Going The Distance

Crappy hotel we stayed in in Piura had open gaps above every door. Which means that when the room beside you decides to watch TV ALL NIGHT, you’re going to get a shitty night’s sleep. That’s not entirely fair they didn’t just watch TV all night, they did have sex 5 times, (TV still on).

I’m in a foul mood. This happens if I don’t get enough sleep. Mike, thankfully (since we are driving 8 hours today) got a great night’s sleep, able as he is to rolll over and go straight back to sleep.

Piura is not the most charming of towns – we have found, during our various drives in Peru, that there is often a pile up of rubbish, landfill-style, at the side of the road, which makes for some very smelly patches (not that I’m not used to that with Mike…). But the PanAmerican highway is in the best state that we have seen it since Mexico, so no complaints there. Mike guns it and the trusty steed makes it to the utterly magical surfing resort of Huanchaco, just outside Trujillo, by 3pm. We get a room overlooking the ocean (and the surfers, more importantly), there is a canopy of bougainvillea for me to wake up to in the morning, and I manage to convince Mike that we should stay in this paradise for 2 nights rather than doing another long driving day south immediately. He agrees.

That evening we meet Luis, a Spaniard who lived in London for 5 years (so swears as much as we do), and the 3 of us dine together, then end up in a local bar for one of the most extraordinary evenings of our trip so far. The bar is a tiny, single room. It’s filled with people all sitting round in a circle, most of them have instruments of some sort or another – bongos, wooden pipe, guitar, home-made shakers, some killer voices… and together they spend a few hours just jamming. Mike and I sit back and take it all in. Along with the first Pisco Sours we have had since crossing the border. All good.

I’m sitting at the Ecuadorean/Peruvian border as I type. Waiting for a $1.50 fried chicken and rice to be cooked, as Mike wrestles with the bureaucracy of getting our beloved Russian into new lands.
There are little things about our day to day which don’t make it to print, because they are either forgotten in the days it takes me to write the blog, or because they have become so mundane, so quotidian, so damn normal in this migrant life of ours that I don’t think to write them down.

One such story which falls into the former camp is of me singing at the top of my lungs to Michael Jackson’s “I just can’t stop loving you” (female part) as we drove into Cumbaya, outside Quito, a few days ago in the dark. (We try not to drive in the dark, but often some setback or other – unforseen oil changes, poor roads, donkeys in said roads, etc – mean that we don’t make it to our intended destination before the sunsets. Foolish.) The traffic slowed as we reached a light, and only after I’d belted out “just tell me what else would I dooooooo” that I realised I not only had a pedestrian audience, but that he was clapping along with me. I often think about what would be my audition song if I found myself in the hell of an X Factor audition, and I’m not sure MJ would get me through to the next round. I’m more of an Elton John girl, myself. In fact, a vast Oregon wheatfield was treated to a particularly rousing “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” where I did both Elton’s alto and George’s Greco-North London tones with gusto and expert accuracy. Really, I’m wasted in that sidecar.

Mike has a dance move – all shoulders – which he sometimes treats me to on the road. I’m not allowed to ask for it (then it is strictly denied) but with a judicious bit of DJing (maybe an uptempo salsa track, or a boppy bit of Jamiroquai) he might just be lured to wow me with his slinky torso. I live in hope.

Food’s arrived now. Fried fish and rice. What happened to chicken? I’m sure my Spanish isn’t that bad… I’m taking the gamble today and eating the tomatoes. The first vegetable (fruit?) that’s gone into my gullet in days. That’s one of the really tough things about life on the road. The routine of the grub is intense. Chicken and rice for lunch everyday.

The other thing which I haven’t mentioned thus far is how filthy our faces are at the end of a day’s driving. Mike’s eyebrows look like they have been kohled on, like a clown. I have just wiped the sleeve of the suit across my face and blackened the part I wiped with. The diesel burning vehicles here belch black smoke out, and if we are trapped behind them, it can sometimes be hard to breathe. My hands are permanently filthy, nails get black by the end of a long day on the road.

Depressingly, it’s starting to get hot again. We have descended from the heights of the hills and are getting lower and lower as we near the coast again. This is, of course, the equator and its tropics, my sweat glands have had a nice break, but now it’s time to get real again. Real sweaty.

