Monday 09 November, 2009
Alright, so it's not TECHNICALLY on the border... that honour goes to Rumichara, surely an even bigger shithole but half the fun. Ipiales is 2.5km away and the main town straddling the divide between Colombia and Ecuador.
I spent all day yesterday getting here, almost eight hours on a little buseta that hooned along cliff edges and narrow bridges, fearing for my life more than once - although that's a common theme of my South American bus journeys, and I should be well used to it by now.
I arrived at sunset and got me to a hotel, Colombians having warned me not to trot around at night alone with all my stuff looking lost - sound advice, considering the ridiculous amount of stuff that I am currently lugging around, the Colombian postal system being prohibitively expensive and my new studded leather Zara heels too precious to entrust to anyone else. (Yes, I bought heels. Three months ago. No, I haven't worn them. They are magnificent. That is all.)
A Colombian Lurch by the name of Jose checked me in. He wasn't the chattiest of fellows, the only words he actually uttered being "eleven thousand pesos." Still, Jose wasn't going to get me down - I had a triple room and a TV to myself for all of $6.
8.00pm: Even the LP didn't have much positive to say about Ipiales. What they don't know is the shittier the town, the more I like it. I venture out for dinner into the freezing cold... a neat 8*C in good old Ipiales, yow.
8.15pm: I do a lap of the less than inspiring main square and settle on a Piko Riko chicken joint. They bring me a set menu with a soup for starters. It's a godsend to warm me up, and as an added bonus I see that they have given me not one but three chicken talons. How kind. There is nothing like spooning up some piping hot soup only to be confronted by a scaly claw with nails, rudely chopped off at the ankle.
8.20pm: My main arrives. I decide to leave the talons in favour of eating the literal half a chicken they have plonked on a plate with some bloodstained rice, frijoles, salad and a potato that seems to have been plucked directly from the ground and delivered to my plate, dirt and all. Half a chicken. However, it's tasty and filling and only sets me back by about $4. I love Colombian food, I really do.
10.30pm: Bored. Lonely. There are no other travellers in this town; I think they all take off as soon as they arrive. For company I watch some ludicrous Richard Gere film where he is tried in a preposterous Chinese court and the Chinese characters speak English to each other.
11.00pm: I spend the night huddled in bed in my leggings, socks, hoodie, sleeping bag and the blankets from all three beds in my room. It's cold.
8.00am: I wake up early, ready to get a head start on the Santuario de las Lajas, an amazing church built onto a suspension bridge in a ravine just outside of town. I wander out down the main street and find that I have been a little ungenerous to Ipiales - it's a lot bigger than I thought, and this morning it's buzzing. There are a lot more indigenous faces in the street, which I haven't really seen since Guatemala or maybe Nicaragua. Everyone looks windswept and ruddy-cheeked and they are all rocking woolen ponchos. The shops lining the crooked street are the usual: Super Maxi American Discount Store, three enormous blinking casinos, religious kitsch cake shops, a store called Luber that makes me laugh - lube? lover? lube-lover? who knows - an underwear store with an impressive display of croptops for the premature sexualisation of the town's prepubescent girl population, and the same platic-smelling made-in-China clothing stores that you see everywhere. My favourite-named store is "Jesus's Hairdressing". So this is where our Lord and Saviour has been all this time; I guess hairstyling is a step up from washing the feet of his disciples. I hope he doesn't specialize in Latino mullets. That truly would be a sin.
9.00am: The citizens are keen to be of service, bellowing "a la ORDEN!" so aggressively that I am too scared to enter their stores. "Siga, señorita, siga siga SIGA," commands a man who wants me to peruse his hot pink and yellow onesies. Maybe later.
Here's the problem: I only have 11,000 pesos left, which is about $6. That needs to buy me a meal, transport to and from the church, and a cab to the border. It's going to be tight, but I really don't want to get money out, since my Australian bank (looking at YOU, ANZ) is essentially mugging me for $20 every time I get cash out. I would do better if the local kids just held me up every time instead.
Here's the other problem: despite the extreme friendliness of the locals in helping me find the bus stop, there are no buses to the sanctuary today, due to a cycling competition. Of course, on the one day I am in town and keen to get an early start; I tend to specialise in poor timing. A taxi would cost me 7,000, which is out of the question and also not possible, I discover, since the highway to the sanctuary is totally closed until either 11am or 1pm, no one seems quite certain.
