Ecuador officially in Drought

Anyone who has spent a little time in Quito in the past few months - or who has a Facebook friend who lives in Quito - knows that we have been experiencing frequent blackouts. I posted about the infernal apagones recently, at a time when we still thought they would be a temporary measure, but alas, it's nearly February and we are still waiting for rain.

Amidst the tragedies in Haiti, other far less immediate but still dangerous crises are unfolding in the Americas, including torrential rains and flooding in many parts of the Andean highlands and Brazil, which has experienced deadly landslides in the last two to three weeks.

And Ecuador is now officially in the midst of a drought, which is naturally contributing to loss of power generation capabilities in the country's hydroelectric facilities. The greatest devastation created by the drought is centered in Manabí province, but most people in the sierra are also hunkering down for blackouts well into the unforeseeable future, praying for rain.

According to the Quito Electric Company, 40% of Quito went without power for about two hours yesterday.

Just to keep things interesting, Tungurahua volcano was showing increased activity last week.

PRAISING NATURE

David Moscoso may be one of Ecuador's most important living artists. Although his work is devotional and traditional, his technique is admired around the world and has gained him international stature that many of his contemporary and hipper artist friends in Guayaquil and Quito haven't achieved. If you keep looking at David's work, you'll find that he has an extraordinary and truly original take on Latin American religious art. I tried to describe it briefly in an interview with him that his paint materials company has posted online. You'll find it at their website and in the new edition of Lonely Planet's Ecuador guide.

This is a great time for me to thank David for showing me Ambato's hidden artistic gems and for sharing his unique vision of the cosmos with me one day last November.

The Guianas: The Great Unknown

Check out my article in the South American Explorers magazine about the magical, mystical and little visited Guianas - or just read it below!

Lonely Planet author Aimee Dowl takes us on a journey to three South American countries that seem a world away from the rest of the continent.

Click on image to enlarge

The Guianas are one of those geographically challenged regions of the world. Even perfectly well-educated people ask, are they in Africa? South-east Asia? The Caribbean? But when people find out that the Guianas are those three little countries – Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana – nestled in the northeastern corner of South America, they invariably want to know more.

What’s there? What language do they speak? Why go?

Devil’s-island, French Guiana.
Click on image to enlarge

Consisting of a former British colony, a former Dutch colony, and a region that is technically an overseas department of France (and therefore a member of the EU) the Guianas actually have a lot to do with Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. More than three quarters of the roughly one million people who live there are descendents of African slaves and indentured laborers from India, Indonesia, and China. Add to this melting pot, indigenous Amerindian peoples, old European families and recent immigrants from the Caribbean, Israel, Lebanon, Laos and Vietnam, and you have the richest ethnic stew in South America.

The tension that might be expected to exist between so many different cultures ranges from none to pretty high, depending on who you talk to. The harmony between religious groups is evident in the placement of mosques, synagogues and temples within a stone’s throw of each other, but no one’s throwing any stones. Still, political allegiances in all three of the Guianas generally form along ethnic lines. Intermarriage between the major groups is rare.

Each country officially uses the language of its former colonizer, but many others are widely spoken: Hindi, Indonesian, Mandarin, Arawak and especially in Suriname, a lingua franca called Sranan Tongo (or taki taki by locals) that takes words from European and African languages. The cuisine is no less eclectic, consisting of Indonesan warungs, Indian roti shops, Chinese dumpling houses and Creole joints.

The street food scene, thriving in every urban nook and cranny, dishes up an inexpensive smorgasbord of snacks and fast meals.

Kaieteur Falls. Click on image to enlarge

If the cities are centers of cultural diversity, then the coast and interior are the centers of biological diversity, which blooms wildly in some of the largest areas of protected beach, rainforest and savannah in the world. Vast reaches of protected habitat offer the opportunity to see such magnificent creatures as toucans, anteaters, jaguars, river otters, and anaconda. Bird-watching and sport fishing are top notch with more than eight hundred avian species and the world’s biggest freshwater fish. All three countries’ coastlines welcome thousands of sea turtles every mating season, a period from April to September when the armored amphibians trudge ashore to lay their eggs in the sand, offering a once-in-a-lifetime encounter with highly endangered wildlife.

The absolute must of any trip to this is region is Guyana’s Kaieteur Falls, the highest single-drop waterfall in the world at 731 feet. It is one of South America’s most thrilling natural wonders, yet delightfully void of touristy crowds. Most visitors fly there in small planes. Banking sharply over the falls and the huge Guiana Shield (a geological formation some three billion years old and covered in primary rainforest), this flight is guaranteed to be one of the most dramatic and stunning views of any traveler’s life.

Despite all this cultural and natural richness, for many years the Guianas weren’t exactly a hot tourist destination.

Paramaribo. Click on image to enlarge

Both Guyana and Suriname have experienced economic and political turmoil since their independence in 1966 and 1975 respectively (as well as a violent uprising in Suriname during the late 1980s) and although French Guiana enjoys a much greater wealth than its neighbors, it has tended to stagnate as a distant child of its mother country, France.

The signs of these troubles, however, are starting to give way to the improvements of a brighter era. Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has been restored to a center of gingerbread Dutch colonial buildings, and Guyana continues to invest in ecotourism as an alternative to oil drilling and gold mining in its rainforests. French Guiana’s economy has been reinvigorated by the wealth of jobs associated with the Guianese Space Center, which launches some 17% of the world satellites (visitors can watch a blast off about a dozen times throughout the year).

