A Typical Day

Waking up finally, the rain has stopped and the clouds are beginning to clear. Fabricio is parked first in line at the taxi stand in the town square. We arrange to leave Vilcabamba and head back to Loja, stopping at Podocarpus National Park for a few minutes to grab a quick shot on the way.

His English is pretty good and we switch from Spanish to English so he can practice, stopping every so often to shoot whisping clouds, on the list. Arriving at the entrance to the much visited cloud forrest park, there was a bus parked smack dab in the middle of the entrance with no driver near by. We try to pass by and get stuck in a muddy ditch and have to push ourselves out with the help of the park officials. The bus driver then returns and a huge argument ensues which finally results in the driver throwing his hands up and walking away. His bus won´t start and the compressor has locked the brakes and he can´t move it without starting it and since the battery is now dead, it won´t budge. The real issue that he fails to see is that he choose to stop in the middle of the entrance to the National Park, on a Sunday. Needless to say, all I got was a shot of the sign and some cloudy peaks from afar - total wash.

I catch the 12 Noon bus from Loja to Celica, hours away. We descend into desert highlands and then back up into the freezing wet clouds, at least two full cycles, me reading almost a hundred pages of Blood Meridian, very fitting for this barren and desperate landscape. Arriving in Celica at 4:30PM, I hire a cab to take me back down the mountain to the petrified forrest¨30 minutes, no problem,¨he assures me. An hour and forty-five minutes later after another hairball wet ride down a gnarly rutted one-lane jolting dirt road, just as the sun is setting, we arrive at Puyango National Park, flying past the office that is now closed. Eventually the guards catch up with us and scold us for not having stopped. Shoot first, ask questions later. Now I have company to run into the parkwith and shoot a few fallend petrified trees - about 130 Million years old - the largest petrified forrest outside of Arizona.

Finally, the taxi driver leaves me at the military contraband checkpoint where the last bus passes by at 7PM. Ever since Central America way back when, I always get a little nervous around teenagers with automatic weapons. Being Easter Sunday, the bus comes and goes with no room for one more person and leaves me standing there high and dry. The solidiers are watching soccer inside thier makeshift outpost and invite me over - Guayquil vs. Quito, with Guayquil winning. Finally at about 8:30pm a lone truck driver agrees (at the strong suggestion of the solidiers) that he should take me to Machala. First, we stop at Huaquilles on the border with Peru after bouncing down the terrible road for two hours to pick up his sister. He´s hauling tons of rice in large sacks an keeps peeling off copies of forms of official loooking documents and handing them to soliders at the now frequent checkpoints. Finally at midnight, we arrive in Machala, the 'most dangerous city in Ecuador', it has been said more than once.