As usual, I’m not punctual with my blog entries.  We ended up getting our car back just a few days after that last post.  I asked for the so-called documentation of the so-called new brain, but then paid the deductible without further ado, because I wanted the car back in the worst way.  Since I’d seen the car’s electrical system in major disarray during its long stay at the mechanic, I tried to go over everything before we drove away.  First, the left headlight didn’t work.  Then it was the dome light.  A couple of screws were missing that held down the console around the shift lever.  One by one and fairly quickly the mechanic fixed those things and we drove off.  By the next day we realized the fuel gauge wasn’t working, so we took it back and they fixed that too.  In every case, they just needed to plug in something.

So now the car works, and seems a little more powerful than before!  So, you wanna buy it?  Since we’re leaving Ecuador in June, we need to sell it.  Here’s the link to the attractive, you-too-could-visit-gorgeous-remote-places-if this wonderful-vehicle-were-yours action photos.  Thanks to Academia Cotopaxi former colleague E.J. Lux for the “pictures of car in amazing places” as a marketing tool idea – he made his junker Russian Lada look like a supermodel last year.  We’ve had a couple of people interested, but nothing firm so far.  Tell all your Ecuadorian friends and expats!

One Thursday night in late February the guard didn’t show up to keep watch outside “La Cueva,” the little climbing gym I go to once a week.  When I left the gym, our 1997 Chevy Vitara (Suzuki Sidekick) had been broken into, though it seemed like only my hat and jacket had been taken.  But it wouldn’t start. Under the hood quite a few things were missing:  spark plugs, distributor, air filter.  Oddly, the battery was still there, and they hadn’t taken the stereo.  The next day I found out the most expensive piece was actually taken from under the dash: “el cerebro,”  the brain – the car’s computer.  Thus began a big headache.

We had the car towed to the school (where there was a guard to watch it all night) and again towed the next day to the mechanic the insurance company authorized.  This was February 26th.  Now it’s April 13th and we still don’t have our car back.  It’s always something, real or invented, that gets in the way.  After a couple of weeks, my ever-upbeat contact at the mechanic, Santiago Alban, told me over the phone that they had all the parts but the wiring harness.  I went over that afternoon to see what they had, and not one single part had been delivered for my car.

They never could find even a used harness. Finally they were able to find just the little multi-wire plugs that go into the brain, which would then need to be soldered one wire at a time to the sixty or so severed harness trunk wires, all without making a single mistake.  So they’d been at that for a week or so.  Every time I called Santiago, he assured me we were just days away from getting our car back.  “This afternoon we are going to start it up.”  “Tomorrow it will be running.”  “This afternoon we are getting the diagnostic tool we need.”  Finally, “you will have your car for Holy Week.  I am sure of it.”

They couldn’t get it to start, so our Vitara was sent by tow truck to another mechanic.  Upon returning to Quito after spring break, I had an email from the Insurance broker that the car had been tested by the insurance representative last Tuesday and was going to be sent that afternoon back to the original mechanic.  So I got right on the phone and found out that it was still at the second mechanic’s shop, and they would not give it back to the first mechanic until the bill had been paid.  So that’s where it stands.  Who knows when we’ll get it back.

I can’t believe it never occurred to me that once the car was fixed there could be a whole new set of roadblocks before we actually got the car.  Is the car actually running?  Is it really fixed?  When will we get the car back?  Are the mechanic and insurance company people in cahoots to defraud the insurance company and us?  Are the used brain and harness plugs the very ones that were stolen from our car in February?   Will we have to keep taking the car back to the mechanic to fix ongoing problems?  Will we even get to use it before we have to sell it in June?   Will anyone buy it from us?     Stay tuned!

  We’ve been remiss not getting this post up since we got back from Christmas Break…  We discovered possibly the most idyllic place we’ve ever been – Franklin’s Island, Panama in the San Blas Archipelago in the Caribbean Sea.  Deeply shaded by palms, fringed with white sand, surrounded by crystal clear waters, and with only 15 people total on the whole island, it was almost comically perfect. 

We spent three days and nights with no shoes, just laying around in hammocks and padding around on the water’s edge. 

Franklin and his staff called us to meals by blowing a conch shell.  No electricity, no running water (bucket baths), just a sand floor in a bamboo hut, and three squares – all for $17.50 per person per night. 

The slide show should give you a pretty good feel for the place, but nothing’s like being there (for best effect, click on the show to link to a slightly larger version at slide.com).  Although we try not to go anywhere twice, we’re seriously considering a return visit on our way back to the States this summer.