(There is actually a third problem, and that is that my nose is running copiously and I also need to go to the loo and not only am I low on tissues but my hostel's price for the night evidently does not cover toilet paper, which I don't want to spend my scant remaining pesos on, but that is really another story for another time. I am pilfering serviettes and cursing myself for being caught unprepared and with my pants down, so to speak.)
9.30am: I decide to embrace my own unfortunate sense of timing and use the next four hours to appreciate Ipiales. Four hours is a very long time. I discover a second, grander square with an impressive Russian-style church, and the market - a bleak concrete square dotted with wooden stalls with slabs of raw meat hanging on hooks. Just the smell I was after on an empty stomach at 9am. Three street dogs get into a ferocious brawl and people watch disinterestedly. I skirt around them and wander up a street full of fruit-sellers. Oooh, it looks good... too bad I can't afford any of them.
9.40am: I give in and decide to get breakfast. The only thing that every sit-down cafe I find offers is eggs, and they proudly deliver me a plate of pale scambled eggs and even paler french fries. "There you go, Mami!" the girl says cheerily. Mmm. I do however wash it down with a lulo juice. Colombia has the most amazing selection of fruits I have ever seen, many of which I had no idea how to eat (and let's be honest, still don't). Lulo is kind of like a sweet tomato, and its juice is delicious. Last week I bought some at the supermarket and not knowing how to eat it, sliced it up and chomped in. It was bitter. "Wow," said Clara, "I've never seen anyone eat lulo like this." She was intrigued. Why, how do you eat it? I asked, keen to learn from a Colombiana. "As juice," she shrugged.
And indeed they seem to blend up all their amazing fruits into juice, rarely eating them raw or plain. Only one fruit per juice. "I got my juice guy to do something amazing the other day: he made me juice with strawberries AND bananas!" Sarah once said triumphantly back in Medellin. And none of them make it into fruit salads, that seemingly reserved for boring staples such as apples, mangoes, papaya and strawberries.
10.30am: A group of people have lined an arbitrary strip of street that smells strongly of urine to watch the cycling race zip past. Well, zip might be the wrong word - every now and then a cyclist comes wheezing up the hill to a smattering of applause. I am shocked to see that they are women, braids peeking out from under their helmets. I've been in machista countries for too long, it would seem. Women can cycle too!
The woman next to me has dolled herself up for the occasion, with red red lips that are lined in black pencil, an alarming sight at best. I do appreciate her sense of occasion.
11.40am: The road is still closed; it is now almost midday. "Twelve-thirty, maybe one," says a traffic cop when I ask him when it will reopen. Sigh. I go for another walk. This time I find another market, the key goods on sale being gumboots and knives. These are a practical people.
12.30pm: Internet. Seriously, four hours is hard to fill when you have nothing to do. A little indigenous girl who is maybe three trots up to me. "What are you doing?" she demands to know. Writing an email to my mama, I tell her. "Scribendo," she tries to repeat thoughfully. She smears her lipgloss on me and runs off chortling.
1.00pm: Finally, the road is open. I hop into a colectivo taxi that zooms out of town, along the edge of a road that looks across rolling patchwork green fields as far as the eye can see. Talk about picture perfect. What's not so picture perfect: the looming clouds on the horizon.
1.10pm: I am dropped of the road and walk down a winding cobblestone path towards the ravine. I pass a waterfall. I can't see the sanctuary. What if it's crap? Did I spend all day here for nothing? I round a final corner and wow - there it is. It is not crap. The cathedral was built in 1916 of grey and white stone and is gothic and imposing, looming out of the side of the valley. A river tumbles over rocks far down below the arches of the bridge. There are pigeons cooing in the courtyard and monks. Real monks. And nuns. I am a fan of people in religious dress and this excites me, but I am not wily enough to snap pictures of them. Monks!
Apparently in 1754 an indigenous woman and her deaf-mute daughter took refuge between the jagged stones of the valley during a storm, when the girl spoke, saying, "the mestiza is calling me," pointing to an image of the Virgin that was illuminated by lighting. I'm not really clear on why the Virgin was a mestiza, but anyway, her vision was basis enough for the church to be built there, a flimsy reason at best. But I can't begrudge that; the cathedral is spectacular.
1.30pm: It's fitting that, as some kind of meteorological homage to the deaf-mute and her vision, it begins pouring with rain, thunder booming in the distance. It will take more than a storm to make a believer out of me, but I see my cue to leave and scurry up the hill into a colectivo.
1.45pm: I'm sharing a taxi with a young indigenous guy, a man who squeezes in the back with us, his daughter on his lap, and his wife in the front cradling a statue of Jesus as though it were her baby. Lightning strikes around us and visibility through the rain is poor so we creep along at a snail's pace.
