To wind up my 2 months of working with the horses in the Crater, there was a couple from Ohio that wanted to go on a 5 day tour. Tours longer than 3 days involve leaving the Crater and staying out at hotels a day’s ride away, with the first day being a loop within the Crater to make sure the riders get horses that suit them.

On the second day we went out of the crater via Nebli, a little town just south of my house where they harvest jugo de caña to make into guarapo and later liquor, and rode out to an ecological reserve called Yunguila to spend the night and feed the horses. 

Day 3 involved another trek, but into a more urban area. At this point Manuel, one of the guys from the farm, joined us with a spare “just in case” horse and we continued on with the free horse running along with the group. The path passes fighting bulls, a rose farm that ships to the US, and tons of cattle. We stayed in the cutest town I’ve seen in Ecuador, called Nono that’s just east of Quito. The “hotel” in this case is an old hacienda owned by a guy named Lucho who is the “Cowboy de Sudamerica” and would very definitely be considered a hoarder if he wasn’t so organized. He has collections of just about every farming/cowboy related thing that are all mounted and displayed beautifully throughout the many rooms of his place. I wish I’d taken photos.

The final day that I was on the tour we rode out through the mountains towards Mindo. Here we passed beautiful highlands and adorable farming properties set on steep steep slopes. At the end of the day we met Manuel in the car, where the tourists and Astrid went on and Manuel and I took the horses back to Nono where Lucho drove me into Quito to get my flight. Life was simple and wonderful.

I’m coming up on just one month left on this awesome adventure that I’ve been on (I may need to change the name of this blog when I get home if I keep writing…) and just starting to feel like I might be ready to come home. Mostly though, life here is simpler, more straightforward, and I’m really happy. From what I can tell, the culture of South America is much more linear in terms of the way they think about work. People work to pay for their lives, that’s it. They don’t seek excess, they don’t live beyond their means, and they don’t for the most part have the sense of manic drive that is the norm in the Bay.

I’m not saying there’s not merit to the lifestyle in the Bay and throughout the US, it’s just a refreshing change to be experiencing another way of looking at the world. People here are entrepreneurial, but in that they’ll start their own business with their own idea and see if it has legs with the people around them. They don’t seek millions of dollars in funding, they don’t covet ideas from neighbors and friends, they just grind to make it work and the marks for success are not based on global reach or social media scores, but rather on whether the business pays for itself and a little more. Do people still work hard? Absolutely, but there’s no sense of this constant sprint like we have at home.

As you may be able to tell, I’ve started the whole job hunt thing from here in Ecuador. On the few days that I head out of the crater and into civilization I work on updating my resume and getting in touch again with contacts at organizations I find interesting. As you likely know, it’s a slow process and only time will tell where I land. I’m really juiced about the possibility of at least volunteering with the Exploratorium, but we’ll see what happens. I wonder how my blackberry-scratched and bug-bitten arms will play in an interview.

After 3 months down South I also am just starting to feel comfortable in my Spanish. I’ve been communicating with people relatively easily this whole time, but now I occasionally make people laugh, and not just at my mistakes. There’s still a LOT of vocabulary I need to learn and some verbs/tenses I need to review, but it’s starting to come together. I’m planning on either joining, organizing, or bringing a franchise of some sort of Spanish/English practicing thing to SF (check out Spanglish in Buenos Aires), so if you want to be involved drop me a line as well. More to come on that once I have it even vaguely figured out.

So for those of you who don’t know (and who actually read this, let’s be honest), I’m supposedly training for a half marathon in SF a short 5 days after I get back from Ecuador. While this seems forever far away right now, 40 days is not actually so much time before the race.

I meant to start training in Argentina (seriously) but with all the damn cenizas in the air I was coughing and stuffy anyway and was understandably averse to putting more volcano vomit in my lungs. Bolivia was a non-starter because of the 4km altitude + general business of every day.

So here I am in Ecuador without having really been training at all. Living and running in a volcanic crater has its plusses and minuses. 

For one thing, I’m supposed to be training on hills, so volcanic crater is cool for that, but in San Francisco at least there are uphills and then downhills. Here I basically pick up or down for the first half and then go until I turn around. There’s a limited number of streets and paths, and even selecting the flatter ones leaves me with a very challenging first half of the run followed by a negligible second half of the run… I suppose I could just run the same stretch up and down but that’s just not enjoyable.

There’s also no sense of distance here. All the training schedules I read before coming said that you should go X miles on the days leading up to the race. Without distances, I’m doing this based on time… which is definitely less accurate for training since who knows what my pace is. Still, I figure if I can run an hour and a half by the time I get back then I should be more or less prepared. I hear people usually do their first half-marathons in around 10 min/mile or 2 hrs, 15 min.

On the upside, if I head out at the right time of day (any time after like 3 pm) it’s really foggy. Never before did I know the joys of fog-running, but it’s really delightful! For one, I can’t look ahead and dread the incline that I know is coming forever. I just run in the moment. Second, the fog is nice and cool and moving through it keeps my body from feeling like it’s overheating. Third, even though there’s really nobody around, it’s nice to know that people aren’t watching you run. And lastly, every time I’m out I stumble upon some cows or horses that are as surprised to see me emerge through the mist as I them and we run in parallel watching each other until they frolic away again.

Another great thing is that I always have dogs here! If the aforementioned Rex is tied up at home, I still have Shadow and/or whatever other of the family’s dogs are chilling in Puhulahua for a while. It’s really fun to watch them run ahead of me chasing something and then come back and check in. Even though they won’t tell anyone, I also feel like I have some accountability to keep on going.

