Esperanza, Ecuador March 20-30, 1980
I spent two days in Pasto drinking café con leches and waiting to cross the border into Ecuador (it’s closed on the week-ends). Then enjoyed another fabulous ride – this time in an old bus – through the green and gold rolling hills and fields. I was headed for Esperanza, the magic mushroom capital of Ecuador. Not surprisingly, I arrived to find lots of gringos. Almost as many gringos as locals: this is a very small town. Very ‘tranquillo’, ‘pacifico’, and, according to the gringos, psychedelically beautiful.
Today was a gorgeous day – unusually sunny (it’s often grey, cloudy, misty or raining here), with patchy clouds that hung, rolled, drifted, and wisped their way across the sky. I met another gringa at my hotel and together we walked up and out of town, climbing the mountain behind it into an area where Indios were growing corn. The fields are separated one from another by ridges of earth. And separated from the main path (not a road exactly) by a larger berm topped with big, sharp-pointed and saw-toothed agaves or cactii – they make a formidable barrier.
From the top of the hill we could see Esperanza – a little line of white-white houses with no ‘centre’ to speak of, and the nearby town of Ibarra, a much larger conglomeration of grey and white buildings nestled in one of the hollows between the hills. We watched the clouds as they drifted around the mountain tops, getting caught up in the peaks, then falling lower and lower. We watched the colourful Indian peasant-farmers as they wound their way home over barely perceptible mountain paths – little dots of red and blue drifting down the mountainside. And we listened to the birds and crickets singing and chattering around us, filling the mountain spaces with their songs.
We sat and watched and listened until the clouds rolled in right overtop of us, enveloping us in a dense, chill fog. Gone were Esperanza and Ibarra. Gone the farmers in their fields. Gone even the large and looming mountains directly across from us. All disappeared in the misty white haze. We walked back through a fairy landscape of grass and agaves. Everything seemed to be floating, like a Chinese painting. Tall eucalyptus trees disappearing into the mist, gently swaying delicate green-black against a grey-white sky.
Shortly after we got back, night fell with a surprising suddenness. In the darkness the sounds of frogs and crickets seemed amplified – their clickings, clackings, trillings and hummings filled the air. Here in Esperanza there are few competing sounds – no big trucks or cars, no generators, and very few people out and about – so the little night creatures have the stage to themselves. Even more magical in the almost complete darkness (there are very few electric lights in Esperanza), were the flickerings of hundreds, maybe thousands, of fireflies. I’ve never seen them before. Tiny messengers of light darting through an inky sky. And looking up, their cosmic cousins twinkling in reply. It felt special, like an auspicious sign. And I felt privileged to be here to witness it.
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Today when I came into main room of the little hotel where I’m staying (really just a big house), he was there, sweeping. Usually he sits across the room on a low wooden box, washing the plastic cups and dishes in a pink plastic basin, or peeling potatoes. He wears an old worn and frayed grey-blue suit jacket and a pair of well-wrinkled brown pants. And a hat. He always wears a hat, a golden-coloured straw hat with a small brim, slightly turned down at the front, slightly turned up at the back. He’s always here, in the restaurant-cum-tienda-cum-hotel, working away. I’m pretty sure he lives here, either sleeping in some back room or in a corner of this one. He may be a family member or somehow related. He’s small, almost elf-like, with very small features. He seldom speaks to any of us, but he can talk, and every time I see him he beams and says ‘buenas dias, como esta?’ His smile, more like an elfish kind of grin, spreads out across his face from ear to ear. His sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, the lines of age or maybe care, dissolve into the grin. It lights up his entire being: he sparkles and glows; he is transformed. Once, when work was slow, I watched him as he cuddled the little collie-like dog that lives here, chattering to it as to a child. He looked up at me and smiled, almost conspiratorially: ‘you understand’ his eyes were saying. And I do.
The main room of the hotel-restaurant-tienda is a very small. The bottom third of it is painted strawberry ice-cream pink; the top is brilliant white-wash white. Only one of the walls is ‘bare’, save for five girly calendars courtesy of some Ecuadorian company (Taller Andrade), that decorate the upper half. There are a couple of benches along this wall, and that’s where we, the ‘guests’, usually sit. The wall opposite from this is the most interesting wall to look at. In the middle of it is a narrow and fairly tall set of wooden shelves, five in all, crammed with colourful bottles and jars – instant coffee, honey, cookies, oil. To the left of that an assortment of cooking pots and pans and a red plastic strainer hang from a wooden rack. The wall directly behind them is covered in newspaper, to protect it from the grease – one of the few signs of attempted cleanliness I have seen here. To the right of the tall wooden shelves there is a muddle of things – large metal tins and baskets of fresh vegetables, all stacked on top of one another. Above them hang two very large straw baskets, with their bottoms facing outwards. Perhaps they are just there for decoration? It’s in front of this wall that our little elf-man sits, day-in, day-out, washing and peeling.