I enjoyed my conversations with the guy who runs this place, Elixto Franklin.  A Kuna Indian (the Kuna own this whole semi-autonomous region), he received this responsibility almost a year ago and found the place a shambles.  He’s done a lot to improve the place, Cabañas Tubasenika (but called Franklin’s Island by everyone who stays there).  His place has no website or any other publicity, so I want to pass along his cell phone number: (country code 507) 6540-5478.  We wish him all the best.

Our ever-enterprising 7th grade Science teacher, Diann, got a bunch of us together at the end of November to do a hike she’d had her eye on: Laguna Cuicocha (Guinea Pig Lake).  A couple of hours north of Quito, near the famous market town of Otavalo, here we have yet another gorgeous crater lake, except that this one has two islands in the middle, separated by the thinnest of reed-filled channels.  On a previous occasion we’d taken the boat around one island and through the little slip between them, which was really nice.  This time we were determined to walk the rim.

Fourteen years ago on our honeymoon we’d been to this lake and started hiking counterclockwise, so I had a vision based on that half-hour walk that the whole 5 hour trail would be a naked, baking-in-the-sun ridge hike.  Nothing could have been further from the truth.  We started out walking through sun-dappled pine forest with gorgeous views of the lake.  Yet my favorite part was that the trail didn’t offer constant, satiating views of the lake, but ducked away from the crater rim for a time, through scrub, cloud forest, and paramo, then swung back to offer a fresh but equally gorgeous perspective. 

We’re backin’ up now… to November of 2008.  We’re dying to show you our Winter Break pics (hint – there’s a canal there), but we should probably catch up on fall trips first, before we forget. 

Our friend Beth Rogers and her boyfriend Shawn invited us to go with them for a long weekend to a remote part of highland Ecuador.  We’d been hearing about the Blacksheep Inn, an award-winning sustainable ecolodge, ever since arriving in Ecuador.  Ron Mader, who runs Planeta.com and specializes in eco-tourism, told me that it’s one of the best in the world.  This trip is a giant counterclockwise driving loop that’s positively spectacular. The mountains are tremendous, and covered top to bottom with patchwork quilts of farmland. The mostly dirt and cobblestone road snakes from ridge to valley along precipitous drop-offs, leading to a serious conundrum: should Joy drive and scare herself to death going 15 miles an hour (turning the 6-hour drive into a 12-hour drive), or let Luke drive and scare everyone to death going 50 miles an hour (turning the 6 hour drive into a 4 ½-hour drive)?  The creative compromise? Joy took herbal tranquilizers to survive Luke’s driving; Shawn and Beth just held on tight.

Blacksheep Inn consists of an assortment of beautiful buildings all up and down a steep hillside (the driveway is four-wheel-drive only), with commanding views across a giant valley. Toilets are of the composting variety (but don’t stink at all), some of the water is harvested rainwater, and each room has a great little woodstove that heats up the room in minutes.  Dinner and breakfast are delectable, vegetarian.

The scenic highlight of the loop is the namesake crater lake, Laguna Quilotoa.  Amazingly, this lake was formed by a giant eruption relatively recently (February 4, 1797 to be precise!).  One day we hiked for about seven hours from the edge of the crater back to Blacksheep Inn: the first thirty minutes were along the rim of the crater. Five and a half hours were various angles of downhill; the last hour was straight up.  There’s no describing the views and the immense scale of the Andean landscape.  It was simply spectacular.

Joy and I just wanted to take a second and wish you a Merry Christmas!  We are currently vacationing in Panama; we just got back yesterday from the amazing San Blas Islands on the Caribbean coast.  Pictures will be coming soon, once we get back to Quito.

Joy and I both just finished reading Three Cups of Tea, the incredible story of Greg Mortenson and the amazing work he is doing in Pakistan and Afghanistan, building schools for girls in remote mountain valleys.  If you haven´t read this astounding, inspirational story, please consider doing so soon!  Thanks to mother-in-law Ellen Russell for giving it to us as a gift!  Here´s the website: three cups of tea

I was thinking tonight about what to post and realized I’d still never posted but one picture of what is possibly the most beautiful place in South America, Iguazu falls (Foz do Iguacu in Portuguese).  We went there with Joy’s mom and Step-dad in July of this year, and had beautiful weather.  We stayed on the Brazilian side out of habit (we’d spent the last 3 weeks in that country), but when we crossed to Argentina we realized it was a lot cheaper there.

Since the falls are gigantic, and are on the border of Brazil and Argentina, to really see them takes at least two days – and you must visit both sides.  The Brazilian side features sweeping panoramas that capture the magnitude of the huge falls complex, while the Argentine side offers views from above, below, and middle.

