There and Back Again

Whew! That was quite a trip. Two weeks is not quite enough time to acclimatize for big gains in altitude, but when our guide is ready to go with us . . . well, we have to go. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that our guide is actually going to show up. Daniel didn’t leave us completely out to dry, though. What he did is tell his father-in-law, Don Gerardo, to come meet us in his place. We hadn’t met Don Gerardo before, so we had no idea who this guy was who said he was going to take our stuff to Patul. Wishing to avoid the disaster of our November trip, we asked if he knew Dona Maximina and if she happened to be at home this time. His response was something along the lines of, “Yeah, she’s home, and I’m her husband.”

So Don Gerardo loaded our stuff onto a horse and we started our hike. Even needing to take stops every 10 minutes or so, Chelsea and I still kept a pretty good pace. Unlike Daniel, however, Don Gerardo had no intentions of being a guide for us. His plan was to cart our stuff over to his house and then take care of normal business over there. After following us for about 30 minutes, he got bored with us and decided to ride on ahead. The whole purpose of the trip is to gather data along the way, so we had no chance of even staying close to him. We just had to hope that he was who he said he was and not somebody who was going to ride to Guayaquil and sell our things there. We had a fairly successful day of collecting tadpoles and finding Pristimantis frogs underneath rocks, but the cold weather and mix of rain and hail kept us from doing as much searching as we would have liked.

When we arrived to the house in Patul, we were grateful to see Don Gerardo there to greet us with his two boys, Hector and Eduardo. He invited us into the kitchen for some hot cinnamon tea. It had continued to rain all afternoon, so our jackets and rain pants were pretty wet. We took some time to rest and warm up, but then we had to head back out and use the remaining daylight to look for the main attraction, the black harlequin frog. We spent another hour getting rained on, but we were able to find an adult male in the same exact spot where we had found males during our two previous trips. Encouragingly, we also found the two data loggers that we placed back in November (one in the river, one in a plant). Even though the river recently swelled up pretty big with the onset of the rainy season, we secured our loggers well enough that they stayed right in place. They will give us important information that has never been collected before about the temperature of the water in the river where these critically endangered frogs are breeding.

Once we returned to the house, things really got interesting. She mentioned it in passing a bit earlier in the afternoon, but at this time Chelsea’s headache and nausea were getting worse. Not hungry for dinner, she went into our room to lie down. I gave her an anti-nausea pill, but she threw it up about two minutes later. Perfect. Headache, nausea, and vomiting. Three symptoms of Acute Mountain Sickness. Exactly what we hoped wouldn’t happen. The best treatment for AMS is simple: descend to a lower elevation. With it being dark already, that simply wasn’t possible. You also have to go up nearly 2000 feet before you can start going back down to Cuenca. Dona Maximina graciously offered Chelsea chamomile tea and a mint balm to rub on her forehead, but those really weren’t going to help anything.

I ate a quick dinner and went back to join Chelsea. We were both in our sleeping bags with the light out at 8:00. But the fun didn’t stop there. Do you remember the last time you woke up in the middle of the night for a number 2? I hope not, because they taught me in medical school that this is not a normal thing. I battled some pretty wicked gas until about 1:30, at which point there was no longer any stopping that train. Mercifully, the rain had finally stopped by that time, so I was able go out and do the business without getting my sleeping clothes soaked. The remainder of the night passed by uneventfully. But the fun still hadn’t stopped.

The room where we sleep also functions as the family’s closet. They have about a hundred different shirts, pants, and jackets hanging from the beams so they stay dry. The boys needed some fresh clothes before they went to school, so they bounced in to wish us good morning while fighting over who got which pair of pants. We got up a little while later, and Chelsea was able to eat some breakfast. She told me that her nausea wasn’t gone, though, so we made the decision to return to Cuenca that day. Don Gerardo said that he would go look for horses and that we could leave around 1:00 when the boys were back from school. Chelsea was going to rest and pack, and I was going to go out to do some more field work. Before I could do that, however, nature decided to call again. Urgently. Due to the high level of the river, I essentially had to complete a mini Presidential Fitness Test in order to get to the clump of trees on the other side that functions as the bathroom during the day.

