Its a beautiful morning in Quito. It rained last night and the city seems cleaner for it. This is our last day on free computers at the club so this could be my last post for a while.
Before our river trip, we went and checked out the museum of Oswaldo Guayasamin, the world-famous Ecuadorian artist. His work is amazing,very intense and very political. Frequent subjects include poverty and repression and are a good representation of life for many people down in these parts. I'd recommend checking his stuff out online for anyone that is interested.
Politics are more than something in the news down here, protests are common and police presence is quite visible. We ran into a huge protest in the park yesterday, thousands of people, mostly indegenous. You would think it was a big picnic except for the flags and the megaphones, there were tons of families and kids running around. Totally peaceful, but the swat teams keep a couple lines of cops standing in front of the gov building across the street just in case. (we see these cops everywhere, they are really nice to us, we hear they are not so nice to their own people) Protests are about wanting to dissolve the congress and write a new constitution due to long-standing corruption and huge social inequities. The people aren't so in to privatization here, and people seem to be pretty politically active and involved as a whole.
A few additional words on the river trip...
Part of what made it so fun was the cast of characters on the trip. Steven already mentioned the older couple (in their mid to late 60s?) that braved the class 4 river! (It made me think of rafting with Grandpa Ned when he was older than that) There were some typical frat boy types, this classic California dude in his 40's with great lingo (nice snaps, bro! translation: nice photos man!) And our driver who spoke like Kerouac writes and has adventured all over S. Am. for the last 8 years getting into all kinda of adventures. It was a well traveled group (lots going to or from Columbia too!) with good info on volunteer projects, hiking, safety and all that... all in all a great group. The river was beautiful and the rapids quite exciting.
The vehicle crawling up the huge hills to and from gave us a glimpse of what is in store for us....
We are heading out of town today on a bus, going to put the bikes together in the next town over and hop on. We are heading to Otavalo for the famous indegenous market there on Sat and then are heading into the cloud forest to volunteer for 2-3 weeks. It looks like the work will be focused around conservation, reforestation, and possibly some endangered species stuff with this endangered bear. You can get the scoop on the place at www.zoobreviven.org.
We are very excited to be getting out of the city and on the bikes!
Hope all is well with y'all back home,
--Tina
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