Photos for an upcoming post

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!

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.

Back to Work

After arriving in Cuenca and checking into our oh-so-nice little apartment, we wasted little time in getting back to business. This was, of course, after we enjoyed a lazy Sunday morning. We spent 7.5 hours of our Saturday afternoon and evening driving from Toachi to Cuenca, and it’s not exactly as straightforward as driving from Columbus to St. Louis (for example). Several of the towns we passed through aren’t really into the road sign thing, so we had to do a bit of guessing at certain points. While making our way through the town of Quevedo, a friendly couple on a motorcycle gave us a helping hand. Chelsea hates asking for directions in Spanish, but I made her do it this time! As we continued on, day turned into night to make things a little more fun than they already were. We went through about 15 minutes of pouring rain at 25 mph, and then we enjoyed some thick fog as we started to climb up the western slopes of the Andes. Thankfully the towns closer to Cuenca had good signs, so we made it without too much fuss.

After getting some much-needed rest, we picked up some groceries from Supermaxi to stock the new apartment. Ernesto mentioned that we are close to a co-op market, so we walked over and found that easily (it’s about two minutes away). There we found a paradise of fresh fruits and vegetables at very low prices. Chelsea is really excited about this. We then continued the day’s awesomeness by capitalizing on being able to see at night and to use electronic devices. Our homemade dinner was quite tasty, and the country songs playing from our iPod gave us a little feeling of home.

On Monday morning, we went back to Mazan to visit the frogs. They weren’t, however, quite as excited to see us. We put in a nice solid search, but we didn’t find anything but spiders, lizards, and bugs. I suppose that’s how things go when you’re studying a critically endangered species whose individuals are never longer than 2 inches and live underneath rocks and razor-sharp plants. When we got back to the house, we set about removing things from our room there to bring down to the apartment. We pretty much filled the car, and we still had more things to bring down. For you ladies, I will say that we enjoyed Valentine’s Day with our favorite chocolate cake and a little bit of dancing to Josh Turner (including our wedding song).

Speaking of the car, we decided to give it some attention on Tuesday. Some nice person decided to right “Lavame” (wash me) on it during its stay in Toachi, so we thought we’d grant their request. There just so happens to be a car wash right down the street from us, so we left them the car and made the waiting room our home. Ninety minutes and 8 dollars later, we had a clean car inside and out. Given its two month hibernation while we were in the US, we also figured the car could use a little electrical check-up. The new battery that we bought after the old one died with the car at the top of the road to Mazan during the biggest holiday of the year happened to come with a one year guarantee. This guarantee includes quarterly check-ups. Good for us. So, we pulled into the electromechanic’s (as they’re known here) shop, and a boy who, Chelsea remarked, didn’t even look old enough to drive a car tended to our battery. He also tightened the clamp on one of our radiator hoses because, apparently, we were slowly losing coolant. I’m glad he caught that. I’m also glad that I now know what a radiator hose is thanks to watching Chelsea’s dad replace the radiator on my Accord from approximately 8-11:30 PM on New Year’s Eve.

But back to Ecuador, you say. The aforementioned services would have been free, but Chelsea reminded me to ask if they could replace our burned-out tail light. Sure, they could. In fact, they went ahead and replaced both even though the right one was working. This made Chelsea feel much better. Burned-out headlights and tail lights aren’t really a big deal to Ecuadorians (Ernesto’s tail light has been out since September) because safety isn’t really a big deal to them. I hope Dr. Smith from the Center for Injury Research at Children’s Hospital in Columbus never visits here. Ever. If he does, I’m pretty sure he will be struck deaf and mute for the remainder of his life at what he sees. The police don’t really do anything, either (except take bribes like pros). They just ride around in trucks and on motorcycles all day long, and I’m not sure if anyone really knows where they’re going. In any case, they don’t give people tickets for having burned out lights on their cars.

