galapagos

what do you think about when you hear the word galapagos? isolated pacific islands, giant tortoises, charles darwin? perhaps your mind wanders and you ask yourself why we're still battling with the infectious stupidity of organised religion over 150 years after the publication of 'on the origin of species'? i know i am. but let's get back to the islands.

like many people, i thought that the galapagos islands were a remote natural paradise, devoid of any non-tourist human activity (past or present) and bursting with countless animal and plant species, all competing for tourist dollars.

the truth is that the islands are pretty barren, with surprisingly few species of animals and even less species of plants than i had expected. the other truth is that many of the islands are inhabited - the capital puerto ayora has a population of almost 20,000 inhabitants, and before the ecuadorian government sent a group of people over to the islands in 1832 to claim it once and for all, they were temporarily inhabited by whalers and pirates, all of whom left their mark (graffiti, rats, treasure, etc).

one of the more interesting human stories is that of german dentist freidrich ritter and his lover dora strauch, who left their respective spouses to come and live in the islands in 1929 seeking a natural life. where it gets weird is that they removed all of their teeth before leaving germany, and took only a single set of steel dentures to share between the two of them to munch the food that they grew outside the lava tunnel they lived in. after a few years of regularly being beaten to a pulp by freidrich, dora eventually killed him by poisoning his food and headed back to germany, where she got back with her husband and wrote a book about her adventures, the proceeds of which presumably went towards buying a new set of teeth.

what about the animals? yes: they were amazing, of course they were! because most larger animals on the islands have evolved without any predators whatsoever, they haven't learnt to fear humans, and you can just walk right up to them and they don't give a shit. (the honey badger would feel right at home there). you can - and we did - come face to face with giant tortoises, blue-footed boobies, sea lions, green sea turtles, iguanas, penguins and many other animals and they just sit there totally unperturbed while you're having a cameragasm.

the islands are volcanic, and some are covered with huge lava fields, frozen in various states of ripple or kink that make you feel like you're on another planet.

so what did we actually do? there are various ways to explore the galapagos - some tours are land-based, where you stay in a hostel and cruise out to various places during the day, and others are boat-based, where you sleep on the boat and thus are able to go to islands that would otherwise be too far away. g and i went on an (expensive) 7-night cruise on a catamaran with 6 staff (including our guide who to my initial distress was also called diego), and 8 other tourists. there were 3 lovely swiss germans, a honeymooning swedish couple, two burnt-out and teched-up middle-aged canadian hippies and an older french woman called coco. coco pushed everyone right to the edge, so much so that on the penultimate day of the tour, when she dropped her camera into shallow water during a beach landing, the entire boatload of staff and tourists exploded in a collective ecstasy of schadenfreude.

we were served three meals a day plus snacks - it was like a high class restaurant - and had a little cabin with a little bathroom and a double bed set above it. it was cool, but i can't deny that i was a bit scared during one night's choppy ocean crossing where g forced me to sleep on the fall-out-of-bed-and-smash-your-face-on-the-floor side of the bed and when we ploughed into some of those big waves we got airborne.

our guide was professional and really knew his shit, and that's exactly what we wanted. the other staff were good, but i have to say that it's difficult to have a relaxed affinity with most ecuadorian men when they know you're gay, because the culture is super-macho, misogynistic and homophobic like a mofo. misunderstanding? fear? i think most of these guys just don't know how to react in the presence of known faggots (we will turn on them. we will turn on them and force them to become part of our pink shirt-wearing, kylie minogue-listening, cock-loving army). on one occasion the boat's engineer walked into our room while g and i were spooning, and though he apologised (why the fuck was he coming into our room anyway?!), he treated us with suspicion for the rest of the cruise, and would regard us with a condescending facial expression that i was tempted to treat with a swift kick to the nuts.

the cruise was a bit like a boot-camp. a bell would ring for breakfast at 07:30, another bell an hour later when it was time to head to one of the islands in the dingy, another for lunch etc, and by the end of it we felt a bit like pavlov's dogs. once we got over the fear of missing something and living in regret for the rest of our lives, we stopped going out to all of the islands and allowed ourselves to just lie back and relax on the boat, and that was as amazing an experience as seeing the wildlife.

so, final thoughts on the galapagos islands? go there. this is something you must do before you die. but my advice: do it just before you die. because at the end of the day, it's a week of watching, rather than doing. though it's some of the most spectacular watching you'll ever do, those islands and their animals aren't going anywhere. while you're still young and beautiful, spend your time riding, hiking, swimming, dancing, leaping, lunging, and all the other things that you won't be able to do when you're old and decrepit (but still able to go on a galapagos tour). or you could just go now and have the time of your life! two thumbs up for those wonderful islands.

