Photo of the Day: Banos, Ecuador

From Bridge Jumping in Banos, Ecuador

More Miscellaneous Travel Notes

• Generally, I’ve been pretty depressed by the state of coffee in South America. It is strange to me that there are excellent coffee growing regions all around – Brazil and Columbia in particular – but they still serve crap, instant coffee in so many places. When I took a coffee plantation tour in Panama, the tour guide referred to the low quality coffee beans drying on the ground (with stems, leaves and so on mixed in with them) as “Nescafe beans.”

I’m sick of Nescafe. Instant coffee sucks.

• While we are on the topic of coffee, I like just a small bit of cream or milk in mine. Just a small, little bit. The first few times I ordered coffee in Latin America, I saw “café con leche” on the menu. Leche is milk. I figured, “perfect, coffee with a little bit of milk or cream in it.” Ahhhh – not so much.

Coffee con leche is about a half and half mixture. About half milk and half coffee. And that’s a pretty horrible combination in my book. It reminded me somewhat of one of my roommates during freshman year of college, Dave Rubin.

We drank a lot of coffee that year. I suppose we thought that a few cups of coffee in the morning was some sort of sign of us finally becoming adults. One day I was doing the dishes and washed out a couple coffee mugs that Dave had used – and there was about a half inch of sugar at the bottom. I’d never noticed before, but he poured a ton of sugar in with every cup. “Would you like a little coffee with your sugar” became the roommates’ refrain to him every time he poured a cup.

He’d fit in well down here. They seem to like everything served sweet here. I’ve thrown away more than a half a dozen cups of coffee because they came to my table with sugar already in them.

By the way, if you want to order just plain, black coffee, its “café negro.”

• Sidenote story from freshman year in college. Before I went away to school, I only wanted three things from living away from home: (1) a liquor cabinet, (2) a kitchen, so I could cook for a dinner date -- and assumably impress the hell out of some woman -- and (3) the ability to stay up all night without answering to anyone.

Number 3 was a success. Too frequently. Number 1 existed, but was stocked with such horrible liquor that my father refused an offer of a drink the first time he visited. I don’t think I had a single date my freshman year of college, so number 2 was a bit of a failure. I did get to witness Dave screw up making a grilled cheese sandwich though – that was amusing.

• I love smoking cigars. Back at home, my cigar habit was getting to be somewhere in the five to ten cigar a week range. I really got to like a Nicaraguan cigar called Padron. They were smooth smokes and very reasonably priced – I could get a box of 25 of them for under $100.

As we all know, you can’t buy Cuban cigars legally in the U.S, because of the really stupid embargo on all things Cuban that has far outlived it usefulness, except in courting Cuban-American voters in Florida.

So I’ve been cigar shopping in a few places in Central and South America and the reverse problem appears to me here – you can ONLY buy Cuban cigars down here. And though I do love a nice Montecristo #2 occasionally, Cuban cigars are just way, way, way overpriced. I’m used to paying $3-4 for a cigar, not $12-18 per cigar.

So as a strange result of being in places where you can buy Cuban cigars . . . I am smoking very infrequently. I wouldn’t have figured on that.

• I’d say far less than half the time at the places I’m eating dinner there is salt and pepper on the table. That’s probably a good thing for me – I’m one of those people that habitually salts and peppers my food before even tasting it. As a cook, I know that is stupid, but I can’t seem to stop. In addition, especially in Central America, when they bring out salt and pepper – its salt . . . and then hot sauce not dry pepper, as we are used to.

• I mentioned in a previous blog about all the countries that the U.S. has either invaded or attempted to overthrow their government. There is a strange dichotomy, in my mind, of countries we screwed with and their choices of currency. Two countries stand out. We messed with Nicaragua famously for years, with the Contra War. Strangely enough, they have pegged their currency to the U.S. Dollar. Although they have a local currency, the Cordoba, its value is set against the U.S. Dollar – as our currency goes up or down in value, so exactly does the Cordoba. And although we invaded Panama a few decades ago and took out Noriega, their currency is the U.S. Dollar. The greenback is alive and well in the land of the canal.

If I was running these countries (and Daniel Ortega just go elected President of Nicaragua a couple years back – he of the Sandinista revolution and the target of the Contra War for all those years), I don’t know if I’d be happy having my country’s financial status tied so directly to the country that has screwed with us.

• Keeping with the theme of money, it is really, really nice to go to the ATM machine in some of these countries. In Chile, for example, one U.S. Dollar is worth about 600 Chilean pesos. This doesn’t mean much in terms of how much things actually cost (Chile is actually pretty expensive, compared to a lot of other places down here), but what is great is getting the receipt from the ATM machine showing your balance in pesos.

I’m a multi-millionaire in Chile, baby. Feels sooooo good.

• And on the topic of currency, did you ever wonder where all the Sacagawea dollars went to??

Ecuador. Ecuador is another country that uses the U.S. Dollar as its currency. But when you get change there, you often get the one dollar Sacagawea coins back. The first time I got one back, I did a double-take when I looked at it. They were issued in the U.S. in 2000 and 2001. I feel confident in saying that I’ve never seen a single one in circulation back home. I saw dozens of them in Ecuador.


I wonder if they just loaded up big cargo planes with all of those coins and sent them down to Quito. “Here you go boys. We aren’t using these things. Go crazy.”

• And lastly on the subject of change – NO ONE has change in South America. It is truly amazing how many times, when I hand over a 20 or 50 or 100 peso note, the person in the store asks if I have exact change for what I’m buying.

One night in Quito, Ecuador, I went out to a bar with three of the girls I was traveling with for a week or so. The bar was fairly crowded – I’d say there were 50 or so people in there, drinking and dancing. I went up to the bar to buy a beer. The beer was $3. I handed him a $10 bill and he shook his head and said “I can’t change that.”

