So last weekend I took "vacation" from my office and took off for San Juan Bosco for Thanksgiving, a little town in Morona Santiago in el Oriente. I started the trip off inauspisciously by buying a ticket on the wrong bus to the wrong town, mainly because I failed to read the email of Dave, the volunteer who was organizing it. Of course I was not able to return the bad ticket and I now have an $8.50 ticket to Macas, which I think is about twelve hours away. I have to use by Saturday. Sad. I don´t think that is going to happen.
San Juan Bosco is 36 miles from Cuenca, but the bus ride is 6 hours, and I couldn´t fathom how this could really be true until we hit a gravel road about an hour after leaving and started to wind through green hills. It was really beautiful and really slow. On hour number four, we came over the ridge of a mountain and a beautiful valley opened up to us, with a tiny shimmer of white in the bottom of it. That is San Juan Bosco, they told us, another two hours from where we were. Once we got to the town, being the the valley was just as stunning, the first morning after we arrived I found myself in blistering sun, surrounded by towering green ridges, one piled up behind the other, covered by clouds. Everything is topped off by the Pan de Azucar, or Sugarloaf, which is this Close Encounters like mountain that stands over everything. The volunteers who lived there had engaged pretty much the entire town in welcoming us, the first night the jovenes cooked dinner for us at the colegio or the high school.
Thanksgiving Day Dave and his family had set up ovens and gas ranges by this picnic site at the fairgrounds along this lovely green river and cooked turkey and comote, a purple root vegetable with marshmellows and lots of vegetables and stuffing. I got suckered into being responsible for making pumpkin pie, only everyone´s most basic and traditional comfort food. No pressure there. It turned out well although I had a couple bad moments carrying around two bags of pumpkin that I packed in from Cuenca. They were starting to turn in the jungle heat, and I don´t think I will ever forget the smell of rotting pumpkin. It was the smell of my social demise during the weekend. I had visions of being remembered as the girl who tried and failed to make that terrible pumpkin pie. Once I finally got the meat into a pan of boiling water, I calmed down and we sat at the picnic table and made pie crusts. It turned out that there was enough for everyone and it tasted really good. Really people made a bg show of how delicious it was, although I don´t think the Ecuadorians really understood the appeal of pastel de calabaza.
Friday Dave´s family roasted a pig for us by another river and we saw them clean entrails out in the river and I saw the creation of my arch enemy, morsilla, as they filled the intestines with cabbage and onions. I didn´t stick around for that though, but took off with some Sarah, who lives in a little city near Cuenca and Zoe to her site in Bomboiza, which is a Shuar community near Gualaquiza. I mean we tried to take off but, as my Zoe said, no one really ever seems to leave San Juan Bosco and it was more complicated than we thought. We had plans to catch the 4:30 bus and got to town plenty in advance only to find that we bus had come early, which of course almost never happens. We sat on the corner of the road to Gualaquiza and made friends with the neighborhood boys. (Digression: I´m reveling in the local color a little here, so bear with me. The whole weekend, I had this sense, this is the real Peace Corps experience, and my life in my pretty, modern, well organized, Cuenca is just a mere shadow of it. The grass is always greener, right?) Eventually we did catch a bus to Gualaquiza, and another bus out to my Zoe´s village, and I when we got off at the road that you walk out to where they live, we were completely floored by how dark it was. As we were falling asleep Zoe said reassuringly that she thought all the tarantullas had been killed when she fumigated, but despite that, I slept soundly and woke up to the light shining through the cracks of the cabin walls.
The Shuar are an indigenous group that live in the Oriente, and I think we had some ambitious plans to visit the cultural center, but we ended up lying around with the Zoe and the other volunteer, Ulla in their lovely homes, making spaghetti and hot chocolate and recovering from the accion de dar gracias. In the evening it was time to get into Gualaquiza to catch a night bus back to home, and we scored a ride with the principal of a school who immediately divined we were Peace Corps volunteers and talked non-stop for the entire ride about how he learned english in Ossining, which was a great relief to not have to make awkward conversation. Ulla gave us a muscle relaxer to split during the night bus, and Sarah and I agreed that we both could have stood to be a little more relaxed. At one point during the night the driver asked everyone to get off so that the bus could get up the hill, but we arrived safely and slept til noon.
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