I went and did some field work, Chelsea rested and packed, and Don Gerardo found about 15 horses (all of which he brought to his yard). We waited until the boys got home from school, and then Hector rode with us back into the park. While he stayed with us longer than his dad did, Hector also got tired of going slow. Once we started climbing and the temperature started dropping, he kicked the horses ahead and was out of sight within 10 minutes. We were a little annoyed at having all our stuff take off ahead of us again, but we were pretty sure that he would wait for us by the road. Despite not feeling well, Chelsea was able to make pretty good time and really didn’t have any problems on the hike back. Once we got down to our apartment in Cuenca, we enjoyed being able to take nice, hot showers. After having breakfast for dinner (my favorite), we tucked in for some much needed rest. We awoke on Friday morning feeling much better, and we set about making it a day of recovery.

We also gave our car a long overdue rejuvenation. It had been struggling to go uphill since we got back, and we do a lot of going uphill. We dropped it off at the mechanic so he could do an “ABC” tune-up. An oil change, new spark plugs, a fuel injector cleaning, and $208 later, our car was back to its best. We enjoyed gliding easily up the mountain to Mazan for some field work that afternoon. Our good luck with exiguus continued as we recaptured the little “macho” underneath the same plant. We also found just our 2nd Pristimantis criophilus hanging out under a rock. We then capped off the day by celebrating our 7 year / 9 month anniversary combo with a dinner at Tiestos, our favorite restaurant in Cuenca. After enjoying bread with a range of salsas including a delicious eggplant concoction, we ordered steak in a mushroom and bacon sauce. Incredible! This was probably one of the best two or three meals I’ve ever eaten. And all for just under $30 for the two of us. That’s hard to beat.

We went for more excitement on Sunday by attending the big Deportivo Cuenca vs. Barcelona soccer match. No, this is not Barcelona from Spain. This Barcelona does, however, have the most fans and the most Ecuadorian championships of any team in the country. Since Cuenca and Guayaquil are only about 4 hours apart, there is quite a rivalry between the two clubs. Cuenca’s stadium is pretty small, but it was packed almost full with over 15,000 fans in attendance. At Diego’s invitation, Chelsea and I sat with him in the general section during this game last season. The line to get in was about an hour long, we had to sit in the bottom row, and I had a little Ecuadorian man’s shoulder pushing into my ribs for the entire match. To make the fun complete, they only let the Cuenca fans leave through 1 door in order to prevent clashes with the Barcelona people. The ancient Romans would probably pee their pants from laughing so hard if they saw how inefficiently this little stadium empties. Basically, 7000 people going through one gate leads to a mosh pit which Chelsea did not at all enjoy.

This time we sprang for the slightly more expensive mid-level seats. This side of the stadium is covered by a roof, and the people there were civil enough not to sit on top of me. It was a pretty cagey match, made even worse early in the 2nd half by a red card for one of Cuenca’s defenders. Rivalry games in soccer, kind of like distance races in the Olympics, can often be boring because the players don’t want to take the risk of making a mistake that may cost their team the game. The game ended in a 1-1 draw, with Cuenca scoring on a penalty kick late in the 1st half and Barcelona forcing in a header which bounced off a Cuenca player (after they had the advantage of playing 11 vs. 10). I think Chelsea and I agree that the most entertaining moment came early in the 1st half when Barcelona thought they had scored on a header from a free kick. Their fans started going crazy, but the referee called a foul on one of their players which ruled out the goal. Once the Barcelona fans sat back down, several Cuenca fans behind us got up and started dancing in celebration of their opponent’s false excitement. Hilarious.

We found two tiny, new little exiguus frogs on Monday. This is excellent news, because it is a sign that the population is still reproducing. Chelsea’s main objective is trying to convince Jose and the national park to make an effort to get the trout out of the river where these endangered frogs are breeding. These trout were introduced by the Peace Corps in the 1960’s without the knowledge that they can be very harmful to frog eggs and tadpoles. Hopefully we’ll be able to get the park to respond and make an effort to conserve this incredible piece of diversity which they’re responsible for protecting. Our next trip is coming soon, as we’re planning on going to check on our harlequin frogs (and deliver vitamins and toothbrushes) in the rainforest this Thursday. Chelsea has recently been working hard on several grant applications and presentation submissions, so that’s why I’ve been doing all the writing. You should get to hear from her soon.