miguel is no different.  The tasting room laid surrounded by beautifully well preserved relics from the past, like this classic wooden bar.  The kind you want to belly up to and enjoy a game of cards or a tall glass.  A person with a head full of rum vapor, seeing it empty, is led to wonder briefly over the permanence of the past, gone as it is and committed irrevocably to yesterday.

As our last glasses went bottoms up, we stepped once again into the brilliance of the outside world, more easily perceived as we emerged from the darkness by the fact that it was still cloudy and raining.  But that didn't get us down, as we walked over to our final treat for the day, which consisted of bottles of San Miguel rum available at wholesale prices.

To give an indication of what we were drinking, the high end sample we took in the tasting room was available to us to buy at about $7 per bottle, which even at retail prices wouldn't put it up on the same pedestal that some of the more famous rum might sit.  Nor will I be bringing a bottle on a plane someday, as I did with some of the finer mezcal I had sampled in Oaxaca.  But that day, I don't think any of us left empty handed.

All in all, not a bad way to spend a rainy afternoon.  If people's faces were any indication, I feel pretty good about my amateur attempt as an organizer of tours.  Maybe someday I'll try it again. 

One thing I've always been impressed by in Ecuador is that prices are set for the average working individual.  Of course there are places and events for the very rich, but for traveling and seeing many of the beautiful and interesting sides of this country, the cost is usually one attainable for local and tourist alike.

A tour at Cava Ron San Miguel, for example, is only $2 per person and our guide mentioned that she's happy to lead families and small groups as well as larger organized tours.  Its location just outside the city means that even a taxi shouldn't be much more than $5 more from most parts of Cuenca.  From our point of departure and back again, the tour took about 2 hours and left us home before dark, ready for whatever else Friday night had in store.  Cheers!

Fusión Andina

The photo above is a glimpse of one of my favorite restaurants in Cuenca.  Tiestos is one of the newest and most popular dining establishments in town.  I'd venture to say that if you live here in Cuenca and are known to splurge from time to time on a pricey but delicious meal, you've probably already eaten here at least once.  That being the case, if you do live in Cuenca, maybe you need read no further.  Unless you want to get hungry.  For the rest of you, here's my review of a top-notch restaurant that I'm happy to have discovered along with everyone else in the city.

I've had the fortune to eat at Tiestos twice now with my wife and otherwise fine dining companion.  The first time the two of us went, we modestly selected two of the mid-range items on the menu: a half-bottle of Chilean red and of course a shared dish of the restaurant's signature offerings.  The centerpiece of any table at Tiestos will invariably be an elevated ceramic platter bearing your choice of thick and tender medallions of meat, simmering in a generous portion of one of many delicious sauces to choose from.

Our first experience there was with steak in a red wine sauce, each steak delectable and cooked a perfect medium per our request.  Our waiter, a slim costeño in a Panama hat, presented us our meal with flair, first revealing the sizzling earthenware platter before serving each of us one of the six juicy cuts, and then drizzling them with a hearty helping of the steamy sauce they were basting in a moment before.  Ready to dig in, we helped ourselves to a selection of the many accompaniments to the plato fuerte: bread with a variety of spicy sauces and oils, perfectly cooked baby yellow potatoes, mote (read: whole hominy-style corn), white rice, and a sort of round pasta not unlike israeli couscous.

It is in the accompaniments that Tiestos' chef Juan Solano pays homage to his cuencano roots.  The sauces, grains and other side dishes are nearly all either variations or direct borrowings from typical Ecuadorian cuisine.  The tiesto itself, the glazed earthen platter used to both cook and serve the meal, is a method of preparation which I've seen put to use by street vendors in Ecuador and Mexico alike.  Tempered to withstand direct heat and naturally non-stick, these shallow ceramic dishes add traditional flavor to a contemporary meal.

As we savored our tender steak medallions and helped ourselves to more, we also took in our surroundings.  Tiestos is located in a historic building in Cuenca's downtown, and that night all three of its thick-walled dining areas were bustling with clientele.  When we had arrived there were still a few open tables remaining, but by the time our meal was served all of the dark and heavy wooden tables were full, and the waiting area was already brimming with anticipation.

From where we were sitting we had a view of all three of the dining rooms as well as the kitchen, an open concept in architecture dating back at least a hundred years.  Chef Solano made his rounds throughout the evening, spending time chatting with the larger groups but also saying a few non-intrusive words to couples such as ourselves as we ate.  As we departed that evening we were both already making plans to try one of the other promising choices on the menu before long.

As we stepped in the door to Tiestos more recently, we already knew that our days in Cuenca were numbered in the low double digits, and that this would be our last chance to dine there.  So this time, we decided we wouldn't hold back and treated ourselves to the coveted high-ticket items on the menu we'd been eyeballing from our first visit.  We ordered our steak medium rare in a cordon bleu sauce with mushrooms and bacon, a robust offering which was rounded out nicely by the full-bodied, full bottle of Chilean cabernet sauvignon from Misiones de Rengo we asked for.

The steaks were served a smooth and tender medium rare, the red interior lending itself perfectly to the thick and flavorful sauce.  Each sip of wine offered a refreshing and bold compliment to the main course.  A full bottle of strong red wine may have been an ambitious choice for a couple, and I'll admit that over time the longer-ranging effects of so much to drink may have begun to interfere with our unbiased appreciation of the meal.  But looking back, and recalling clearly my empty plate, empty glass and nicely filled belly, I have no regrets.

With our choice made to go all out before we walked in the door that evening, dessert was a foregone conclusion.  We ordered a dish called "chocolate temptation," and what we got was chocolate mousse with chocolate fudge on top and a chocolate brownie below.  It was served with a generous spoonful of fresh passion fruit, an unexpected inclusion whose tart flavor contrasted impressively with the smooth and rich chocolate.  Equally unexpected and impressive was the artistic presentation of our dessert, served atop an edible still life.  It was a shame to ruin such a sight to behold, an act made much easier by how tasty it was.

My only real criticism of a restaurant where so much attention has been paid to presentation is that dinner was served with your regular, store-bought paper napkins.  You might find this to be a minor point, and such a small detail certainly doesn't detract from the appreciation such delicious food.  But from a design standpoint, ample cloth napkins that complemented the colorful Andean tablecloths would complete the experience down to the last moment.

With our first, more humble outing running us around $30 and our second shameless binge topping out at more than double that, Tiestos is reserved as a rare and much-anticipated dining excursion in the minds of ordinary people living in Cuenca like ourselves.  Tiestos is located at Juan Jaramillo 7-34 in Cuenca's historic downtown.  Its three dining areas offer an intimate ambience and consequently, limited seating.  Due to this and its surging popularity, it is usually full for dinner, but they do accept reservations.  They serve lunch and dinner Tuesday-Saturday and are open Sunday afternoons.  Whether you are in Cuenca for months or only a few days, a night or afternoon at Tiestos will give you a taste of Cuenca at once modern and authentic.