mountain bike vs volcano: cotopaxi and chimborazo

we bookended our trip to the galapagos islands with two days of mountain bike riding down two massive volcanoes: the glorious cotopaxi near quito, and the equally glorious chimborazo near that abortion of a city riobamba. the similarities: both started in the snow, both days left us with bruised and aching arses, and both groups were made up of awesome people that had at least one hot english guy in them that left g and i breathless.

the guide for the cotopaxi ride was called diego. on a colombian beach 11 years ago, i clicked with a man called diego who invited my friends and i to his bar and offered us free drinks, free marijuana and even a free woman (said chattel was thrown onto my lap). when i rejected the human offering and told him that i was gay, he turned on me like a cut snake and kicked me out of the bar. ever since i've been much more upfront with my sexuality, and i've treated with suspicion anyone called diego. that is my story. despite this, diego the cotopaxi bike guide was just fine.

there was a (freaking) blizzard atop cotopaxi when we started, and with snow and killer winds, but only cotton ladies' gloves, our hands were threatening to auto-amputate at the wrist after about 30 seconds of crazed riding. within 20 minutes, however, things got a bit warmer, our hands defrosted, and the rest of the ride was just magnificent: a steep descent along a winding dirt road, a cross-country section in an alpine valley, and a final sprint down a dirt track that was so bumpy it rearranged my internal organs and almost flattened some external ones.

chimborazo was another story altogether. we started with a quick climb to a hut at 5000m (glorious!!!) and then had a short 8km ride down a dirt track through the moonscape of the volcanic highlands filled with camel-like animals and wildflowers, before driving to the start of the old pan-american highway and hooning downhill for 42km through valleys, villages and fields. wowsers!

that's about all i have to say about the rides. they were just really, really fucking good, a highlight of our time here in ecuador. i did make one observation though. in each group there mere mortals (g and i included), and then there were gods. these gods were always young men - diego was one of them, but there were others too. and whilst g and i got the knack of going over dips and corrugations at high speed and felt pretty proud of ourselves, just when we thought we had reached the terminal velocity for a human being on a bike, one of these gods shot past in a blur of colour and laughter - sometimes not even hanging on to the fricken handlebars - and left us gasping.

what is the difference between a man and a god in the world of the mountain bike? the fear. once you reach a certain age, injuries tend not to heal but to linger forever. at that point the cost of a protracted recovery outweighs the thrill of losing control, and unless you're fucked in the head, you can no longer afford to fall, and you develop the fear. michal, a middle-aged polish guy that was on the chimborazo ride with us summed up the fear perfectly:

i will fall: i know that i will fall. and when i fall i will roll, and i will keep rolling. sometimes i will be rolling alone and the bike will be rolling behind me, and sometimes the bike and i will be rolling together, but we will never stop rolling.

so i'm old now. i'm balding, i'm hurting, and i've got the fear. but you know what? i reckon i've just entered my golden age. this is the golden age of ondrej, and i'm intending to milk it for all it's worth. peace to you all!

baños

spanish for toilet, baños is a small town gloriously nestled between mountain volcanoes, and was the first destination in G+O's ecuadorian adventure.

the bike ride from baños to puyo is raved about, so after g changed into some shorts in the reception area of our hostel in front of three ecuadorian virgins (who were blown against the walls shielding their eyes from his bubble butt - think zoolander's blue steel), we rented some bikes and headed straight out to see what all the fuss was about. what was the fuss about? who the fuck knows. is the scenery spectacular? yes! but ecuador is a country full of spectacular scenery, and there are many other areas where you can enjoy the views without sharing a highway with massive trucks that try to push you off the road and leave you choking on their fumes. one thumb down.

you know how some people change when they go travelling, but in a bad way? i don't know why this happens, but it does. because baños is a bit of an activity centre, it's a magnet for tourists, and our hostel was packed to the rafters with tourists of the changed in a bad way variety. these boys and girls were way too cool for school, too cool to make eye contact (even when their faces passed within 50cm of our faces) and definitely too cool to respond when we said hola. i felt that this was unacceptable, and after an evening full of it, i was filled with the need to re-educate. my desire was to line those gringos up in two parallel rows, facing each other about a metre apart, and then walk down the middle with my hands out slapping everyone's face like a greek sunday school teacher. i would then turn around, walk back between the rows and engage in another round of slaps, and finally I would select the prettiest blonde girl in the group, and on a small platform in front of the others i would either kick her in the vag or wrestle her to the ground. what are your thoughts?

