Medical Update:

Thanks to a (15 dollar) x-ray, I have determined that my elbow is, thankfully, not broken.

However I might have tendonitis now.

Goddamnit, Ecuador.

Sam’s Uninformed Ramblings, Quito-Style

So the project is over. The sensation is not unlike having a cancer removed. Specifically, a ninety-three pound cancer that resided on the base of my neck for five weeks and sang in a shrill, halting contralto whenever I tried to sleep and in general behaved like a huge group of drunken baby birds, helpless and brain-damaged, cawing at all hours of the day and night for my attention because apparently they’ve reached the age of nineteen without ever letting go of their desperate clutch of mommy’s skirt or gotten more than sixty feet away from daddy’s wallet and perpetually indulgent smile so they don’t quite understand that this is Ecuador and it is different and maybe even though I’m staff I don’t CARE ABOUT THEIR GODDAMNED PROBLEMS ARRRRRRGGGH.

Inhale, Sam! Inhale. The cancer metaphor got lost in the mix somewhere in there but that is something I am prepared to live with, as I’m sure actually re-reading that paragraph will result in elevated blood pressure.

The best part of the project being over is that, having never for a moment cared about the problems of spoiled American college students bewildered by the absence of strip clubs and styling salons, now that the project is over, I don’t have to! It is glorious.

The last couple of days were harrowing. Since friendly motivation is obviously my forte, I responded to the problem of getting our students to work by the expedience of stripping the metal off a pickax handle, christening it “The Stick of Gentle Encouragement”, and brandishing it about like a drunken teamster whenever people could not be bothered to bestir themselves away from their DVD collections and never-ending games of grab-ass and make their shiftless arses of use to me. Which was basically all of the time.

SAM, HANDSOME DEVIL: Hey! Maybe you want to, uh, work on breaking those beds down.

SOME GUY: But those girls over there aren’t working either!

SAM, SEXY BEAST: *brandishes Stick of Gentle Encouragement* Give me a reason. I swear I will make you eat it.

SOME EXTREMELY SCARED GUY: Yes, my liege!

In spite of such problems as general uselessness and an inability to grasp that garbage goes in a trash bag, we finally managed to leave Cangahua. It was a sad event.

BOBBY, BEST BRO: Aw man, I’m kind of sad to leave.

SAM, CALLIPYGIAN MAN-GOD OF THE AGES: in a high, unsettling cackle I’m free! Free, I tell you! Freeeeeeeeeeeeee!

When we reached Quito sometime later, I said farewell to my beloved students, sharers of great and mighty experiences, friends of my bosom, with all the solemnity and gravitas the occasion merited.

SAM, NEW WORLD LOVE MESSIAH: So long, suckers! extends two middle fingers, blows raspberry

Of course this made the farewell dinner a few hours later a touch awkward, but I am nothing if not able to smooth over awkward social moments, and I am not able.

SAM, RUGGED MAN-BEAST: Wow, hi!

SOME BITTER GUY, WHO REALLY NEEDS TO LEARN TO LET THESE THINGS GO, CHRIST ALMIGHTY: You hit me with a stick this morning. When you got off the bus you shoved me back into the seat and said unspeakable things about my mother and ancestry. Why can’t I kill you just by wanting it?

SAM, CHISELED ICON OF SUPERFLUOUS MANLINESS: I’m going over here now.

Finally, after dinner, I was free to wander the streets with Bobby, Matt, and Rob. We ate another dinner and went to a bar, where I drank sufficient strawberry daquiri to take the edge off of practically anything. The highlight of the evening for me is when I went searching for Matt, certain that he had been raped, mugged, stabbed, and had his organs harvested in the thirteen minutes he’d been gone. I encountered some friendly people!

FRIENDLY WOMAN: Hi there.

SAM: Hello!

FRIENDLY WOMAN: It’s a nice night, isn’t it?

SAM: Why yes! It rained a little earlier on, but- sudden pause as Sam takes in leopard-print mini-skirt, push-up bra, skintight halter top Oh wow! You’re totally a prostitute!