It’s likely that the Guianas will remain under the radar for a while, but that’s the best part. Visitors can enjoy mild levels of tourism while exploring a thoroughly unexpected cultural and natural gem. If you want to keep it a secret, tell you’re friends it’s in Africa.

Lady Tzantzas for Sale

The Ecuadorian newspaper, Hoy, published a fascinating story today describing the increase in sales of female tzanztas, or shrunken heads, which are trophies of Amazonian Shuar tribes who cut off the heads of their defeated enemies after battles and shrink them in a lengthy process involving herbal mixes and boiling and stuffing the skulls. These extraordinary objects have attracted anthropologists and collectors to the Ecuadorian and Peruvian jungles for decades, and a few pristine specimens can be viewed in the Banco Central museum in Cuenca. 

Until now, the tzantzas were always male heads, but recently female heads have been hitting the international collectors' market, and the police in the Ecuadorian province of Morona-Santiago are now concerned that at least six decapitated women discovered since 2005 may have been victims of tzantza traders. Female tzantzas appearing for sale at the German website, Exotic Trade, start at 6,900 euros. 

Rolling Blackouts in Quito

Ecuador is in the middle of an electricity emergency. The mountainous sierra region is not getting enough rain to produce power in the hydroelectric facilities (the represa del Paute, above) that provide light to much of the country. The crisis is expected to linger - it's cloudy today but we need several days of rain to really get the lights back full time - and may become more serious.

According to the El Comercio newspaper and many other news sources here, the Colombians don't have much luz to sell us right now, either. The Comercio is running schedules of the blackouts, and so far the electric company has been following the hours they set. They also offer algunos "tips" for dealing with the power losses and review the economic losses, the details of which are not yet known.

Some of My Photos in the New Lonely Planet Ecuador Destination Guide

Finally, the new Lonely Planet destination guide for Ecuador & the Galápagos Islands is out! I am pleased to learn that the editors have included two of my photos in the Color Highlights section that opens the book. These are the photos and captions that appear in the new edition.

Volcán Cotopaxi
The all-night climb to the summit of Vulcán Cotopaxi (p155) is rewarded with extraordinary views of the surrounding planes, the Sangay volcano puffing smoke plumes, and at least a dozen other peaks. When you peer down, you see a steaming black hole of a crater and get a strong whiff of sulphur.

Getting a Healing at Latacunga's Mamá Negra Festival

Nobody gets to just watch the Mamá Negra Festival. As soon as the huacos saw me they ran over and started chanting and pretending to poke me with deer antlers. It wasn't over until I got the full ritual, which involved spitting aguardiente liquor all over my body.

Bird of the Month

Aves Ecuador, whose main goal is "to stimulate birdwatching in a serious and popular scientific manner," just chose my partner-in-Ecuadorian-crime's photo of the Gray-breasted Mountain toucan, as their Bird of the Month photo. It originally appeared on Derek's blog, Birding Ecuador.

There's Gold in Them There Hills!

A typical street in the beautiful, poor, declining city of Potosí, Bolivia (4090 meters above sea level), where the Spanish are said to have extracted enough gold to build a bridge to Spain and back. Historians estimate that during the last half millenium millions have died in the mines around Potosí and in Cerro Rico, the dry brown mountain lurking in the background of this photo.

I've been trying to post these pictures for while. They document my dark descent into the bowels of a zinc mine in Cerro Rico, where men and a small number of children work in clouds of dust and as a result die young - often before fifty years of age - of silicosis.

Headlamp - check!
Protective Gear - check!
Dynamite - check!

Just fifty meters down into the mine, the temperatures push into the thirties/nineties Celsius/Fahrenheit. Photographic conditions are less than ideal.

One of two principle dieties of importance to miners, here with his drink, coca leaves and giant phallus.

Before we went in, we had to buy some dynamite and coca leaves for the miners.
















There's a fast train to get inside the mines, if you don't want to walk the half kilometer to the active areas.






There happened to be a miners' strike in Potosí the day I arrived. The issue at hand is pay and benefits.

Some machines in the shadows of the processing area, which is apparently not much less toxic than inside the mines.

SAFETY FIRST!

Is Quito safe?

If there were still any doubt about whether Quito is safe destination, let this weekend's Wall Street Journal settle the matter once and for all. The issue first came up a 2007 San Francisco Chronicle article by my Lonely Planet Colleague, Danny Palmerlee, about Quito's civic investment and revitalization. In 2008, Chris Kraul gave Los Angeles Times readers a detailed report of how much safer and beautiful the city's 500-year-old historic center has become, and the same year I offered some suggestions about Old Town and other cool new things to do in Quito in a New York Times article. I addressed safety issues in a New York Times Travel Blog Q & A last year as well.

So, at least we have some good news to balance out the plane crashes, volcanic eruptions, political coups, and endless airport construction delays!

A New Bus Station for Quito

I know that Quito's main bus terminal is every traveler's favorite place. Aren't luggage slashers, dark and dank quarters and vendors screaming the names of pueblos you'd never want to go everyone's idea of a good time?

The folks at V!VA Travel Guides just posted a nice comprehensive list of links related to the closure of Quito's main bus terminal, Terminal Terrestre de Cumandá. Here you'll find most everything you need to figure out which bus terminal to use, how to get to it, and how much it costs (in Spanish and English).