It’s later in the day now. Things got bad once we crossed the Peruvian border: the sides of the roads were soon littered with junk – plastic bags, plastic bottles, general garbage. A wasp flew into my face on the drive and left the stinger in my face. Much flapping and not happy. Then, half an hour later, Mike too got stung, twice. On the leg. Again, much flapping. Thankfully, we didn’t crash.

To top it all off, the road at one point became a ford. A deep ford, crossed by a river of thinly disguised sewage. He paused, revved the engine, and we headed to cross it – as Mototaxis and small cars were doing before us. I thought I’d film the traverse on our little HD camera. The depth was much more than it first appeared. The sidecar was flooded, the camera died and we were left sodden in stinky water. (which is why I have no images of the Peruvian border to share…)

I love Peru.

The Valley of Longevity, that’s what this place is called. People just live and live and live – it’s famous for its old people. 40 years ago, it wasn’t uncommon to see people of 110 or 120 years of age. The setting is exquisite (nestled in a green valley, surrounded by verdant and fertile hills) and life was always good to these people. The life-expectancy has dropped hugely since the arrival of cars and the outside world in them. But there are still lots of old people around. We came here because we wanted to find an old couple who we could get advice from. We hoped to find some over-100s, but despite much enquiry, we can’t find one. However, married couples in their late 80s abound, so we interview two of them.

The first is Leopoldo and his wife, Soleda. They have been married for 56 years. They used to live in a finca in the hills outside Vilcabamba, but sold up and moved to a pleasant little house on one of the main roads in the town (on Avenida dell’Eterna Joventu, as it happens). They laugh a lot together. Our only issue on the interview front is that Leopoldo is going deaf, which always makes the interviews very difficult. We asked them for an interview, then went back to our hostel to get the camera, during which time the two of them changed into Sunday best.

The second couple, Vicente and Vicenta, have managed 52 years together. They are 86 and 84 respectively, and their faces wear that age. They are both captivatingly lovely people, much laughter, many smiles and much warmth exudes from them. They live in a small village called San Pedro up the hill from Vilcabamba. A village, which they tell me determinedly, has been independent from Vilcabamba for the last 10 years.

The two of them both grew up in the town and have known each other forever. They got together in their late teens but only married late (she was 32). I couldn’t make out the reason for this, sorry readers. That’s dodgy Spanish for you. They only have one son, and two grandsons. Which, by Ecuadorean standards, is a titchy titchy family. I ask about this – Vicenta very nearly died in childbirth. They had to get a donkey cart to take her to Loja (about an hour’s drive on the bike away) and there she had to have a caesarean. After that, Vicente got himself sterilised. Was it hard to be surrounded by your friends and neighbours with many children? I ask. Yes, it was, they reply. Children are the most magical thing that can happen to a couple, and to only have one was very hard. In fact, that was their advice to us, have children. I, of course, delight in that advice!

While we were in Vilcabamba in the morning, asking all and sundry if they knew old couples, and being sent from place to place, we met two ex-pats who live in Vilcabamba. (I can see entirely why they would: it’s beautiful, laidback and filled with bright and interesting people). One, Ann, has just lost her husband – and great love – of 20 years. A widow, still broken by sadness. So much so that even my hardened documentary heart can’t find it to ask her if we can interview her as our first widow. The second, Mike, is a Brit who has been there for 6 years. He was a junkie and a drop out, then his mum won the double rollover on the lottery, each of her kids got 2 million quid, and he basically went to the place he’d wanted to live all his life (he read about it when he was 7 and had wanted to go since).

From Cuenca to Vilcabamba today. The wonderful thing about driving days in Ecuador is that they are always a lovely temperature (like the best of English summer days – sunny but not too hot, with a lovely breeze) and the scenery is totally spectacular. Very green, hilly and interesting. Love it. Would really really recommend Colombia and Ecuador to anyone with even a twinge of wanderlust.

The article about us came out this morning. Which led to a couple of phonecalls from US ex-pats. Always nice to chat to people about what we’re up to. (I’ll publish the article when I get hold of it)

One little known fact about southern Ecuador is that this is the home of Panama hats. NOT Panama. A grave injustice – caused by the fact that the Ecuadoreans shipped them up to the canal from which to sell them around the world. So Panama got the cred, and not Cuenca, Ecuador, the very epicentre of the trade.