The last positive is that I know that coming back to sea level is going to be CAKE compared to here. 2800 meters is nothing to sneeze at. I just hope it’s foggy on race day.

Meet Rex. He’s young, German, full of energy, and rarely more than 5 feet from me while I’m at the ranch. Rex technically lives next door but spends most of his time at my place… or under my place barking at things in the night.

They weren’t lying to me when they said it’d be lonely and that I should bring a lot to do. I get up every morning around 7, eat breakfast, and go down to the farm to ride the horses. If there’s a tour I help bring the horses in, saddle up, and go out with the group on one of the younger ones. If not then I just catch what horses I need and ride anywhere from 2-4 around the crater to get to know them and try to get them over some bad habits. And even though there’s not much to be do and I’m pretty cut off from everything, it’s been lovely.

There are 27 of them in the herd, and this week I got through 18 of them… I’ve been busy. From here on out I’ll be trying the remaining 9 out as well as starting to do some more intensive training with the babies and the particularly neurotic.

Real photos to come soon?

My house is the blue flag and the farm is the pink one. The horses live around in those pastures nearby.

View Pululahua in a larger map

this was supposed to post a week ago… oops.

On Monday I finally arrived at the last stop in this whirlwind adventure: the Green Horse Ranch.

Well, more accurately I’m at the family home of the woman who owns the ranch for now, getting prepared for my life out in the middle of nowhere in (yes, in) a volcanic crater about an hour and a half from Quito on the ranch.

I arrived at Astrid’s house on Monday night, about 16 hours before she and her daughter came back from a 7-week visit to Europe, and was greeted by a pack of dogs and two lovely other German women who have been volunteering/helping out around the Ranch for a while now.

Mostly what I’ve done here is try to learn German as everyone here is originally German and, especially since they haven’t seen each other in months, they just speak to each other quickly. I seldom know what’s going on.

On Wednesday we headed out for a ride with tourists in the crater, which was a great taste of what life will be like. I didn’t really take photos, but here’s a bit of a description:

The crater is about an hour’s drive from Quito, but then it takes another 30+ minutes to descend from the rim of the crater down into the basin where the horses live and the rides begin. I’ll be living in a cute newly constructed wooden house about 500m from the barn that has 2 bedrooms, the biggest shower I’ve ever seen, a cute kitchen, and a wraparound porch. Plus I will probably bring a sweet dog named Soleil to keep me company!

The horses are a herd of about 30, most of with Lord of the Rings characters. They’ve all got varying levels of training and neuroses as does any herd. My day-to-day responsibilities/activities are mostly going to be cooking for myself and riding 2-3 horses. They’ve got a number of young ones that need some work before they can go out with the tourists and some older ones that need some maintenance. 

Here’s the one photo I took (don’t worry, more will come later):

Socially, there’s not much doing in Pululahua so I’ll be spending a lot of time on my own, with this Czech/Canadian guy next door, and probably using internet at the hostel that’s about 20 minutes by horse away. Otherwise, word on the street is that volunteers like myself tend to bring about a lot of drama with the men of the crater. Hopefully by the time Austin gets here in September I’ll have at least 3 Ecuadorian boyfriends figured out how to fend them off.

RETROBLOG: El Tigre is the mouth of the Rio Uruguay that divides Uruguay from Argentina and eventually Brazil. It’s only and hour train from Argentina and costs less that an dollar round trip, so it’s a great day trip for a sunny day.

I actually ended up going twice, once with Lourdes from my class and the second time with Mario, Sarah, and a roommate from my hostel, Brendan. 

When you arrive in Tigre, you can either do a catamaran tour for 2 hours or take a collectivo ferry to an island to walk around and eat lunch. Obviously we did the second one because it included food. Lourdes and I walked to a restaurant and spent like 2 hours trying to figure out what to order, but the second time around we did an “agrestic trek” around Tres Bocas which included a lot of sketchy log-bridges.

[artsy photos credited to Sarah Twitchell!]

RETROBLOG: Iguazu Falls

I’ve held off on writing this for a long time because Iguazu is utterly indescribable. There’s no way that what I put here will possibly do justice to the truly awe-inspiring experience that it was to be there… but here goes a try.

Iguazu falls is at the intersection of Argentina, Brazil, and sort of Paraguay (though they don’t actually have access to the falls itself). Unfortunately due to time and not wanting to pay for a Brazilian visa, we only went to the Argentinean side.

Day 1: we go up to the “Devil’s Throat” which is basically 270 degrees of waterfall. If I knew how it was all formed, I’d tell you, but from above you can see the wide, wide river that flows peacefully into a turbulent throat-like area. It was incredible. 

From there we took this semi-lame boat ride down to another part of the falls where you can walk along paths across all of the other falls. Turns out that the mind-blowing Devil’s Throat is only about 1/3 of the falls in its entirety. 

Day 2: we head to the bottom part of the falls. The park has a bunch of really nice pathways and the thing that’s incredible is how every vista point they give you is as amazing as the last. I could have easily spent another day there. On the lower trails you can walk right up to the falls and get wet, which we did, as well as take a boat for a “gran ducha” right into the falling water. Admittedly, this would have been better if it was warm out, but we did it anyway. 

Picking just 10 photos was difficult, and it would really take a video to do justice here, but the internet in South America isn’t upload-friendly.