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| Carchi, Ecuador |
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| Volcano!!! On my way to my community. |
After travelling to Carchi for the weekend to check out my prospective placement in a community called Jesús del Gran Poder, having altitude sickness and spending all of Friday night/ Saturday morning on the toilet and throwing up as a result of food poisoning, Irene, the woman I was with and I began our journey back to Quito at around 5pm. In her beat up standard, we began our way back, climbing and falling with the slope of the mountains. Little did we know this would be no simple four hour drive back to the city.
Ok so…I had started this blog post thinking of making it really dramatic and suspenseful (as the night was), but I haven’t had any time, and in fact I wrote that first paragraph over a week ago.
So as distasteful and vague as this is, I am going to use bullet points…if anything to remind me of what happened 5 months from now. I apologize for all the gaps I am about to not fill in.
-we didn’t know there was a pilgrimage happening meaning that crowds of people were walking a ridiculous distance from Quiche to Quito (or the other way around, can’t remember). This meant the Pan-American highway (the main highway in Ecuador) was shut down. Great.
-we got stopped just outside a gas station. All we wanted was biscotti’s as I had not had anything to eat all day and they are some of the best in Cayambe.
-We got stopped by the police. Irene kind of overlooked what they were telling her (turn around here, you can only get back to Quito at 4am tomorrow), drove past them and into the gas station.
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| Here we are sitting in the car. Irene is just about to tell me to get out of the car and lie to the fuzz. Party going on whilst we are trying to make it back to Quito! |
-From here, after eating some food, we snuck by the police and began following a government vehicle down an empty road.
At the next police stop Irene told me to get out of the car with my Censo card (Ecuadorian ID) and copy of my Canadian passport and tell the three police officers blocking the road (in Spanish) that my mother was landing in Quito at 9:30pm that night; that she doesn’t know Spanish or anyone in the country and that I had to get back to Quito before then…at this point it was about 8:15pm. Who knows whether or not they believed me, but they let us through.
-The next police stop, the police officer told us we couldn’t get through. I handed him my identification again (which he said was basically useless) and after pleading with him (didn’t lie this time) he let us through saying he didn’t want to hear about any dead pilgrims the next day. We told him we were women and that we would drive very carefully. Yes, we stooped that low.
-At this point I kept looking at the gas gage…we were literally almost on empty. Irene didn’t voice it, but she told me later that if we hadn’t found a gas station we would have been fucked. We were in the middle of nowhere in the mountains. Luckily we found a gas station that has just closed and the man there was kind enough to open up a pump for us.
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| A few of the vehicles on the first road. Dusty and bumpy. |
-Shortly after this we picked up a 21 year old hitchhiker named Byron. He was trying to get back to Quito to see his wife. Irene asked what I thought about him before letting him get into the car and asked if he has any guns or weapons on him. He kept us company during our hour and a half drive on a dirt road, seeing hardly any cars and no lights from Quito which we had caught a glimpse of about a half hour before getting on this road. I thought we were lost, but eventually we found our way back to the pavement.
-When we finally arrived in Quito at around 12:30am, we were famished and I had my first meal at KFC in about 8 years.
-I got into a cab after this, willing to pay the guy 20$ to get me home safely, but he was nice and I only paid the standard of about 3$.
Lying to the police, dealing with an upset stomach, picking up a hitchhiker and eating at KFC? Quite an experience here in Ecuador, I’d say.