like i said, baños is surrounded by these glorious mountains, and on a clifftop at the edge of town (at the base of which are the holy water thermal baths of the virgin) they have constructed a large cross which glows with a rich orange light, so that at night, there appears to be burning cross floating in the sky about 400m above the city. I found the effect quite wonderful; it was a victory not just for jesus but for aesthetics in general.

now baños doesn't just mean toilet, it also (mainly) means baths, and baños is named for the baths that you can find in and around town, all fueled by the geothermally heated water that comes bubbling up all over the place. due to a combination of jet lag and excitement, the morning of our second day we were out of bed at 4:30am, and decided to follow the burning cross in the sky and go for an early morning dip in the holy water thermal baths of the virgin. the baths opened at 5am, and though we were the only gringos, there was already a queue of what looked like 100 year old ecuadorians who were there for their daily cure. the cliff that the baths are at the base of has a waterfall running down it (some of whose waters are redirected to the cool-down shower area), and splashing about with hundreds of other people in these cliff-base baths as the sun gradually came up and the town came to life was a real highlight. (unfortunately no photos)

there were three pools at the holy water thermal baths of the virgin: a freezing cold one that I almost died in during a two minute endurance session, a packed to bursting point hot bath in the middle where g could be found mixing with locals, and a scalding hot death-by-bath next to the waterfall that was 43 degrees plus and had only a few lobsters hanging around in it. g chickened out, but I hopped in, got addicted to the heat, and stayed there until I was well and truly cooked.

we spent the rest of the morning hiking in the mountains above town, first to the burning cross and later over to another mountainside where we encountered a massive statue of the virgin mary. it was so kitsch i almost screamed, but one has to remember that in these parts, they just love the virgin.

just before heading back to quito, we had an unfortunate culinary experience at the baños food market. most places in Ecuador serve almuerzo (lunch) in a fixed combination of soup, main meal, juice and sometimes a small dessert. all of this usually only costs $2.50, and really hits the spot. when we rocked up for a feed, I spotted an almuerzo with sopa de pata and excitedly told g: 'they've got duck soup!' we were seated and ready to eat before you could say barbra streisand. unfortunately the spanish word for duck isn't pata, it's pato. pata means animal foot. and that's exactly what we got - a bowl of soup, and sitting right in the middle of it: a foot. after china, I'm not too surprised by feet or faces or foetuses turning up in my food, but it crossed some invisible line for g, and the poor thing was nauseated for the next 36 hours. mental note: when cooking for g in the future, avoid the temptation to serve soup with a foot in it...

and though that was all for baños, G+O's ecuadorian adventure had only just begun (perhaps you've looked ahead at photos on facebook?), so please fasten your seatbelts and join us next time for more volcanoes, giant tortoises and near death alpine experiences!

hiking quilotoa to chugchilán

first up, if you've landed here from a googlesearch looking for instructions/details about the hike, go down to the comments section on this entry to see my annotated version of the excellent instructions i found HERE.

leaving quito last saturday morning was a fucking nightmare. it took me 6 buses to get out: six buses. six. why? because i'm an idiot. that's right: i am the real deal. bus number one was a shortcut to the correct bus number two to take me to quitumbe bus station in the south of quito, and if i'd stayed on it, there would have been no problem (and no adventure!). just get on that trolleybus and stay on it is my advice. where i went wrong was in listening to a lady (that stupid fucking lying whore!) on bus number two who told me that i needed to get off and backtrack (using bus number 3) to get to quitumbe. where i got was NOWHERE, from where i took bus number 4 to NOWHERE #2, and from NOWHERE #2 i finally hopped onto bus number 5, where the driver told me that we'd pass by quitumbe station and when we did he'd let me know. thank goodness! i was so relieved i just collapsed in a seat in gratitude. half an hour later the guy in front of me tells me that we'd passed quitumbe ages ago. WTF? i hopped off bus number 5 (dagger stares at the driver) and found myself on the side of a highway with a hundred other people trying to flag down a bus to latacunga. i felt that it had not been a good start to the day.

getting that final bus was easier said than done. though flagging down a bus on any road on any other day of the year would have been simple, saturday was the first day of the mama negra festival, the highlight of the latacunga calendar, and thousands of people from quito were heading down, so that all the buses passing us were full and sealed. that's right: sealed with sticky tape over the door to show that they were so full they couldn't take another passenger. oh my goodness.

and then, a miracle: some dude took an off-duty urban bus and decided to make some money with it, rocking up to our little outpost on the highway and saying the magic word: latacunga. i ran as fast as my gringo legs would take me and clawed my way through the crowd onto that wonderful, final, latacunga-headed bus number six. amen.

