Tour guides in training

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Well, it appears that the title to my last post was oddly prophetic. As many of you have certainly heard, Chelsea and I found out on Match Day that we’ll be spending the next five years in Little Rock, AR. We’ve already been told by a friend who recently spent four years in Alabama, “Congratulations on moving north to the Deep South.” Maybe the next blog will have to be called “Brad and Chelsea’s Arkansan Adventure.”

Following the excitement of Match Day, we received our friend, Amanda, for a visit from Columbus. We were hoping to provide her with a very authentic Ecuadorian experience, but the airlines took care of getting that effort started for us. Apparently Amanda’s flight was delayed out of Chicago and then again out of Miami, causing the flight from Miami to Guayaquil to be on a different plane than was originally planned. The stellar ground crew at Miami, however, put Amanda’s bag on the original plane which ended up heading to Lima, Peru. This probably happened because she was kind enough to bring down our replacement camera, and of course we should be made to worry about the new one being lost, too. So, after only a few hours of sleep, Amanda returned to the Guayaquil airport for the short flight to Cuenca. She took the opportunity to get some rest during the flight, but then, like the rest of the passengers on board, was surprised to find the plane landing not at the Cuenca airport, but in Guayaquil. In admirably Ecuadorian style, the flight crew made no announcement explaining why they had just flown in a 30 minute circle. So the passengers sat and waited, and eventually the crew decided to say that the plane had landed to refuel. Apparently their instruments aren’t good enough to keep them from flying into the mountains when it’s cloudy and rainy. (Upon hearing this story, Fausto told us that a plane crashed into the mountain right by his house in the late 70’s. They still have one of the doors to prove it. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.) Eventually, the rain let up and the plane did arrive in Cuenca two hours late.

We left the airport, and Amanda requested quesadillas for lunch. Well, we don’t know where to get quesadillas here, so she has to settle for empanadas. Our friends at Puro Chile, our new favorite snack (or meal if we order 2-3) served up some great cheese empanadas and immediately earned Amanda’s loyalty. She insisted that she needed to eat them ATLEAST once more before she left Cuenca. After lunch, we did a walking tour of Cuenca. We went to the flower market and the fruit market, and pointed out some of the churches before Amanda decided she needed a nap.

We had planned to go to Cuenca’s best restaurant, Tiestos, for dinner but when our friend Jose informed us that Deportivo Cuenca would be playing soccer that evening we changed our plans. Amanda had picked up a $5 knock-off jersey on the street earlier in the day, and she was excited to support the local team. We enjoyed the game, even though our team didn’t win, and following the game we went to Jose’s apartment to help celebrate a birthday. We arrived there 30 min before Jose, and about an hour before any other guests but we waited patiently and enjoyed ourselves once the other guests arrived. Amanda had a bad headache, and left early. Too bad she didn’t get to enjoy her Ecuadorian Pilsner that night.

The next day we let Amanda sleep in while we did some field work. We picked her up in the afternoon, and went to Tiestos to enjoy lunch since we missed dinner the night before. Despite the rain, Brad played a game of soccer with the boys. Sundays are pretty dull here, so there wasn’t a whole lot of things to see and do.

Monday we went to an orchid garden, and unfortunately got paired up with a group of real enthusianists from Poland. The people were really nice, but their private guide kept talking over the orchid garden guide to translate the Spanish to Polish while Brad was trying to translate to English for Amanda. It just got to be too much! We did get to see some pretty flowers, and afterward we shopped for silver filigree jewelry in Chordeleg. For lunch, we shared a delicious pizza at our favorite restaurant in Gualaceo. It was a nice day, and by the time we got back to Cuenca we were all pretty tired!

Amanda’s last day in Cuenca, we took her to see the frogs at Mazan. She got to see the tadpole project, but we didn’t have any luck finding Atelopus in the field. We had a traditional Andean lunch of pork and a corn called mote, then headed on to the hot springs. We relaxed for a couple of hours, did a little more shopping, then got her to the airport just in time for her flight.

We had a nice visit, and enjoyed being tourists for a couple of days. Now we need to get back to work and catch up on things in the field!