We spent Tuesday afternoon working on the internet, and we enjoyed another delightful evening in Cuenca. We returned to Mazan the next day, and Chelsea found a little Atelopus exiguus. That always makes it a good day of work for us. We transported down the rest of our things from the research house, and then we walked into the center of town to meet with Ernesto. We all had a good opportunity to catch up on goings on over the past few months. One key development is that Ernesto installed wi-fi in the zoo office, and we are welcome to use it as we like. One piece of bad news is that German stopped collecting data in El Tiink (the rainforest) at the end of January. Using her grant money, Chelsea left enough funds with Ernesto to pay German to gather data on the as yet undescribed Atelopus species during January and February. Because we had to stay for my interview in Richmond, we arrived to Cuenca in the middle of February. In typical Ecuador style, nobody asked us if we had money to keep the project going (which we do), and they just stopped. German will have recommenced the field studies by the time this is published, but we still lost 20 days of data during a time when the frogs should be breeding. Oh well, that’s life down here.

We were tired on Thursday, so it ended up being a rest/computer day. We went back to Mazan on Friday to check on some tadpoles that we are experimenting with in the lab. While Chelsea was in Cuenca this time last year, a momma frog just hopped right into the research house at Mazan. Carlos grabbed her up and gave her a new home in the lab. These tadpoles we are working with are her children. We’re trying to get them to develop and metamorphose into frogs, and they seem to be advancing well in their new conditions. Saturday ended up being a relaxation day, and Sunday we went into Cajas park itself in order to find tadpoles and download information from a data logger that Chelsea left in a pool up there. She commented that this is why she needs a ToughBook laptop, but unfortunately our friend Mohammed bin Zayed’s grant isn’t quite big enough for us to afford one.

We had more luck again in Mazan on Monday: Chelsea found an exiguus frog that is older and more mature than any of the ones we found during the fall. He still isn’t a full grown adult, but we were able to tell that he is a “macho,” as they say here. Good news! We got some unexpected news, however, while checking our email later that day. Apparently, Ernesto was able to work out our next trip to Patul (the tiny little mountain village). He didn’t have any balance left to call us, though, so we found out Monday night that we will be making this 3 day trip on Wednesday morning. Great. So much for our schedule this week.

Our apartment

Our first week back

Right now, we’re sitting at the table of our new apartment while we wait for our car to be washed inside an out ($8.00). While we wait, we thought it might be a good time to reflect on the past week here. We took care of business on Quito, picked up our car in Toachi, and drove the road by way of the coast to return to Cuenca.

While we were in Quito, we stayed with Giovanni and the girls at Casa Marianista. As always, it was an interesting blending of cultures, languages, and personalities. Dinner Friday night was particularly enjoyable because there was a full table: Brother Giovanni, Mayra, Silvia, and Father Cecilio were accompanied by Etilo (from Italy), Mario and Francesca (a father and daughter, also from Italy), and ourselves. As usual, there was pasta, cheese, wine, bread, and an array of fruits on the table. Spanish, Italian, and English were spoken and the switch between languages was fluid. After dinner, we washed dishes together in the kitchen while the older men reminisced and sang songs from a different time.

During our stay at Casa Marianista, we were able to take care of both the things we wanted to do and the things that we needed to do. The first order of business was to deliver the reagent to the Catholic University so that my samples can be processed. While there, we met with Santiago (the professor who runs the lab) and Andrea (the student who will process my samples). We also met with another staff member, Eduardo. Eduardo spent two field seasons at Mazan studying Atelopus exiguus (I know it’s been awhile, this is the cute little green one with the yellow belly). We met to discuss a publication we are planning to write among several of us who have studied this same species during the past 30 years.

The next order of business was to visit the consulate and jump through all necessary hoops to make our visas valid. You have to get a card called a censo, but it isn’t as easy as walking into the office and asking for one. First, you walk into this crazy, overwhelming room where there are desks and people and you’re not exactly even sure which people go with the desks. Then, none of the desks are labeled correctly, so when you ask where you need to be you are shuffled over to a line, only to wait in it until it is your turn when they tell you to go to another line. Then, you get to the correct line and they tell you that you need to make copies of this and that, and to get a folder , an envelope, and a copy of something to show that you have a place of residence (e.g. an electric or water bill). So finally we get all of our things in order, we wait in line again (this time we meet some other nice folks, a couple of girls from Belgium, a girl from England, and a guy from the Netherlands—all trying to go through the same process as us) and when we get to the front of the line, they take our passports and tell us to come back tomorrow. Apparently you have to leave your passport overnight to get registered, then you can come back the next day (and make ANOTHER copy, this time of the registration stamp) and then you can get your censo.