When I was a kid, we got the first Japanese car in our little borough in Pennsylvania: a Datsun.  One of the ways my dad likes to wax nostalgic is to apologize over and over for making my brother Bruce and I ride in the back of that tiny two-door 1200.  But hey, we were kids, we didn’t know we were supposed to mind, and at least it smelled a lot better than our old Dodge Dart whose previous owner was clearly a cigar smoker.

As they might say in Jersey, we didn’t know from harbingers.  That little white Datsun portended the eventual domination of Japanese cars in the US.  Now, for the last ten years, we’ve been seeing Korean cars — Kias and Hyundais, and just like it went down with Japanese cars, the conventional wisdom WAS that they were junk, and the conventional wisdom IS that they are getting better and better.  There are also Daewoos and I just learned down here about SsangYongs, all from Korea.  So get ready for more Korean Cars.

But the big news for me was Cinascar – the dealer here in Quito of Chinese-made cars.  All kinds – trucks, pickups, SUVs, minis.  I’m including some pictures from their billboards.    

The red truck I see often walking home from school.  It features that very practical hinged sidewall design that you used to see on the Volkswagen pickup, where the sides as well as the tailgate can fold down. Not to mention the tie- down hooks all the way around, like every pickup should have and hardly any pickups in the US do anymore.

There seem to be at least four automakers in China, Chery, ZXAuto, Changhe, and Great Wall Motor.  Each of these companies can be found on wikipedia as well, which is where I found the links to their web sites.

If you happen to follow the links above to the manufacturers’ English-language web sites, you can appreciate that the immense differences between the Chinese and English languages, as well as the newcomer status of Chery and the other companies to the English-speaking market, are bound to lead to some interesting phrasings on these companies’ websites, and I love to go looking for these.  Here’s one from Chery, regarding their V5 station wagon:

V5, a combination of the functions of SUV.MPV and cars is a breakthrough in auto market, a mixture of multi-styles that leads the unique auto culture.
       ROOM: roomy space that carries styling life
       HOME: family use, enjoying happy life together
       TEAM: colleagues, clients and friends assemble in the vehicle.

Another example: a popup chat window on the ZXAuto page asks, “What can I help you?”  We can all have a chuckle at that, but we dismiss these automakers at our peril:  Wikipedia says Chery is working with the Ferrari/Lamborghini designers, Bosch for transmissions, their engines already meet the tough Euro emissions standards, and their painting facilities and manufacturing processes are state of the art.  They were hoping to have cars in the US by this year, but the agreements fell apart. It’s just a matter of time before these cars start making Kias and Hyundais look good, and then start looking good themselves.

Ten years from now I’ll be able to say I told you so.

As you probably know, Ecuador’s official currency is the US dollar, so bank machines here dispense the familiar green stuff.  But they dispense it in a way that opened my eyes to possibilities that are lacking back in the USA.

Here’s a quick test:  what is your best guess about how many different money trays a standard ATM has inside?  Well, when I first moved to Austin my UFCU bank machine would give out bills in increments of ten dollars, so I for one assumed until recently that there were two money trays behind all that thick metal and friendly interface: one for 10s, one for 20s — though these days my bank and all the others seem to fill both trays with twenties (which I heard referred to once as “yuppie food stamps”).

So, how many money trays?  Here’s the truth: what I thought and whatever you were thinking, we were lowballing it big time.  I got $200 in cash from my bank machine the other day, and as this picture attests, you can fit at least 4 different types of bills in there.  Dollar bills?  From a bank machine?  Are you kidding me?  No, I’m as serious as the sub-prime mortgage crisis: this is the kind of spread we get every time we get cash.  And I like it.  It’s the way it should be, I’m beginning to think.  Ever try to buy a soda from a machine with a twenty?  OK, well, there are no soda machines here.  But in the States, this would solve your problem.

Back to last summer, here are a few pictures from some of the gorgeous colonial towns we visited in Brazil.  The first picture is Parati or Paraty, the port that shipped off the Brazilian gold before Rio de Janeiro took over.  The last picture is Salvador da Bahia up in what is referred to as northeastern Brazil.  It was the biggest colonial city we visited, and in its day was the center of slave trade and now is the cultural heart of Brazil, with capoeira, candomble, and most of the country’s musical styles hailing from there.

The rest of the pictures are of the exquisite colonial towns of Minas Gerais, the state northwest of Rio de Janeiro whose name means “General Mines,” a bureaucratic triumph of paternalistic nomenclature that clearly distills the region’s only importance to the colonial Portuguese.

Fresh back from our trip I had planned to write in detail about the towns and the sculpture, etc. etc.  But at this distance, I’ll just let the places speak for themselves.  A wonderful trip with almost no U.S. tourists.