Santo Domingo

The 6 hour bus ride from Ibarra to San Domingo began on the Pan American Highway, a winding road through the mountains to Quito. The mountains were patch worked with farming plots and pastureland and there were villages in the valleys and there were the blues and greens and yellows and browns that made me remember Cezanne. Any of these mountains seemed as good to me as Saint Victoire and I wondered what Cezanne would have done with them. It was all in his color palette and it was good country, Cezanne country, I thought. Maybe one day when my knees were better I would ride it.

After the sprawling mess that is the city of Quito the road turned west and ascended up into the clouds and it was very green and wet and humid. Then the road wound down from the mountains, descending in elevation towards a river and then we were down along the river bed and following it into the beat-up, traffic congested city of Santo Domingo.

I got off at the small bus station in town and took a taxi through the busy streets, filled with shops and street vendors, to a hotel I had an address for. I booked a room for two nights. The hotel was near an outdoor market and I went out and bought some fresh tomatoes, onion, green and red pepper and a can of tuna fish and made pasta in my room.

Ibarra 3

On the far side of the city there was a small, one room bar that stayed open for men who were committed to their drinking. I was there at this bar, drinking a bottle of Club Verde, seated at a wooden table with an out of work carpenter, a belly dancer, a very drunken photographer, and the Black Poet of Ibarra. The carpenter was called Pablo Guerrero and he had brought me to this bar after the one we had been drinking at had closed.

The belly dancer smiled. She was not at all ashamed of her bad teeth. She wore a green sheer dress and sparkling bikini top and had just performed her belly dance. At the other table four old men leered at her. She was very much enjoying the attention.

The Black Poet of Ibarra stood up and announced that the poem he had been writing for me was now complete. He asked that the pastilla music be turned off. From the pocket of his corduroy jacket the Black Poet produced a piece of broken glass. It looked like the bottom of a Coke bottle. He held the shard of glass to his eye and looking through it he began to read the poem he had written on a small square of paper. The poem he wrote for me was titled “Pedro.”

The Black Poet was old and sad. His wife of 28 years had just died. We talked of Augustine. We talked of Nietzsche. We talked of the Pre-Socratics. For some reason he very much liked Kant. I explained to the Black Poet that the line in his poem about my having pockets filled with wind was going to stay with me a long time.

Ibarra 2

“I also know New York. I also know Miami,” said Don Pepe. “My son worked in those cities.”

Don Pepe was the owner of the Hotel Imbabura. Don Pepe was a very old man with white hair who walked slowly with a cane. His eyes were green and lively and because I could talk Spanish he wanted to talk with me. We had been talking about the United States and about places we had both lived in.

“This is my son, Osvaldo.” Don Pepe introduced me to a man who had approached as we were speaking and I shook his hand and we greeted each other.

Osvaldo had lived in Queens, in Flushing, and had operated a limousine service between the airports. Flushing was an ugly place to live, he said, and he had not liked living there. He worked very hard but New York was too expensive. Then he moved to Miami and lived in Brickell. Brickell was a nice place but he did not like Cubans. The Cubans ran Miami. He did not like Cubans at all. Puerto Ricans he did not like either, although he disliked Cubans more. Miami had too many Cubans and Puerto Ricans. His family was emigrated from Argentina. That made him an Argentine. But the family was originally from Italy. That made him an Italian. Like any good Argentine he did not identify himself with South America.

When I explained I was headed for the Pacific coast, Osvaldo cautioned me about coastal people. Costenos were a different sort. You could not get along with them. I did not quite understand what the difficulty was with coastal people. I mentioned that I quite liked the Colombian costenos that I knew. Osvaldo smiled painfully. He shook his head. He did not like Colombians. I could see he felt badly for me. Clearly I did not know what I had gotten myself into. Osvaldo was an Ecuadorian from the mountains who was also an Argentine but really an Italian, and he could not understand the people of the Caribbean.

***

In the morning Don Pepe stopped me as I was leaving the hotel. “Where do you go today?”

I explained to Don Pepe that I did not really have any plan.

“You must go to Laguna Yaguarcocha today. You must go to see the Angel on the hill that protects Ibarra and you must go to see the lake into which the Incas placed 30,000 dead of the Caras. The lake was turned red by the blood of the slaughter.”

“Perhaps I will go this afternoon,” I told him. A lake of blood did sound interesting.