So we left the consulate (without our visas) and went to enjoy a chocolate brownie from Kallari, a nice lunch, and a stroll in the park. While sitting in the park, the Belgian girls spot us and come show us a list of what they were told they needed to jump through the second set of hoops to actually get the card made (they were a step ahead of us). No, they aren’t kidding about needing a proof of a place of residence. Yes, you will need to make more copies and bring passport photos. No, they will not complete the process without an envelope. So we thanked them, and planned to return the next day completely prepared.

When we arrived the next day, they weren’t ready yet. We took the opportunity to get some ice cream first, then some lunch, and returned in the afternoon. We were thrilled when they handed us back our passports, we ran down the street to make copies, and absolutely ecstatic when they handed us our censos. In our celebrations, we forgot to look at the cards themselves and didn’t notice until we returned to Giovanni’s that they were only issued for 6 mos. Instead of one year. But that doesn’t really matter. 6 mos. Is longer than we were planning on staying anyways. We have our censos, and shouldn’t have any problems getting out of the country this time.



We were planning on taking a bus to Toachi to pick up our car on Friday, drive it back to Quito to pick up our things, then drive to Cuenca on Saturday. However, plans changed. I was able to set up an appointment on Friday with presumably the best amphibian biologist in the country, Luis Coloma, and Giovanni decided that he would be going to Toachi on Saturday. So we went to meet with Coloma Friday morning. This is the guy that lost his job with the Catholic university, and he’s showing them that he isn’t going to let it keep him away from doing great things for the frogs. He is in the process of building an even better captive breeding conservation and research center with the help of many of the Catholic university’s former staff, at his parent’s house just outside of Quito. Our friend Elicio is working for him, and helped us navigate the bus system so that we could make it to the meeting. Elicio showed us the property and the plans for it, and also told us about a second captive breeding center at Otokiki where the climate is more appropriate for lower altitude species. The meeting itself went great, and Coloma was happy to share what he knows about the species that I am working with and offered some advice as I continue to pursue my research. It really was an amazing opportunity to sit down and talk with him for an hour about something we are both passionate about—frogs.

Saturday morning, we got up early for a quick breakfast and packed all of our bags into Giovanni’s car. There were five of us, plus all of our luggage, plus their backpacks with things to stay for a few days. Along the way, we confirmed my UD professor’s statement that Giovanni drives “like a bat outta hell” and we also stopped several places along the highway to look for plants and enjoy the view. We were almost there when we stopped for “some coffee” which actually was an entire meal in itself. We had sweet cucumber, pineapple, corn prepared two different ways, and some strong coffee (grounds and all). The Giovanni asked a young girl, Lety, 12, to go with us for a mechanic to make sure the battery is working and then to get our car from the parking lot. She didn’t know exactly where we were going, so we got off the bus a little early and walked the rest of the way. Then we had a terrifying ride in the back of a pick up to go and get our car. It turned out the battery was just fine and we didn’t need to go through the hassle of getting the mechanic (or paying him $10) but it was what Giovanni recommended. Meanwhile, he had worked out payment with the parking guy, paid him $15, and left our bags. However, the parking guy wanted more money when we got there (although he didn’t name an actual amount), and we were surprised to see our bags because we had planned on staying the night at Toachi. We loaded everything into our car (including several additional kids who seemed pretty excited to go along for the ride), drove to the house at Toachi, and carried all of our bags to the house. It was locked and Giovanni and the two Italians were nowhere around. We weren’t ready to leave yet, we still had to pay Giovanni for the parking and we hadn’t even said goodbye. So Brad and Lety went to find him, and startled him because he had thought we were leaving. He thought something was wrong, and he was abrupt in the way that he responded. The Italian girl stuck in her two sense, which only further upset Brad. We waited at the house for their return, upon which Giovanni was hospitable and very helpful, but decided that it was still appropriate for us to leave. So we started off for Cuenca.