2.00pm: We arrive back at the colectivo depot. "Here we are," our driver says. It's hailing. Everyone laughs - there is no way any of us are getting out in this storm. We all sit huddled in the cab, watching the rain through the foggy windows. The little girl falls asleep. Presumably, so does the baby Jesus.
2.30pm: I make a run for it, into a cafeteria with a huge painting of Garfield on the wall. My soup again contains chicken feet; always a delightful surprise.
3.00pm: I farewell Ipiales, which is once again blue-skied and sunny, and get a taxi to the border. This is my final border crossing; I am a little sad.
3.30pm: Am highly unimpressed with this border. Not only did both Colombia and Ecuador give me a stupid computer scan instead of proper stamps in my passport, but the Ecuadorian guys are rude, craning to watch a telenovela behind my head, and laughing at me when I try to exit by a locked door. Fuckers. I am officially on Colombia's side in the cold war between the two countries, and all it took was a couple of rude border guards to get me there. I hope they're happy. Humph.
4.30pm: Get a minibus to the bus terminal on Ecuador's side so I can finally leave this border zone that I have been hovering around for the past 24 hours. Over a dozen of us are crammed together in a more than friendly way. The people sitting around me are very sweet, asking where I'm from and complimenting my Spanish. "Will you take me back to Australia with you?" jokes one man. The lady next to me has been travelling for fourteen hours straight, since 3am and is munching on an iceblock for strength.
5.00pm: At the bus terminal, I farewell my new friends and am rushed off the bus, my pack grabbed by a local tout who hurries me onto the 5pm bus to Otavalo, the town I am headed to. I rush after him, concerned that he might be making off with my pack: this is not something that has ever worried me before but I've heard a lot of stories about theft in Ecuador and those Zara heels mean too much to me.
5.15pm: A whiny teenager gets on the bus, seen off by her father. "Oh, I wanted a window seat, I hate the aisle!" she moans, looking pointedly at me. If this little whelp thinks that bitching and moaning will make me give her my window seat, she has another thing coming. I have shifted women five times her size from my rightful seat and I'm not giving up without a fight.
5.30pm: Our bus is pulled over on the side of the highway by the national police who search it, who knows what for. Two shaggy-haired stoner types are escorted off the bus and searched more thoroughly, along with their luggage. The police man comes down past us, and looks at my passport. "Get off the bus, and bring all your bags with you," he tells me. Is he serious? In my previous experience if anything I have been exempted from searches because I am a tourist and they want no trouble. Not this guy.
The eyes of the whole bus are on me as I drag my stuff down the steps and wait by the baggage compartment. This guy doesn't know what he's asking. He doesn't know how finely-engineered my packing is; he doesn't know how long it will take to go through my stuff while the whole bus waits. A German Shepherd prowls the edge of the highway next to me. I might be projecting but I think he's looking at me suspiciously.
6.00pm: The conductor comes round the side of the bus, out of breath from having to assist the police searching the other luggage hold. "Vamos!" he says to me. Not so fast, I say, the cops want to search me and all my stuff. He visibly deflates.
The policeman comes leisurely down the stairs. The conductor confronts him, pointing at me, asking if a search is really necessary. "Look at her!" he exclaims. I find this hilarious. The policeman has obviously forgotten about me, and with a languid wave of his hand, lets us go. I get back on the bus. I smile at the whiny girl next to me and she rolls her eyes: I know she was hoping I would be arrested so she could have the window seat. Not likely, missy.
8.30pm: Finally, finally arrive in Otavalo. I am dropped off on the side of a highway outside of town in the dark. This is clearly the middle of nowhere. "The town's that way," the conductor said, with an expansive wave of his hand. Me and all my bags try to hail one of the few passing cabs, to no avail.
8.40pm: Thankfully a taxi stops. There is an indigenous woman in the backseat who grins and tells me that we came on the same bus, and wants to know my life story. We drop her at home with a big wave, shouting goodbyes.
8.50pm: I unleash one of my patented Great Dane woofing coughs. "Oh," says the taxista, "that sounds bad. What you need is a special Ecuadorian drink, a liquor. It will fix you no problem." What is it? I ask. "Pure alcohol. We can set it on fire! I'll bring you a bottle. One gulp of that and you will be 100%." I didn't take him up on it, but now I think maybe I should have. Welcome to Ecuador, we'll drink to your health.
No comments:
Post a Comment