Don Pepe was disappointed. “To go in the afternoon you will miss the lunch of the tilapia or the trout.”

“The tilapia and trout are fished from the lake of blood?”

“Claro. Of course.”

“I will depart soon,” I assured Don Pepe.

Don Pepe was still disappointed.

“I will depart now for the lake of blood,” I told Don Pepe. “I must not neglect the lunch of tilapia or trout.” I did not want to disappoint Don Pepe.

Don Pepe was very pleased and he shook my hand. “Buen viaje.”

There wasn’t much to see at the lake. The dead bodies are gone and the lake is no longer colored red by blood. A few tour ferries were on the water but there was not much other activity. The restaurants were empty and I stopped in one with the cleanest looking signage. There was no trucha so I ordered the tilapia and a pilsner. It was a very tasty fish. Then I walked around the lake.

The sun was out and a breeze was blowing. I tried to imagine how the Incas got the 30,000 dead Caras into the lake. Unless they were taking the dead out in boats and dumping them, I figured the shoreline would fill up quickly with bodies. There seemed to me a real logistical problem. Was 30,000 dead enough to color the water red? Perhaps it was only colored red along the shore. Anyway, I was sure Don Pepe was going to be pleased with me.

Ibarra

Tulcan

Tulcan was a dump of a town. It was cold and windy at 4000m and it rained daily. It was even colder at night in my drafty room at the flophouse, so cold I slept in my wool sweater and socks and considered getting out my sleeping bag. Each morning I had nine seconds of steaming hot water in the hallway shower before it went icy cold. There was nothing to do in the town but go to the cemetery and look at the sculptured hedges and on the weekends to watch the men play pelota de guante in the park. Tulcan is a border town with Colombia and only exists because of it.

The problem with leaving was the time table of the bus. I wanted to go to Santo Domingo, an eight hour bus ride, but the only bus departed Tulcan at 7:30pm. That would put me in Santo Domingo sometime in the early morning. I imagined getting to the terminal at some ugly part of town, far from the center, and finding no hotels nearby that were open. I imagined the thieves who seeing a gringo with two large cardboard boxes would be drawn immediately to me in order to relieve me of my treasures. I would be too exhausted from the long bus ride to fight them off.

So I considered going to Quito, though I didn’t want to go there at all. From what I had read the city was filled with gringo tourists and a sizeable population of thieves who fed off them. I really had wanted no more big cities and to hear English and I didn’t want to go anywhere I had to worry too much about my boxes. It was hard enough carrying them around.

Each day I would walk to the supermercado in front of the windswept plaza and buy water and supplies, then stop at the bakery on the way back for the small rolls I would eat with my soup or use to make sandwiches. There were two young women and a young man who ran the hotel and they looked at me strangely. They no doubt had never known a gringo to stay so long. Then dressed heavily in my wool, a tshirt wrapped around my neck as a scarf, I would cook up my meal on my camping stove in my room.

 

When I finished eating I would dream of the coast at Canoa. I would see the beach there at the little town and the sun and the heat and how I would go swimming in the morning. Maybe I would try surfing there. I wouldn’t need to wear any wool. But I didn’t know how to get there. If I could get out of the mountains to Santo Domingo, where it was flat, I knew I could ride there. But I was stuck up in the mountains with my bicycle and gear separated into two heavy boxes and I had knee tendonitis. 

Then last night as I lay in bed, the blankets bundled up around me, I remembered Ibarra. I didn’t know anything about that city but I had seen it indicated on the map. I remembered reading it was 2.5 hours south of Tulcan by bus. Perhaps I could travel there first and then take another bus on to Santo Domingo. The idea excited me and I was tempted to get out of bed and begin reading about it. But I talked myself out of it. It was too cold to get out of bed and to read, much too cold, and I was just starting to get warm under the blankets. I could read about Ibarra in the morning. Ibarra wasn’t going anywhere. I slept easily thinking I might soon be leaving Tulcan.

Sure enough Ibarra was beautiful. That’s what the guidebook told me in the morning. The young man at the desk of the Hotel San Francisco told me buses left every 15 minutes direct. I packed my gear back into the boxes and re-taped them and carried them down the four flights of stairs to the street. I waived down a cab and headed to the terminal. I was finally leaving Tulcan.

Cemetery at Tulcan

Las Lajas