We wanted to hunt out a Panama hat couple. Like the embroidery collectives of Northern Ecuador, there are many indigenous workers involved in the trade, and we had a lead similar to our one in the north, but it didn’t work out. So we went to the museum anyway, tried on some great hats (and some funny ones) and learnt about the trade.

There are different grades of Panama Hat – Standard to Super Fine – classifications which describe the fineness of the dried leaves woven to make the hat. The women who make the hats can make about 2 or 3 standard ones in a week, but a superfine one can take up to 4 months. Like the embroiders, it is work they can do in their own homes, around their children and their lives.

They then sell the hats to the factories, which then bleach and press them into shape, and finish them up for sale around the world. London is the biggest market, our wonderful guide Ifrein told us. And that the French have unusually small heads.

As you know, readers, I burn like a peach, so I have purchased the most exquisite hat which I have sent home, ready for my summer gardening forays.

Next up was an interview with Dr Juan Cordero and his wife, Anita. Juan is a history professor at one of Cuenca’s 7 universities. This is a small town, famed for not only its Panama hats but its culture. It’s Ecuador’s little pocket of poets, artists and generally the creative folk of the country, we’re told.

Dr Juan Cordero is the country’s former education minister, and has been married to his utterly lovely wife, Anita for nearly 40 years. Despite looking fabulous, and having been a minister’s wife up in Quito for his term, Anita is not mad keen on being filmed. She laughs as she tells me that she could talk the roof off a house until a camera is turned on her, then the words get stuck in her throat and she just freezes up. Either way, they are the most wonderful couple to interview. It’s utterly jovial, and we hold the interview in their house, which is at the back of the museum that the two of them have founded together in the centre of Cuenca, Museo de las Culturas Aborigenes. It’s been a lifetime’s work which they have shared – born of a shared passion for collecting items. When we ask what love is, Juan says that it’s about shared passions – and being prepared to make sacrifices. He says that they used to have to forego family holidays in order to be able to afford some artifact or another. But because they both believed in what they were doing, they could do it together. Now the museum is the largest collection of its kind in Ecuador, a fact of which they are both very proud. It really is a great place, built around a courtyard, and the kind of place – not unlike Cuenca itself – that you could spend days in.

I then dragged Mike out to the nearby Banos where there are volcanic hotsprings. We had hoped to find an economic widow – someone whose husband had left to work illegally in the States or Europe (Spain, Italy or France, usually), but we had no luck. So had a nice dinner instead.

The first of Pepe’s victories is Dr Nicanor Merchan, editor of the local paper, El Mercurio. Not only is he fiendishly accomplished, but he is also a passionate motorbiker, having done the Panamerican himself and manifold other mad biking adventures including the Himalayas. All 3 of his sons have some sort of National Motocross title, and bikes are very much a way of life for the Merchans.

We do a bit of a trade off with Dr Merchan – we interview him for our documentary, one of his guys interviews us for the paper. Dr Merchan’s wife is away, so it’s just him, so we decide to grill him on Cuenca and on biking. His wife doesn’t like to bike – how does that work? It’s his own special alone time. We ask him what it is about biking, and he replies that biking is life. It’s the way that he feels totally at one with the world around him, how he drinks in the great landscapes of the world. One time, he and his son were biking across the Himalayas. The snow was thick on the ground and they were wrapped up fully. In the distance, on the white landscape, he saw an orange dot. As they approached, he realised that it was a monk, wearing nothing but sandals and an orange robe.

They pulled up beside him, and the monk nodded peacefully, blessed them both and they hugged, managing to communicate across the language barrier. Dr Merchan said that it was one of the most moving and memorable moments of his life. You simply don’t get experiences like that without bikes, he seems to suggest.

We then meet Dolores, wife for 40 years of one of Cuenca’s most impressive residents, Edgar, a doctor who has set up a mobile surgery unit in which he travels the south of the country, doing much needed surgeries for free to the rural and urban poor. He loves Cuenca with his heart and soul and never considered living anywhere else. He met Dolores in Miami (she is a blonde nurse who he worked with in a hospital) and before he could marry her, he had to ask her if she would return with him to Ecuador, which 40 years ago was a fairly different place. He is the dean of the university, he was health minister for the government, and he and Dolores know everyone in Cuenca, pretty much. But he is away with the mobile surgery unit, so we can’t interview them.