On our way from Cuenca to Quito in December, we travelled the road through the spine of the Andes. However, Toachi is along a different way from Quito to Cuenca that goes along the coastal plain. We weren’t sure how long it would take, and we knew that none of the towns were the type of place you would choose to stop and spend the night. We called Ernesto, and he talked us through the trip and said that we should arrive in Cuenca around 10:00. He would be waiting for us, and would show us to the apartment which we would be renting from his aunt.

We arrived at 10:00, picked up Ernesto, and drove just around the corner to an adorable little apartment. It is a tiny house just next to the house where aunt Evita, uncle, and three cousins live. We have our own standard iron gate with a small patio between us and the road. It isn’t on a main street, so there isn’t too much noise and the river Tomebamba is just across the street. When you come into the apartment, there is a combination kitchen and living space. We have a table with 6 chairs, a stove (no oven), sink, refrigerator, and cabinets stocked with some plates, silverware, pots and pans. We have a cushioned bench, a rocking chair, and a coffee table. There is a door that leads to the bedroom in which we have a bed, two nightstands, and a large closet. From the bedroom, there is a door that leads to a small bathroom complete with a hot-water shower. We still don’t have television or internet, but I couldn’t be happier with the apartment itself!

Monday we went to Mazan to do some field work (no Atelopus exiguus out and about) and to pack up some of our things to bring down to our new apartment. We packed clothing, food, kitchen supplies, and field equipment. We filled the car, and realized that the room wasn’t empty. We will have to return for our large laundry basket, our small book shelf, and the rest of our camping equipment. Instead of going out for Valentine’s day, we decided to unpack our things, make dinner at home, and enjoy two pieces of our favorite chocolate cake.

Conclusion: We’re here in Cuenca with our nice apartment. There is a convenient fruit market across the street and a car wash just down the street, and we are warm, happy, and ready to work!

Live from the Air

We’re on our way back to Ecuador. We’ve had a whirlwind of a trip to the US, and we’re looking forward to the next four months in Ecuador. The amphibian research is up and running, the clinic is off to a great start, and we’re thinking about sneaking in a trip to Peru if time allows. We’re a little anxious about returning, but we’ve been able to make some positive changes before we’ve even arrived. Our friends Ernesto and Amanda have lined up a furnished apartment in Cuenca—we’ll have reliable electricity and, more importantly, hot water. We’ll be closer to friends and farther away from the puma.

During the past two months we were able to enjoy time around the holidays with both families, attend residency program interviews , meet with advisors, restock on supplies, participate in our annual Branches community retreat, visit with friends, eat Jeni’s ice cream, eat Graeter’s ice cream, sleep in our warm and cozy bed, drive my car over the 100,000 mile mark, fix Brad’s car (again!), celebrate my birthday, attend a potluck, crochet an afghan, drink bubble tea with the knitting group, go thrift shopping, cheer for Buckeye football and basketball, watch the SuperBowl…. Everything but the annual re-gifting party (which I assure you will DEFINITELY be a priority on next year’s calendar!)

Some highlights from our time at home:
1. Singing Kumbaya around the Christmas tree
2. Eating Christmas cookies
3. Sharing foods and spirits from Ecuador with our friends in Columbus
4. Spending our first Christmas together
5. Learning to (sort of ) replace a radiator on New Year’s Eve
6. Girls’ night / Boys’ night
7. Mom’s home cooking (x2)
8. Birthday parties and potluck
9. Getting stuck in O’Hare Airport and arriving after 2 AM before my interview in Arkansas

We were so glad to have the opportunity to see so many of you while we were home, and we hope to keep in touch with you through the blog and emails now that we’re back in Ecuador. We return on May 31, and we’ll miss you until then.

* Note: This post was written on the airplane, well before we realized that our camera disappeared at some point during the flight. A post full of consternation will follow.