Carnaval

Due to unforeseen circumstances, our trip to El Tiink in the rainforest has been cancelled. Really, “unforeseen circumstances” just means normal, everyday affairs. Apparently, everyone in the village is sick with some sort of viral illness, and our local field technician / host said that he’ll call when it’s a safe time for us to come. With that trip cancelled, we developed a plan B for the second half of our week. It actually turned out quite well. We also realized that this weekend is that crazy time of the year known as Carnaval.


Looking back over the past week, we had six encounters with green harlequin toads (Atelopus exiguus). That’s more than half the number of encounters that we had during the whole three months we spent searching in the fall. We had very good luck during February and March last year, and we’re very excited to be having similar results during this year’s rainy season. As a replacement for our rainforest trip, we designed one heck of a Friday for ourselves. Essentially, we went into Cajas and did about half of the hike to Patul in order to search for the frogs that live under rocks at more than 13,000 feet above sea level. Both times now that we’ve been in this area without an Ecuadorian companion, we’ve had to field questions from several different people about where we’re going and what we’re doing turning over rocks. Chelsea really freaked one lady out when she showed her the frog that we’re studying while we were explaining ourselves to her. All in all, we had a successful day.


We would have spent another hour or so in our search, but we had to get back down to the park office for a meeting with Jose. We had planned on discussing the trout removal project in Mazan as well as his schedule of field trips to monitor amphibians all over the park. These are important topics to us, so we made sure to hustle our way back to the car. After a quick hike and a purposeful drive, we arrived at the park office to find it empty and locked. Chelsea gave Jose a call, and he told her that the office closed at 2 PM (our meeting was supposed to be at 3). Upon asking if he could do the meeting down in Cuenca, she was informed that, no, he was busy with other things. Given that we had a professional meeting scheduled, you would think that Jose would’ve informed us of the early office closure in advance. Nope, that’s just not the way things work here. Instead, we’ll have the meeting sometime next week once Carnaval is over. Sorry that you cut short your scientifically important research and made your hike even more grueling in order to make this meeting-that-didn’t-happen? Not mentioned (things don’t really work that way here, either).


As for Carnaval, it appears that all of Latin America has a big celebration before the start of Lent. Brazil’s festivities and parades are famous the world over, but the holiday is very big here in Ecuador as well. I haven’t been to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but I would imagine that the party encompasses more than just Tuesday. Down here they celebrate Saturday through Tuesday, and nobody works on Monday and Tuesday except for the people who make money from the tourism (restaurants, hotels, etc.) There is a big parade of flowers in Ambato, but the main activity of Carnaval in Ecuador is simply throwing water and spraying foam on other people. Interestingly, the people who live on the coast tend to come up to the mountain cities to enjoy the traditional celebrations. The people who live in the mountains, on the other hand, take off and enjoy a long weekend on the beach.


After working at Mazan on Saturday, Chelsea and I decided to head to Yunguilla Valley, a sunny location where many Cuencanos have country houses. Although it’s only just an hour drive from Cuenca, Yunguilla is about 800 meters lower in elevation and the temperatures are usually in the 80’s. We stayed at a hotel here back in the fall, and we planned on visiting for the day to use the very nice pool. Yunguilla is a huge valley, and we enjoyed the views on our drive down. Until I realized that I forgot my swim trunks. Sitting out in the sun in jeans wouldn’t have been fun for very long, so that pretty much destroyed the swimming pool plans. Chelsea was very nice in the face of my stupidity, and we decided just to drive farther down the road towards the coast. Not too far down the road, however, the highway was closed and we had to take a detour around the construction. This was a detour unlike any the two of us had ever seen before.


Basically, we had to go uphill on a dirt road and snake our way around the hillside. The direction signs were, typically, very poor, and we were definitely not the only people who got lost. We ended up deciding just to enjoy the views and drive around for awhile. After about an hour, we ended up back on the highway and drove down towards the coast a bit more, enjoying the changing landscape as we went. Chelsea wanted to go all the way to Machala, the banana capital of the world, but I really didn’t want to go that far as it was already past noon. I was feeling less than adventurous, we turned around, and Chelsea was justified in being displeased with my wussy behavior. So we went back through the detour of all detours, although a bit more directly this time. Still, it was confusing enough for an Ecuadorian to stop and ask us for directions. The organizational abilities of this race of people are simply legendary. We stopped at a pig roast for lunch, and we finally learned how they prepare the crispy pork skin. From what we saw, they baste it in fat and then blow torch it (and repeat several times). Then they use a knife to scrape off the char, leaving the crispy skin.


On Monday we decided to get into the Carnaval action. On our way to use the internet at the zoo office, we picked up some water balloons from ladies who were selling them on the street. Just one dollar for three shopping bags full of already-filled balloons. We decided to start right away by launching a few out the car windows at people walking along the street. While amusing, this backfired on us when two boys were waiting with a bucket full of water. Seeing our window down, they hurled the water through it and got me so good that I couldn’t see through my sunglasses. With that lesson learned, we took cover in the 2nd story office and utilized the window for our attacks. Some of the balloons broke before we got the chance to throw them, but we were able to get a few people wet as they came walking along the street. Well, at least we had a little fun with the local holiday!