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Today I went with a couple of other gringos out into the fields not far from town to look for magic mushrooms. They’ve been here a while and know where the caps are most plentiful (in fields frequented by cows), and where we could relax and enjoy the trip without having to move. It was a fine day, sunny and warm. There were mushrooms everywhere.
My new friends quickly picked enough for all of us, suggesting I start with just one or two, to see what effect they had on me. It wasn’t long before I started feeling the effect: an overwhelming feeling of closeness, intimacy really, to my immediate environment. The grasses and little flowers were brighter, more intense, and somehow alive. I expected them to talk. The trees were beckoning to me, their trunks undulating, their branches waving, pulling me into their tree-essence, like a force field. The agave plant beside me was also drawing me into its spiral of leaf spikes. I swirled into the agave’s technicolour world. Down and down.
Then all colours became so vivid, so intense, that I had to lie down and close my eyes. Still the colours didn’t fade. But now the images changed, and the trip became less friendly and more unsettling. I envisioned people I knew – and others I didn’t – their transformed by age, with hollowed out cheeks, sunken eyes, and deep wrinkles. I opened my eyes and looked at my own hands. They too were old and wrinkled – deeply, deeply veined lined, and vivid colours of purple, blue and green. I lost all concept of where I was or what time it was, and finally ‘came to’ close to nightfall. The frog and cricket sounds, that charmed me just a night ago, tonight sounded more ominous – a hollow wood-knocking sound, like a doomsday clock, tick-tock, tick-tock, pulling me deeper into an existential abyss. I wonder if the mushrooms have shown me another reality – something outside of, apart from, the reality I have known – or just another dimension that’s been hidden – at least from me. .
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This morning I got up early and went by bus to the market in Otovalo – just over an hour away, south, through Ibarra. The market was very colourful, and very touristy. The artisans here are famous for their weavings – large blankets and smaller wall hangings or carpets, bags and purses. The wool is from both llamas and sheep, and is often left in natural colours of grey, brown, and white. The designs are mostly geometric, including flowers and human and animal forms as well as fantastical mythological creatures. I managed to exit the market having purchased only three small purses, but there were some bird and fish weavings that, had they been smaller, I might have come away with.
As I think back on my day, I am overwhelmed with images:
- groups of dark-skinned, dark-eyed, dark-haired Indian women sitting, standing by their wares at the market, selling fruits, vegetables, grains and seeds I’ve never seen, women cooking liver and potatoes over a small fire, or a little gas stove, and offered up on plastic plates, rinsed in buckets of grey, murky water
- coloured drinks in tin pails ladled generously into well-used, grimy glasses
- rickety wooden street-stalls where tired-looking vendors sell matches, cigarettes, scissors, knives and little knick-knacks that nobody needs but everyone seems to buy
- Latino ice-cream vendors holding out fistfuls of red and white ice-cream ‘bars’, a sucre a piece, and selling them to waiting groups of Indians and gringos alike
- Indian girls, wide-hipped in voluminous pleated skirts of brilliant green, white blouses richly embroidered with coloured flowers
- men and women wearing blue or black or red or orange shawls, long black braids cascading down their back from under their black bowler hats
- shawls filled with babies, firewood, onions, corn
- women displaying their wealth and worth with gold jewelry – earrings, necklaces, thick collars of golden beads wound, multiple times, around their necks
- buses crammed with colourful Indians, coming and going from markets, bringing their produce, their hands and faces, their clothes, encrusted with the dirt of their labours
- old, rusty, tired buses struggling up the steep cobblestone streets, belching diesel and noise into the narrow roadway
- country fields enclosed by mud and agave walls, at intervals pierced with wooden lattice-work gates, revealing mud and adobe huts, gardens, fields of corn
- raggedy-clothed children, barefoot and dirty, peeking out from doorways and windows
- old men and women, double-bent, carrying load after load of firewood up and down the mountain
- enticing paths disappearing into forest and mountain landscapes
It’s all so rich, so alive, so real, and so different from anything I’ve seen or experienced before. In my response I am reminded of a quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez ‘100 Years of Solitude’:
“…and he bought an eternal ticket on a train that never stopped traveling. In the post-cards that he sent from the way-stations he would describe with shouts the instantaneous images that he had seen from the window of his coach, and it was as if he were tearing up and throwing into oblivion some long evanescent poem…”
My second experience with mushrooms today was similar to the first. But I had more nausea and paranoia, especially as I started to come out of the ‘magical mystery tour’. And now my kidneys feel swollen – apparently not an uncommon reaction, but not one I’m keen to repeat.
Quite apart from that, we all had quite a scare when we were sitting in a field, having taken some mushrooms, when an Indian man strode quickly towards us, machete in hand. He didn’t seem angry, but his demeanor was serious enough that it startled us out of our reveries. About 20 or 30 feet beyond us he brought his machete down fast and hard on something in the grass. Then he held it up – a green snake – ‘un viper’ he said, ‘muy peligroso’ (very dangerous). He tossed it over a wire fence where it hung as a warning not to other snakes, but to gringos like us, who might not be so lucky. We were all a little shaken, and our day-trip ended early.
So all in all, I’d say it’s time to move on.
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