Saraguro, Ecuador April 12, 1979

I’ve just said farewell to Rachel and Sally, who decided to fly from Cuenca to Peru to save time.  They want to see Macchu Picchu before they have to go back home, in just over a week.  It was a bit of a sad good-bye for all of us – we’d had a lot of fun together.  I’m still more keen to travel overland – by bus, truck or ‘other conveyance’.  I want to see the landscape, and experience more of the rural and remote areas, and peoples, of these countries.  As luck would Michel was heading overland to Peru as well, so we agreed to travel together.  He’s been traveling for quite a while in Latin and South America, is pretty fluent in Spanish, and because of his darker skin and eyes, can almost pass as a local.  He prefers to hitch rides with locals – wanting to have more opportunities to interact with them, and to take advantage of whatever invitations and experiences might arise.  So this morning we stood by the side of the road with our hands out in the South American way, and hoped we’d manage to get as far as Loja.  (And we almost did....)

Our first ride was with Jaime, a young dairy-farmer, wobbling along in his Toyota jeep with completely out-of-balance wheels.  Jaime’s a mechanical engineer by education (UCLA), and a hacienda jefe by choice.  He offered to take us to see his hacienda and as it wasn’t far off the main road we figured why not?  His ‘hacienda’ was an unpretentious wood-frame house with a definite ‘hunter’ atmosphere – walls hung with deer heads, animal hides scattered liberally over the floor, and large sheep-skins draped over every chair.  Tree-trunk tables held big potted plants, mostly ferns.  There was a definite cowboy ambiance as well: an antique stitch-adorned side-saddle hung over a high stool; old horseshoes and spurs hung on horse-shoe nails on the walls along with a leather twitch, and several rawhide whips.  A beautiful gnarled tree branch, smoothed and polished, sprouted from one of the walls, festooned with several ropes of different lengths and thicknesses – some looked well used, others almost new.

 

Jaime showed us his collection of saddles – beautiful fancy western saddles, all stitch-worked and well padded.  He has eight horses, a few of which are Arabs, but we didn’t see them as they were ‘arriba’ in a pasture.  

 

In addition to the rustic cowboy/hunter décor there were some softer touches.  Several vases with flowers, mostly wild.  And also, on every wall, at least a couple of water colours - landscapes of the surrounding terrain, still-lifes of flowers in vases – all painted by the engineer-hunter-cowboy hacienda jefe himself.  He’s also a motorcycle fan: there was a big poster of Easy Rider, framed and prominently positioned on one wall.  Opposite that hung an equally large poster of a horse’s head.  

 

The three of us sat around an old wooden table, sipping a morning café-con-leche and talking about Jaime’s hacienda, his life here, small P politics in Ecuador, the influence of religion – a blend of Catholicism and old indigenous beliefs  – on the people, especially the women, who are mostly subservient.  We talked about the macho culture that dominates most of Latin America.  Jaime’s experience, particularly his time studying in the USA, had broadened his perspective and continued to set him apart from many of his kinsmen.  He’s a vegetarian, a lover of nature, a live-for-todayer, and a traveler at heart.  He’s been to many South American countries, and the USA, where he studied.  He’d like to go to Canada to see the Rockies, maybe on horseback.  As we were leaving he picked up my backpack.  He was surprised at how heavy it was.  ‘What have you got in here?’  When I told him how many books I was carrying, he smiled and said: “yes, that’s good.  But you can also meditate.”  And then we were on our way: he took us back to the main road and deposited us and our backbacks on the side of the road, wishing us a traditional ‘que lo vayan bien’ (I hope it goes well with you), not the more religious ‘vaya con Dios’ (go with God)... .

 

It wasn’t long before we were picked up by a young Latino and an Indio who were traveling in a Datsun sedan.  They took us all the way to Ona – over the 3400 metre pass, across several ridge tops, and through a landscape much drier and very barren-looking indeed.  Ona itself is in a reasonably verdant valley.  A sleepy town with a couple of restaurants and a couple of tiendas.  Traveling salesmen hawking goods from out of the back of a pick-up truck in the main square.  We sat down and had a cola, our presence providing considerable entertainment for the local kids, who apparently had never seen gringos before.  One pink-jumpered kid of about 2 or 3 years old just stood in the doorway of her house and stared at me for about a quarter of an hour.  I was impressed with the length of her attention span!

 

Our next ride, towards late afternoon, was in a ‘Viajero’ bus full of locals.  We got seats in the back row, where we watched as the mountain landscape folded and unfolded around – and BELOW us – far below us.  Throughout the two-hour journey we were winding through rainbow-filled skies – beautiful chimerical rainbows, almost transparent, but very, very near.  I was jointed part-way through the ride by an Indian woman holding a well-swaddled babe – even its arms were bound to its sides (first I’ve seen of that here).  We chatted about our lives, and she told me she had lived in Saraguro all her life, had 12 children, and that the life here was ‘muy tranquillo’ (quiet, tranquil).

 

“Tranquillo, tranquillo.”  An oft-mentioned word used by the Indian people to describe their lives here.  And it and they do seem ‘tranquillo.’  They laugh a lot, and seem unworried by run-away donkeys, crying children, and drunken husbands.  

 

Now we’re in Saraguro where the people wear black ponchos and pants so short that it looks like they are not wearing anything at all underneath their ponchos – almost like English school kids.  Big white broad-brimmed sombreros add to the ‘look’, which is ridiculous really, but interesting.  Women wear dark finely pleated skirts to mid-calf or ankle, and black shawls secured at the front by a stick-pin with a large circular ornamented head – a kind of filigreed silver.  They wear either the black-banded Panama straw hat or the much bigger and broader brimmed felt hat that is indigenous to the area.  Even very small children wear hats.  Tots being carried on their mother’s backs often wear hats just like their mum’s.  If their hats fall off often enough, mum wears both – it’s not unusual to see a woman wearing two, or three, hats.  Great symbolism given how hard the women here work!

                Note:  not my photo - found on internet, attributed to 'Pinterest'