PROFESSIONALLY FRIENDLY WOMAN: Yup.

SAM: Oh, cool. Well nice to meet you!

Who says I can’t handle delicate social situations well?

So I’m in Quito until Wednesday, sleeping in a clean bed and wondering why I bothered spending time anywhere else.

And there are no frat boys in my room.

God, it’s so pure I could cry.

ARGH.

Alright. So, um, I don’t like Ecuador anymore. I have traveled past the touristy bits and journeyed deep into it’s black, carnivorous heart. I have seen things NO MAN SHOULD EVER HAVE TO SEE.

Case in point: they’re replacing the bamboo/reed ceiling of the church of the Hacienda Guachala, right? They found a MUMMIFIED BABY.

Let me repeat this: they were replacing the ceiling of a church and they found a mummified dead baby.

For emphasis: I AM IN A COUNTRY WHERE THEY STUFF BABIES INTO THE ROOFS OF CHURCHES AND JUST, YOU KNOW, LEAVE THEM THERE.

Please, by the way: just so you know? This is not a 500 year old church. This baby was not wrapped in a beaded shawl. This church was built in nineteen freakin’ thirty eight. Which means some enterprising lass had a really brilliant idea for getting rid of her child, seventy years ago. Or since it was a church, possibly a nun had a really brilliant idea.

The worst ever found in the ceiling of an American church was asbestos insulation and maybe a thirty-year-old bottle of stoat!

I look down into a cardboard box, right? I just got back from doing three hours of exhausting point triangulation at the tola site (which is roughly seventy percent less interesting than it sounds) and I look down into a box just sort of sitting on the ground and there’s a thing that looks like a rat because it is one and a thing that OH GOD IT HAD TINY HANDS and I ran away to be busily sick in the bathroom.

And everyone is acting like I’m the weird one.

Just Wants To Go Home,
Sam Acheson

A Photographic Interlude, Mindo Edition

How I love my camera

How I love the Caskefessu

Not Shown: Myself or Roommate

The colors are just faintly stupid, aren't they?

Yeah I don't know what this is about either.

Things I Should Not Post In a Blog Read By My Mother, Vol. 1

INJURY TALLY:
-Sprained elbow. (ibuprofen, 600 ml)
-Mild concussion (see above)
-Major-league torso bruises
-Throat infection (three forms of antibiotics)
-Mild parasite infection (some kind of terrible bug-bombs in pill form)

INCIDENT TALLY:
-Fell out of a truck
-Was peripherally involved in a riot
-Got tear-gassed by policemen (see above)
-Was almost riot-batoned, again by policemen
-Got punched by a drunk person in the face
-Punched a drunk person in the face
-Bitten on foot repeatedly by angry, angry scorpion

NUMBER OF TIMES PEOPLE HAVE ATTEMPTED TO SELL ME DRUGS: 7.

NUMBER OF TIMES PEOPLE HAVE TRIED TO SELL ME, ER, “PERSONAL SERVICES”: 4.

NUMBER OF POLICEMEN I HAVE BRIBED: 2

NUMBER OF TIMES I HAVE DRIVEN STICK (WITH NO PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE): 3

NUMBER OF TIMES I HAVE DOUBLE-CLUTCHED A TRUCK HALF TO DEATH WHILE DRIVING THROUGH THE ANDES INADVISABLY FAST: 3

NUMBER OF GUINEA PIGS I HAVE EATEN: 2

I write this entry in the interests of confession. Mom, don’t have an apoplexy. At least 80% of these things were not my fault.

Living Spaces

Mindo, glorious Mindo, seems to have inadvertantly destroyed my (admittedly limited) tolerance for my fellow man. It has been a mere five days and I am already fully prepared to commit acts of aggravated assault with my leatherman simply to ensure I get seven hours of sleep.

Patience, padawan! Patience.

I miss my family quite a bit. I also miss Chinese food. See, there is Chinese food in Ecuador, but, alas, it is made entirely of parasites, e. coli baccili, and of course pure poison. Eating it is therefor inadvisable.