It was a TEN dollar bill. In a bar, for God’s sake. A fairly crowded bar at about 10 p.m. How the hell can you run a business and not have two one dollar bills and one five dollar bill in the cash register?

Yesterday, in Bariloche, Argentina (a very popular tourist town with no shortage of money around) I went to a store to buy a windbreaker. The store was a big one on the main commercial street in town. In fact, the store was a North Face store. The jacket I bought was $72 pesos. I gave her a hundred peso note. She asked me if I had two more pesos, so she could just give me $30 pesos in change. I checked my pockets and told her I didn’t have any small change.

She asked me to wait. Went to the back room for about 5 minutes, obviously in search of change and ended up coming back out and just handing me the $30 pesos in change. It wasn’t really a big deal in the scheme of things, but this store gave up $2 pesos. . . just because they didn’t have change in the cash register.

Disco night in Quito

I was going to walk around the old town in Quito today, sightsee and take some pictures, but as I didn’t go to sleep last night until about 4 a.m., after a completely unexpected night at a discothèque with some new friends last night, I’m tired, hungry and slightly hung over. So I shall write instead.

Last night was one of those nights in a foreign land that makes travel memorable. It’s rarely the landmarks and sights mentioned in your guidebook you see on the road that sear themselves into your memory, but rather the people you meet, situations you get thrust into, and the foreign stew created as a result that causes the contented sigh that acknowledges the trip was worth it – just for this.

I have a friend, Chance, that has been living in Buenos Aires for a few years. In actuality, Chance graduated high school a few years after me, we rarely hung out in high school, haven’t seen each other since, and only recently reacquainted via Facebook. Regardless of how we got here, he’s been an invaluable resource on my trip, I know consider him a friend for sure, and I look forward to him drinking me under the table on an all-night Buenos Aires adventure in a few weeks.

Because he has lived in South America for a number of years, he knows some people spread out in the various countries I am traveling through for the next few weeks. He sent out some emails to a couple of them in Ecuador and I got a hold of his friend (or so I thought at the time), in Quito yesterday. Her name is Marcela and I’ve been engaged in a three-way email exchange with her and another of Chance’s friends, Susanna, that lives in another town on the coast. It was apparent from the email exchange that Marcela didn’t speak much English, and as we all know by now, I don’t speak much Spanish.

Marcela extended an invitation to come to her house to meet her and her boyfriend and also partake of some local Ecuadorian spirits. Luckily for me, I had run into a fellow traveler, Briana, that I met earlier in the week in Columbia and she and a friend of hers, Zoe, were willing to join me for the evening. I say luckily because Briana speaks fairly good Spanish.

I stopped on the way to pick up a bottle of rum as a thank-you gift to Marcela, met up with the two girls joining in and we all took a cab to Marcela’s place. I am almost constantly amazed at the kindness of strangers on the road – and let me explain how completely the three of us qualified as strangers this evening.

I thought that Marcela had lived in Buenos Aires previously and was friends with Chance. As such, I put the link to get me to have drinks in her home as – Marcela to Chance (who frankly is almost a stranger to me) to me. Sort of a friend twice removed. I was asking Marcela about when she lived in Buenos Aires and how she knew Chance, through Briana’s translation, and it became quickly obvious that she had no idea who Chance was and had never lived in Buenos Aires.

This woman had allowed me and my two friends (who were even more removed than I in this connection) into her home, offered us food and drink, and if Briana hadn’t been there, wouldn’t have really been able to communicate with me, and was in fact, three times removed from me.

She a friend of Susana’s. Susana used to live in Buenos Aires and knows Chance. Chance went to high school with me more than twenty years ago. And to cap off the incredible hospitality of it all – she was fine with me bringing along a couple other people I’d just met, making them four times removed from her, in my book.

I felt sure that we were going to meet up with Kevin Bacon later in the evening.

We sat in her living room drinking rum and cokes (and totally finished the bottle of rum, making it not much of a gift in reality) and the local liquor, which was served warm and had quite a kick to it. Briana translated conversations. Both Zoe, Briana’s friend, and I attempted some Spanish – Zoe much better than I.

And at one point in the evening, I actually had a exchange of a couple paragraphs that I understood entirely. As I’ve said here many times already, I’m absolutely horrible with foreign languages. My bad memory is compounded by my bad ear for linguistic details, so perhaps this isn’t true for everyone else, but it is certainly true for me.

There is something incredibly satisfying about finally understanding someone speaking a foreign language. Actually being able to communicate and idea back and forth. I don’t even recall the topic where Marcela and I actually understood each other – the topic didn’t matter. Through a bit of simple Spanish and some hand signals, we actually understood what both of us were saying. It felt great.

Her boyfriend, Jacobo, showed up a few hours after we did. He spoke excellent English and had studied for a time in Great Britain. We all sat around chatting about this and that, Jacobo played his guitar and we ran out of liquor a little after midnight. My two friends wanted to go get a beer somewhere, so we offered our thank you’s and good bye’s – and Jacobo offered to drive us home. We told him that we were fine with just taking a cab (there are incredibly cheap here) and said we were probably going to go find a beer anyway.

He and Marcela looked at each other and said we should go to a discothèque that they liked. So off we went. And danced, mostly to excellent 80s music that I sang to at the top of my lungs while jumping up and down and making a gringo fool of myself, until about 3:30 a.m., when Jacobo drove us all to our respective homes/hostels.

So in short, this couple, who not only didn’t know any of the three of us, didn’t know my friend that helped get us all together, has us over to their home until midnight and then takes us all out dancing till 3:30 a.m., then drives us all home. . . and went to work today.

Does that sort of thing ever happen at home?