So Dolores takes us to the home of her best friend, Diana, and her husband of 40 years, Tommy. Diana, like Dolores, is a US expat, married to an Ecuadorean. She’s a New Yorker and feisty, I can tell immediately that I’ll enjoy the interview.

Tommy headed to New York when he was 19. He didn’t speak a word of English and didn’t even really know where he was going. He got on a bus at the airport, then wandered around the part of New York he thought his uncle lived at. He was lost. He looked at people’s doorbells and eventually saw the name “Lopez”, assuming they’d speak Spanish, he rang the bell. Diana opened the door, didn’t speak any Spanish, but got her parents. Who happened to know Tommy’s uncle. And it went from there – Tommy’s uncle asked Diana to show him around the city, they slowly fell in love (and got better at each other’s languages – now they flit happily between the two). Effectively, Tommy married the first person he met in New York. Tommy has a husky contagious laugh and a smiling face and we all laugh our way through the interview. The two of them built their life out in Cuenca, have 4 totally bilingual kids – 2 in the States, 2 still in Cuenca. I always marvel at relationships which began with a courtship with different languages. How did they know that they were right for each other? Diana said that Tommy made her laugh from the get go, and she just knew they were great for each other. Lovely jubbly.

Cuenca is a beautiful little town – cobbled streets, small buildings. We’re staying the heart of it, and able to wander around without having to mount our trusted steed.

As we leave the hostel to get some breakfast, a man crosses the road and starts asking us about the bike. The Ural Effect, we’re used to it. But as we explain what we’re up to, he becomes animated and from then on in, takes us under his wing and starts to organise interviews for us. What a dude, thanks Pepe.

The hacienda is genuinely one of the most magical places I think I have ever been. It’s at the base of the Cotopaxi volcano, the land is green and lush, the temperature is sunny but breezy. The house is big but unpretencious. The outer windows are large, so the main rooms are bathed in the mountain light. The surrounding, tended garden is alive with colour and order. Bougainvillea cascades from the bowers surrounding the living room, a fish pond has fat little goldfish in it, and the wind moves the tall daisies around. Quite lovely.

Alicia is half-Swiss, half-Ecuadorean. She’s gorgeous, dark hair and eyes and a wonderful elegance. Valentin is her Aryan: blue eyes, lighter skin. He was raised in the Swiss alps as a farmer, and left around the age of 20 because he became disenchanted by the ills of 20th century society. He came over to South America, and started working on the haciendas out here, saying that the uncomplicated and uncluttered way of living suited him much better. The two of them had known each other in Switzerland, when both were with other people, but it was only when Alice asked Valentin to come and help with her ill father’s hacienda in Colombia that the two became really good friends. Alice later split from her husband, and the two of them ended up together.

Alice is wonderfully matter-of-fact- “this one I know is for life”. They have been together for more than 20 years, but Valentin is staunchly against marriage, so they remain unmarried. In fact, Valentin is staunchly against a lot of things. Humanity in general, seems to be a recurring theme. Alice and he have got the farm running (cows, fields, roses) which they run entirely as a fair trade, organic venture (rose growing is huge business here in Ecuador and in Colombia. It’s easy to buy tens and tens of roses for little more than a couple of dollars. Ann says that the foundation sees a lot of cases where children of workers (and the workers themselves) have contracted cancer from the pesticides which are used in the cultivation, and the work and pay is nigh on exploitation). They say that it doesn’t make them any money, but it keeps tens of local people employed. Furthermore, Alice’s daughter set up a school on the farm for 120 children of the nearby peasant villages. Volunteers come from round the world to teach there, they are housed and fed. We meet a jovial Irishman at one point…

Valentin is really sickened by the excesses of mankind. He sees how man just takes takes takes and it makes him really sad and angry. Despite his lapses into the occasional polemic, he is great fun and very very good company. He can laugh at himself (and Alice is good at poking fun at him too) and it makes for a very interesting interview indeed. We keep having to pull him back from the Ills of the World and back to his love story with Alice.