5 minutes later, my bad mood was heimlich-manoeuvred out of my system: the bus zipped down from the quito plateau, and in front of us, the snow-covered peak of the cotopaxi volcano emerged from the clouds. what a sight. my head snapped back from the warm hit of a full body eye-gasm.

and then we were in latacunga. to be honest, after 2 weeks of the cuenca festival, i didn't give a shit about mama negra, so after an hour of wandering through the seething mass of humanity, i was happy to jump on the single daily bus out towards my destination: quilotoa.

what can i say? the scenery during that ~3 hour journey was unbelievable. green hills covered in patch-work quilt fields, running streams, gorges and big skies. the best part was the final 13km on the back of a pick-up truck with some school kids, holding on to the wooden crossbeam feeling the wind in my hair. i felt alive. ahhh...i loved it.

the quilotoa lake sits in a volcanic crater that is about 3km in diameter at its shoreline. i had heard that it was one of the most beautiful sights in ecuador, but i was not prepared: it was incredible. standing there on the volcanic crater rim with the lake at its base and the iliniza volcanoes in the background, i experienced the rare pleasure of multiple eyegasms.

i still had the afternoon, so i descended quickly for a snooze by the water's edge. at 4000m altitude, going down was a completely different story to getting back up, and the vertical ascent back to the rim was pure punishment. take that thighs! the crater is very sandy, and this very fine cloud of sand that surrounds you while you walk not only made its way into my eyeballs, arse-crack and lungs, but somehow made its way into my camera, where - much to my chagrin - a single speck of dust landed right in the centre of my lens - the back of the lens - and no amount of shaking or cursing could dislodge it. what this meant is a little bit more editing on photoshop of the photos you see here, and then a quick camera swap when the g-man arrives tomorrow: perfect timing!

i got up early the following morning for the hike to chugchilán, which i'd heard would take 6 hours. the first hour was a hike along the volcanic crater rim, and under a luminous but overcast sky, was hiking perfection. from there there was a descent through pine forests into a small village, then down a steep-walled gorge to a little river and back up again to the final destination town of chugchilán. highlights included crossing a small bridge which splintered under my weight, leaving me lying in the dry river-bed a metre below surrounded by broken wood with a few cuts and scrapes and in a mild state of shock (but very happy that i didn't get impaled or worse by the remaining bits of bridge). the people i met on the way were wonderful, the scenery was wonderful...what can i say? it was all good.

i arrived in chugchilán 3.5 hours after leaving quilotoa, which was earlier than i had planned. i found the people there to be quite unpleasant, so it gave me a whole afternoon of roaming the mountains above the town and watching the clouds slowly descend over the forests and farms. if i had had a magic button to instantaneously explode the heads of all the aggressive barking dogs that were chasing me around, i may have had a spiritual experience. as it was i was left admiring the scenery and dreaming of that magic button.

i had dinner that night (and the previous night actually) with a bunch of western europeans of various ages. it got me thinking that i'm really into their mindset. it's the acceptance of individuality and willingness/ability to have a logical discussion that really appeals to me. maybe it's about self-identification.

what prompted me to think about this was the contrast. we were the only 4 people in the hostel who weren't part of a massive (young)-australian-dominated tour group. oh my fucking god. now i'm going to put myself out there and say that groups of young australians are not just bad: they're the worst. they are the fucking worst. i love australians, i am australian, and i'm proud to be one. but when young aussies are in groups, they are simply awful. awful awful awful. they are worse than groups of young americans. they are worse than groups of chinese. they are even worse than groups of young israelis (how is that possible?!). i just felt so ashamed of their disrespectful, loutish behaviour. i thought: c'mon mate, you've commented loudly about her pussy about 50 times, isn't that enough? i thought: loud burping and farting in public is funny only the first (20) time(s). i thought: can't you even learn the spanish fucking word for thank you? the others looked at me as if i were to be held accountable, and i was left dreaming of a magic button...

i headed back to latacunga, and then quito, on the 04:30am bus, a magical journey through mist-covered mountains that revealed themselves in various stages of exquisite beauty as the sun rose behind the rain clouds.

i'm back in quito now for the final few days of ondrej vs ecuador. today marks exactly one month since i arrived in this country, and what an amazing month it's been! tomorrow night my favourite frog in the whole world arrives, and it will be time for part two of the south american journey: G+O vs ecuador: an adventure that promises to be truly epic. peace!

was you ever bit by a dead bee?