Putting things where they don't belong

It took prearranged plans to pry me from caluroso Cali, but vecina Ryan's arrival propelled me from the heat-and-pastry induced laze that tied me to Cali for a full thirty five days. Thirty five memorable days. Memorable even for the hamster-brained like me because I need remember only a handful of variations of the same day, a few different time-fillers wedged between the papaya wakeup and the arepa, aborrajado y aguardiente nightcap.

I circled the city clasping hands and kissing cheeks, sneaking final groping handfuls of stacked streetside mannequins, promising the salsa rhythms permeating and pulsing the streets I'll return to conquer the confusion of my feet. Bags packed, Ryan and I moved to Salento, a pueblito nestled in Colombia's rolling eje cafetero (coffee zone). Besides hiking through El Valle de Cocora, snapping hundreds of ultimately identical looking shots of the mighty waxpalms (palma de cera), highland palms that grow sixty meters high, giraffed-versions of their beachland cousins, Salento was good for, well, sleeping. Going to bed early. And learning. So frequently alternating Spanish and English with our Swiss friend Michelle if often took me a sentence or two to register the tongue of the moment, I mistook "Pamela Anderson tiene hepatitis" for "Pamela Anderson has hippo-titties." In fact, both are true.

Toward Ecuador we passed through Popayán, La Ciudad Blanca, where defying Southern-bred expectations we encountered nary a Confederate flag, though the imported Budweiser was curious. An overnight bus to the border at Ipiales landed us at one of the world's most architecturally distinct churches, El Santuario de Las Lajas, built into a mountain wall buried between cliffs, atop a bridge constructed above a gorge-bottom river.

Quito was our first stop in Ecuador, a high-elevation metropolis longer than wide running between and halfway up bordering mountains. The old city's colonial charm distracts from the third-world seediness, but you're never more than a urine-stenched alley away from bootleg DVDs and dim and dingy, nameless kitchens fronted by tables stacked with ubiquitous silver pots and cualdrons, an accumulation from behind which a woman busily fanning flies squawks indecipherable advertisements at every passerby. One afternoon we ascended to a 4000m high mirador via tourist-priced cable car, dressed in beachwear, appearing every bit unprepared gringos on a casual country-hopping jaunt fighting gusting winds and shivering bodies to steady our cameras amongst wool-layer mummified Ecuatorianos. (Recalling scenarios to insulate from reality, namely youth soccer games played on rainy winter days, spawned this gem of a qoute: "It really sucks getting hit in the balls by a face. Or, wait, it really sucks getting hit in the face by a ball. I guess the other one doesn't really suck at all!") We visited the ecuator sans sunscreen, because in Latin America skin cancer is less expensive than sunscreen, which is to say the price per squirt means treatment is less expensive than a lifetime of prevention.

At our family-run hostel I drank 1.5L of murky tapwater based on assurances of citywide purification according to one son. The next time I neared the tap his mom caught me and cocked her head, disbelieving I couldn't solve the riddle of the giant container of purified water at the kitchen door. I think the son wanted to ensure we'd choose the more expensive private bath option...

Quitting Quito we came to Quilotoa, where we'd have to endure 4000m conditions for the length of our stay. So two or three planned nights quickly became a wind-whipped one, Ryan and I reasoning the views from any point on the crater rim above La Laguna de Quilotoa would be as arresting as those at any other point, thus precluding the need for any rim-traversing escapade. So we came to Baños, a clean and tamed touristic fantasyland, a sparkling unreality like Guatemala's Antigua. Surrounded by volcanos, lush green mountains spilling waterfalls, outskirts of the Amazon a bikeride away, it's an immediately pleasing gringo magnet that reminds you shortly why you needed to escape.