They make a great couple. On this trip, we have met so many wonderful couples with different types of love. I always love it when we meet a couple who I think we are similar to. They are good friends, first and foremost. They laugh, they discuss, they enjoy each other’s company. But they are also very independent, and different in ways.

Twenty years ago, Alice decided to study art. She had never done so before, and had never had any inclination to do so. Then one day on the hacienda, she had the urge. So she started having a go at it. Then she used to go to a workshop at the university and just work happily in one corner. And slowly, slowly, she has become brilliant at it. The exhibition in Quito is the first of her work, and while we are with her, she receives a phonecall from a UNESCO representative, asking for her work to be exhibited in Paris. She is modest, and laughs when I try and make a big deal out of it. At the moment, she spends three days up in Quito a week, and says that that’s how their relationship works well: they each have their own interests, and are never jealous of the time the other one gives to those interests. Valentin runs the farm, and will disappear off with his bike and the dogs for hours, and Alice is happy to let him go.

We have a most wonderful interview and subsequent conversation with these guys, meandering through Valentin’s apocalyptic and Malthusian forecasts and onwards. We eat beef from the farm, and are surrounded by vases of roses from the farm.  It’s really really sad to leave this magical place and these wonderful people. I really hope that Alice has the exhibition in Paris, it will be a great excuse to see them again.

We leave to drive to Cuenca, 3rd biggest city in Ecaudor and jewel of the inland south.

We leave Quito in convoy with our wonderful hosts. I get to go in the car for the one and a half hour drive south to a hacienda owned by Alicia, a friend of our hostess, Ann’s. The hacienda is an earthly paradise, and we spend the day with the 7 and 10 year old daughters of Ann and Gaston. Baby rabbits, chickens and dogs keep us busy all day, until we flake hard (how does anyone have children and have any energy at all?!)

The day starts with an interview with oft-published Ecuadorean historian, Carlos Freile, professor of the University of San Francisco de Quito. We thought we’d pick his brains a little on what we needed to know about Ecuador, and he was utterly fascinating. The gist is that Ecuador, though small, is as biologically diverse as a country can get: mountains, coasts, rainforest and Galapagos.

Socially, he believes that successive governments – as is true with all of Central and South America – have led to individuals renouncing their own responsibility. Governments fail to deliver on their promises, and individuals moan about the rulers’ shortcomings. Instead of individuals realising their part in the greater picture and their own responsibilities. Ecuadoreans talk about their rights, rather than their responsibilities. Pages and pages of the law talk about the rights of the individual, and only one or two sentences will cover a person’s responsibilities to their society. THus, he says, people have become lazy and ungrateful. Which actually, you see in marriage a lot, he says, people give up at the first hurdle because they enter into the union with a “me, me, me” attitude.

His eloquence on this matter is such that I wonder why he isn’t teaching it. “Oh I do,” he replies. He is author of an book in which he takes the story of The Little Prince, ostensibly a children’s book, and dissects it for its rich lessons in life: how to love, what we to our fellow man, what friendship means, what love means.

We had no idea that he had published this book when the meeting was arranged (by our host’s neice, his student), but Carlos Freile is a brilliant interview subject. Fascinating and still very in love himself. We ask if we can interview him and his wife later today. And, to our delight and astonishment, he agrees.

We leave Carlos Freile, knowing we’ll see him again later in the day, and head to the Baco Ortiz children’s hospital to film the work of the Sol Y Vida Foundation. Having been turned away from filming in the hospital yesterday by a vile witch of the “computer says no” school of bureaucracy, we have now filled in the necessary forms and are back to meet some of the little children going through their chemo treatment.

The chemotherapy room is fairly small – not a daunting hospital ward of a room, but a kind of a square waiting room with lots of natural light and brightly coloured murals. There are about 10 blue leather seats which can recline. They look like airplane seats – the material of business class but the size of economy class. on 6 of these seats sit children. Slumped, bored looking. They’re used to this, they’ve been doing it for ages. out of a canula in their hand comes a tube which stretches up to a drip above them. A parent sits beside them, also a bit bored-looking. Fridays are not busy, so there are fewer children here than normal.