Pukarito, the archaeological site I´m working at now, it cruelly, almost absurdly beautiful. The first day we hiked up we were treated to the sight of a perfect double rainbow stretching across the vast valley, which is full of farms and hedged in by rocky, mountainous peaks usually seen bordering the lands of an evil overlord. There is a fully three-sixty view, and every single square inch of it is beautiful. It makes spending the day crouched in a pit not merely amusing but actually masochistic.

I´m so ready to see my mom, and my dad, and my fish, and my cats, and possibly my favorite boutiques, and then after about thirty six hours of sleep in my bed and nine hot showers, my friends.

I love you all. I miss you all.

One week left! Time to start cramming in the adventure.

Those whom the gods would destroy…

…they first make Sam Acheson.

Okay, Ecuador. Jesus, LAY OFF. I got a throat infection. My innards are in constant turmoil. But my last two trips to the clinic make FOUR. FOUR, IN LESS THAN A MONTH.

ARGH.

So, trip three? Because of the antibiotics, I was dizzy, so I fell out of a truck. It wasn´t moving all that fast, thankfully. But I landed square on my torso, which now resembles a tye dye shirt made of agony. Clinic trip? To check for broken ribs. Prognosis: negative! Go me!

Trip four was yesterday, because I fell headfirst into a four-meter-deep unit, landed on my elbow, and smashed my head into a cangahua wall. I spent the rest of the day in a lovely floaty world accessible only to the semi-concussed. It was nice! Fortunately, my elbow was merely sprained and I didn´t die of a cerebrovascular hemmorhage, so I am definately ahead. Go me!

Trip five will probably involve hyenas.

The Cloud Forest

So there’s this strange meteorological phenomenon: in high places, sometimes the atmosphere is just right to create a rain forest. It becomes muggy and warm and damp, and even though it’s thousands of feet up in the air, plants begin to kill each other to reach the sun and evolution goes into overdrive, creating hundreds of thousands of species in an area that, by all rights, should be populated by dead grass and a wheezing, oxygen-starved llama.

I went to Mindo this weekend as a sort of getaway; getaway from my lumpy bed, my thousands of peers, my filthy dermis. And boy oh boy, did I succeed.

The drive down was dark, bumpy, and thoroughly unremarkable; except at about two hours in, when I realized something: there was oxygen in the air. Not just oxygen; but soft, caressing oxygen like you never see in the Andes, where the wind is like a buzz saw jammed down your throat at the absolute best of times. It was like Hawaii, or some other gentle part of the world.

Even at nine in the evening you could feel it in the air. Since the area was swarming with groups of dead-eyed young men who undoubtedly wanted to steal the very fillings from our teeth, we highed our way over to a hostel. At fifteen bucks a night I got a feather mattress, a private room, a private (extremely hot) shower, free breakfast, and possibly the opportunity to untense muscles that had been strung like piano wire for the three weeks previous.

Let me take a moment and talk about that shower. You know that scene in The Princess Bride where the narrator describes Buttercup and Westley’s first kiss as the greatest kiss in all of recorded history? My shower was like that. I scrubbed away whole geological stratum of filth, washed nesting insects from my hair, and collapsed into the bed, where I slept until nearly nine in the morning (unspeakable decadence!) and woke up in a courtyard full of flowers.

The thing about Mindo is: it’s a rainforest. It’s a rainforest without mosquitoes, but it has everything else: flowers with colors you can’t name. Hummingbirds flying through the air like tiny winged jewels. Butterflies that look like they were designed by the Jim Henson studio. And that was all in the little courtyard of the Caskefessu, a hostel of unsurpassed friendliness. The proprietor, Susan, met her husband fifteen years ago during her stint in the Peace Corps, fell in love, went back to the states, saved a bunch of money, and returned to found the best hostel ever. They had real coffee. It was a revelation.

