A week later, this morning I am trying the rainforest a second time. I was convinced the Malarone had made me terribly ill last time. So how was I going to go to the rainforest and not get malaria? Paul, Stuart, and Alex all told me they know tons of people who have gone, including themselves, and not gotten malaria. But it is a malaria zone. Well, they say, if you get it you go to the hospital and they cure it. I'm still not convinced. I don't want to get malaria and die. But I also want to go to the rainforest. And I don't want to get sick from Malarone, because I can't go if I'm that sick.
Finally when I'm feeling better I take another pill. Then the next day I take another. I maybe feel a little lightheaded sometimes, but it's ok. I'm not sick like I was. I take another. Still fine. Then we come to today. Still fine. I am heading back to the rainforest!
I get back on the Quito bus. It's a beautiful day, you can see the entire snowy irridescent peak of mount Cayambe from my backyard. Y'know. Just my yard. And there is fog hanging low around the foothills. I had intened to read on the bus to avoid the constant vigilence of the groutesque peril. Oh yeah, that's what I call the bus rides here. Terrifying cliffside rides. But the world is so beautiful this morning that I'm brave enough to look. I watch my mountain for as long as I can before it dissapears behind new mountains we're driving through. Then I daydream about all the dinner parties I´m going to have this fall.
Quito has redone its bus system. So I get out at Carcelen, and get on a new trolley. I ask the lady next to me if we're near the new station I need to go to. Not yet she says, and I know you, you're from Picalqui too. I sold you the honey a few weeks ago. I hadn't recognized her, but her honey was delicious. Weird that we run into each other in Quito. She helps me get off this trolley and onto another. I need to go into the old town to pay for my tour. I need to take this trolley one stop past my stop, switch lines, and then get off, because the line splits and there are stops you can only get to from one direction or another. I get lost. Then I find the tour office.
I am here a day early, the tour coordinator informs me. This is mortifying. I thought it was the 22nd. Luckily we work it out, and I can take a tour starting tomorrow. My plan had been to continue on from Quito to Lago Agrio, from where the tour departs, stay at a hostel for the night, and start the tour in the morning. Paul convinces me to take a night bus, so I have the whole days in Quito to explore. I leave my backbpack in his office and start off.
The first stop is to buy a bus ticket from this bus place the tour guy gives me directions to. I get lost, then find it. Don't have enough money for a ticket. Have to go to the bank and go back. Buy a ticket.
It's lunch time, so I find the Indian food place Mike and I ate at last time in Quito, and I get food. The server asks me where I´m from. The United States. I love the United States! I have never been there but I want to go! He speaks English, is Pakistani and has moved to help his friend, the resteraunt owner, as a server, because, he explains, Ecuadorians just don´t understand the importance of his business and sometimes just would not come to work. We talk about America, how his brother was a successful businessman there in NYC until he was arrested and deported for being an illegal alien. About how after 9-11 it is very difficult to get a visa. I try to explain to him that I am frustrated with many of my country´s policies about war, oil, agriculture, the environment, but he doesn´t really understand. America is great because it controls the world. Anyway, he is going to go to America someday and prove that country wrong, prove that he can be a successful Pakistani business man.
The conversation moves onto food, how good Indian food is, and I say yes, I am actually trying to learn how to cook Indian food. He invites me to have a cooking lesson in the resteraunt. I make a deal, say, if I come back, can I cook my own dinner as a lesson? Of course I can, he says. So I leave with some time on my hands before dinner. I go to the website for tourism in Quito, and pick out the museam of contemporary art. I get lost on the way there. When I get there, it turns out that the museam is dedicating its first year and a half to the Quiteño revolution, how Ecuador gained its colonial independence. That´s great, very cool parallels between America, France, and Latin America, which I can read in Spanish, but not the art I was looking for. It is nice to do some reading in Spanish, because I´m so much more advanced on paper. Reassuring, because I never read in Spanish, I just talk. I´m starting to feel sick, so I head out for my second choice museum, which has an archaeology exhibit and a gold room that is supposed to be phenomenal.
I head to the museam, get lost on the way. Are you noticing a theme? When I get there, there is an hour until closing. Now, I have never been a huge fan of indigenous art, I´m more of a modern kind of girl. But let me just say I fell completely in love. I don´t know what it is, but it´s so expressive and mystical and just amazing. I plan on going back to the museam, a second time when I have more time and am not feeling so yucky.
So now it´s time for dinner, and raining very lightly. I walk back to the resteraunt, and the owner comes out and greets me. I ask him if I can have my cooking lesson now. He explains to me, as politely as possible, that of course the kitchen is busy and they are cooking for the guests. When he turns away, I walk out. I feel absolutely humiliated. Was the server just hitting on me, hoping I´d come back? Even if he wasn´t, did I seriously and naively believe that some resteraunt chef would let me into his kitchen and give me a cooking lesson? I mean, Ecuador is a friendly place with laxer rules, but I feel really stupid. I go to try and find another resteraunt for dinner. I turn down one because it´s menu is too ridiculously complex and lushly gourmet even for me. The dishes are called things like ¨Your blue suede shoes¨ and other names that have nothing to do with what food is in them. I finally settle on this cafe that is probably the equivilent of Panera in the states, but it has those cool heater things on the sidewalk so you can eat outside even though it´s rather chilly. I had hoped, of course, that I might get a meal wherein I am eating alone and the waiter walks up to me and says, excuse me, that gentleman over there would like to buy you a drink, and I look over and see this incredibly deboniar twenty-four-year-old and you know, the whole shebang. But no, I just feel really crappy and have a mediocre dinner which somehow comes to 12 dollars.
It´s dark, so I plan to take a taxi back to the tour office, where I can wait at the hostel upstairs´s bar until the guy gets back to take me to the bus station for the eleven thirty night bus. I flag a taxi, ask how much it costs. 12 dollars. Now, if I walk, there is a significant chance I might get robbed, but honestly, if a 12 dollar 7 minute taxi ride isn´t robbery, I don´t know what is. So I take the walk. I put on my mean face, which either makes me look really really mean or really really terrified. On my way, I pass by a nice looking tourist looking man studying a map. I stop and ask him in English what he´s looking for. Not that I´m familiar with Quito besides having been lost in it all day. We bend over his map together, tracing where we are, where he needs to go. I give him some advice, he thanks me, we wish each other luck, and we part. I feel a lot better now. It was a lot less exiting than sharing a romantic dinner with a handsome stranger, but it was exactly what I needed.
On the last of the three trolleys I need to take, I realize I have made a mistake in the directions I give him. I feel terrible about that.
I get to the hostel just fine, and end up chatting for a few hours with some other travellers who are very cool. I feel a little sad I´m missing out on the whole traveling thing- people ask me where I´ve been so far and I say oh, Quito and Otavalo. I´m a volunteer. But then this one kid reassures me I´m not missing much. And he´s right- this hostel seems really fun because it seems like college, but I´m not here for more of what I´ve got at home.
When the time to go rolls around, I almost don´t go. I feel sick, but I decide to push through, because it´s now or never. And I know if I was at home, sitting in front of the fireplace with some tea, I wouldn´t feel so bad because I wouldn´t be overanalyzing it. So I get on the bus and I go.
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