Our first little man is sitting patiently in his chemo chair, parents with him, and his plastic superhero toy. He’s 6 years old. Ligia, the Foundation’s psychotherapist for the kids, waves and introduces us to the family who are willing to talk to us about the immense impact that the foundation has had on their lives, paying for the medication for the boy and basically working to save his life when without them, there would have been no hope.

Through a set of doors, there is a second room. It feels lighter, there’s colourful, small furniture, more painting on the walls, and not a trace of anything “hospitally”. This is where children come to play in between appointments, while they wait. They have lessons here too, the Ecuadorean government has a curriculum drawn up for kids in hospital. We meet the teacher who is adorable, and says her goal is to make sure this little room feels like a world away from what goes on on the other side of the doors: the pain, the chemo, the bored waiting.

A smiling three year old gives me a whopper of a grin, follows it up with a chess piece, then trots off to do some colouring in. She looks so happy and healthy that I turn to her mother and ask if she’s here because of another child. No, she says, her little smiling duaghter has been ill with cnacer for the last 2 years. But, thanks to help from Sol Y Vida, she seems to be getting slowly better. Mother and daughter spend every day at the hospital getting treatment. “It’s like a second home,” she says. But with a smile, as she waves at the teacher. In minutes, her gorgeous little girl is singing La Cucaracha, word perfect (with a little help from mum) as I dance like a loon, much to her giggling entertainment.

THere is one public pedeatric oncologist in the whole of Ecuador, she is the one who has to see and treat all these children. We meet her briefly, and arrange to come back in 15 minutes to interview her. Sadly, when we return, she is gone for the day. We later learn that she herself is undergoing treatment for cancer. There are people in this world who are truly amazing.

As we sit outside her office, we meet a man and his little daughter. She is 8 years old, and when she was 3, she was diagnosed with a tumour in her eye. She, like all of the other children, is adorable – and once she overcomes her initial hide-behind-dad shyness, she opens up, starts chatting and is very sweet. Her father talks openly to us about the miracle of the Sol Y Vida Foundation – how it has saved the life of his beautiful daughter, and how it has supported him and his wife as he had to give up work to bring his little girl to the hospital. We leave the hospital, and rather than being broken by the injustice of the disease and these young lives, instead I feel uplifted at the amazing work of the foundation.

We head into the colonial centre of Quito. Time to get some GVs (that’s “general views” ” to you non-documentary making few who read this). For the first time, Mike notices a little purple crescent which is appearing in shot. It’s not on the lenscover, it’s not on the viewing screen. Mike’s really worried. But we get shots of the centre of town – it’s utterly gorgeous, and our friend and tourguide Luis gives us a masterful and thorough tour of the place.
While we are in town, we head to a sculture exhibition by an artist who we are set to be interviewing on Sunday with her husband. Her name is Alice Trepp, and for the last twenty years, she has been studying residents of El Chota (the black villages in the north of Ecuador which breeds world class footballers) and making sculptures from them. She makes moulds from which she then creates lifesize models – in bronze, fibreglass and, most interestingly, chocolate!

The exhibition is of lifesize fibreglass models. It’s uncanny, you half expect them to get up and walk around. They are breath-taking. More on Alice in a couple of days…

From there, we head to interview the wonderful Carlos Freile and his wife Lucia. Carlos was her history professor and is 20 years her senior. But they are very very in love. He refers to her always as “Mi Lucia” which I find utterly enchanting. He consults her, and delights in her. She obviously matches his intellect, and the two of them are still radiantly happy – 30 years and 3 sons later. It has to be quick, the interview, so we wrap up. Carlos has given us his answers to our questions for advice and What love is. So we ask just Lucia to answer, and wonderfully she answers with exactly the same ideas as Carlos.

Finally, we go to Ventura Mall in the town of Cumbaya to make a short video for our host, who runs the mall. What a day. We make it back to our hosts exhausted, but with still enough energy for a quick acted rendition of “So Long, Farewell” from the Sound of Music with the girls (I’m the eldest son – “Adieu, adieu to yer and yer and yer…”, 10 year old Kim is one of the middle-sized girls “I flit, I flit, I fly…” and little Aileen is the tiny one “the sun has gone to bed and so must I” and Mike is utterly bewildered but gamely tries to be the eldest son before I have to step up from the role of Lisel – all this in performance for the parents/our hosts)

I want a kid. (A recurring theme on this trip)