Sadly we were usurped by a party of hateful Scotsmen, so we had to move. We chose the stately Dragonfly Inn, a polished wooden edifice with rooms like a luxurious treehouse and an excellent view of a stream. It was equally lovely. Then, of course, we had to decide what to do.

We went tubing.

Please do not envision Raging Waters tubing, where you gently bob down a narrow channel with screaming pubescents behind you. Instead we paid two Ecuadorians of such chiseled and swarthy manliness that I felt not unlike the Pillsbury Doughboy to lash seven inner tubes together and launch us down a level 4 river during the dry season. It was incredible.

The great thing about Ecuador is that so much of the stuff they do is charmingly haphazard. In America, where a stubbed finger can result in a class-action suit of monumental proportions, being somewhere where people simply launch you down the river and hope for the best is oddly refreshing. Terrifying at times, yes, but oddly refreshing.

The best part was listening to the guides argue. As we reclined, holding on for dear life as we struck, got hung up on, and occassionally pancaked around rocks the size of a volkswagon bus, the guides seemed to be having either a philosophical debate or coming to terms with the dreadfully apparent fact that neither of them knew the river very well.

(approaching rapids)

CAPTAIN BICEPS: Derecha! Derecha!

VICEROY PECTORALS: No, izquierda! IZQUIEEEEEERRRRDDDDDAAAAA!

In between the times I was fearing for my dear gringo hide (re: most of the time) I have never wished more for a camera. The things we say were amazing.

Tiny birds, half the size of sparrows, startled by our screaming, flying centimeters over the placid river, their tiny claws leaving tracks of foam.

Six butterflies the luridly vivid color of cherenkov radiation, perched on a rotting log.

An enormous eagle, disappearing and reappearing among the crags, weaving in and out of a tattered lacework of fog.

A white bird and a black bird, flying in perfect step.

Six cows, laying placidly by the river, watching us with dull unconcern with birds perched on their backs.

Sheer cliffs at 90 degree angels, covered in bushes and trees hanging on for dear life.

It was easily the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done. Minus, of course, the terribly undignified screaming.

That night (after the world’s most nightmarish ride in the back of a truck through a rainstorm) I had a rare steak, covered in peppercorn cream sauce. God bless you, Caskefessu.

The next day was the butterfly farm – more on that later. I love Mindo more than all of Europe combined.

And not just because they have good steak.

Blaugh.

You know, there are times when I really deeply wish I was someone else. For instance, someone who doesn’t here a large group of people socializing downstairs and having a great time, and spend his evening buried in a book thinking “well, I’d only screw it up.”

Hooray antisocial tendencies!

I love Robert Heinlein. He understands.

Dead People

Man, every time I leave the country weird famous people just drop like flies. Today was dedicated entirely to Michael Jackson jokes of variously questionable taste (I generally honor the dead but there is a limit to how hard I´m going to lament the passing of a pedophile) and man, was it fun.

Farrah Fawcett is sad, of course, though I´m glad her terrible suffering is over. Billy Mays is a surprise! I expected him to die of a shouting-induced embolism, not head trauma. I always figured he must have been married to an extraordinarily patient woman.

¨HONEY WOULD YOU LIKE TO WATCH A DVD AFTER DINNER ONLY 14.95 WITH MAIL-IN REBATE!?!?¨

¨WOW THAT SOUP WAS DELICIOUS, ALL THANKS TO SOUPBOWL(C)¨

¨DARLING LET´S GET MARRIED IN THIS HOTEL FOR A REASONABLE PRICE AMERICANS CAN AFFORD.¨

In poor taste, certainly, but my place in the infernal pits is already ensured by evicting a Catholic priest, so what the hell.

Speaking of dead people: apparently I almost was one! When my lymphnodes reached the size of golf balls I finally went to the doctor, who blanched, clutched his heart, and prescribed me (literally) six different medications. All six of them totalled to less than my co-pay, so I suppose it´s not that big a deal, but I seem to be cheating death at such thin margins lately it makes me glad the Universe is neglecting to keep score.

Oh and apparently some football player got shot.

And While You´re Dying (I´ll Be Still Alive,)

Sam