The Middle of the Earth, Volcanos and the Bullfight

Ecuadoriana lady
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I have been up in the High Sierras for the past week!

Back to the beginning.

we arrived in Cotocachi for an unexpected parade!

We connected with our group on Sunday (August31) morning for a 2 ½ hour drive to Cotacachie, which would be our home base for the next week. The drive took us into the Northern Sierras, past half finished concrete houses with no windows, shacks with corregated tin roofs and tiny men walking their goats along side the highway. These are very small, compact people. The men wear their sleek black hair in long braids down their backs. White panama hats are popular, and surprisingly many of the men wear white pants (I don’t know how they keep them clean!) The indigenous Indian women wear rounded bowlers or fedoras with a feather along with colorful shawls or frilly embroidered blouses, depending on the region. They carry their babies on their backs, tied tightly with a large sheet of fabric to leave their hands free. They are always walking a goat, pig or cow.

volcano
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There are many volcanos here, so everywhere you looked was an astounding peak rising up through the clouds. The altitude in Quito is around 9000 feet above sea level, (that’s where we started!) so you are at high altitude all the time. I think living in Colorado definitely kept me from having any headaches or feeling short of breath, but I could not have run any sustained distances!

The main roads are not too bad. Traffic coming into Quito was ridiculous, and apparently many people commute because the long thin valley of the city is already built up, with no more room. I later found out that roads are “A” “B” “C” or “D”…so I should say the “A” roads are fine. I have now experienced a “D” road on a bus, and it was rutted, unpaved and narrow. Sort of like a roller coaster!

parade marcher
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Our first toll road stop was like a carnival, with walking vendors selling everything from newspapers and soda pop, to toys, while we waited to go through the toll booth. From the bus it was easy to look down into other cars, and I can tell you, seatbelts are not used much here.

We stopped at Mitad del Mundo, (Middle of the World) where the equator line bisects the world into Northern and Southern Hemispheres. This was our chance to have one leg in each…I saw a map there of the ley lines of the earth, and every city in Ecuador is located at an intersection. Ecuador is just above Peru, and there were Incan settlements here too, when it was all one big territory. One of the oldest churches in Quito, Iglesia de San Francisco is built on top of an ancient Incan royal house. Energy and mystical spirituality are intrinsic to the people here. Before being forced to convert to Catholicism by the Spaniards, they were sun and moon worshippers, and still very connected to nature.

parade watcher, young modern ecuadorian man
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We arrived in Cotacachie in time for an unexpected parade! The road to our hotel was blocked, so we all got out and watched. The parade was part of a once a year celebration that would end with a bull fight later. Individual groups of riders on horses took turns showing off their horsemanship and style, some riders as young as 4 or 5, being shadowed by their mothers. There wore colorful serapes, or bright red cloaks, cowboy hats and wooly alpaca chaps. A band standing staggered on the church steps took turns drinking from a skin bag and playing their horns and drums, and girls with sliced watermelon on trays balanced on their heads called out to customers in the crowd. There was cotton candy, candied apples and potato chips (papas fritas) in 25 cent bags. This was better than the county fair! It was also our first photo op…all of us trying to catch the motion of the dancing horses or discretely zooming in on the interesting wrinkled and often toothless faces of old men and women. Sometimes, instead of hats, the women just had funky folded blankets on their heads!

mom with baby on her back
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Hosteleria Meson de Las Flores, where we would stay, is built in the square hacienda style, with interior walkways around the perimeter of all three floors, ferns and fuchsia and bouganvilla draping over the railings. The interior tiled patio was lined with geraniums and dotted with wrought iron tables and chairs with blue striped umbrellas. Charming! Our rooms were simple adobe walls, with carved wooden bed frames, old wooden desks polished to a deep rich patina, creaky wood floors with locally woven rugs and built in cabinets. The hotel used to be the home of some wealthy local official, and we were just a half block from the town square. We had time to check in and have a quick lunch out on the patio before we found out we would be attending the bull fight.

dinner in Quito in an old mansion
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I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, because I certainly didn’t want to see some matador stab a bull!

A bus took us to the grounds outside of town, a circular arena painted red and white, with a series of stone seats carved into the earth, and stands set up behind that. We had to walk up a long dusty road with hoards of people, some on horseback, all making their way to the festivities. Most of the men looked like they had been into the cervezas for awhile, some carrying three or four large bottles in their arms. We got great seats down in the first row, behind a low concrete wall, and then we waited, not knowing what we were about to see.

hometown parade band
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First the individual horse groups came out and showed off again for the judges. Mostly it was choreographed turns in unison, or standing on their moving horse, or racing across the field and pulling up just short of the wall- all very pretty and exciting. One guy made his horse kneel, and then lie down while he stood and sat on him, but we all thought he was arrogant, and disliked him for digging his spurs into the horse to make him do what he wanted. And one group’s horses were so terrified of the crowds, they wouldn’t enter the gate, and reared and bucked their riders off, one horse rolling on top of a caballero who didn’t get up right away.

the newest style, blanket on the head!
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Then…the first matadors in costume entered. Yeah, they were about 9 or 10 years old, and one was a girl! They had an instructor with them, and they were so cute. And they fought a little baby bull! We were laughing our butts off, because mostly they would wave their capes and when the little bull ran toward them they turned and ran as fast as they could toward the boards they could hide behind. They were completely terrified. Each event escalated in size of man and size of bull, ending with any drunken male who wanted to jump down into the arena and try his hand at bullfighting. This was mostly done in large groups, with lots of macho swaggering, each guy egging on the other, but there were a couple of them that really knew how to spin with the cape and elude the horns of the huge bull. Then again, it was quite entertaining to watch the guys try to jump the wall to escape, pulling their feet and legs up as high as they could hoping the bull couldn’t reach them…

parade cabellero
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The last event was for women only, and a jaunty pig on a leash was led to the middle of the ring. I thought the women were going to have to catch the pig, but no! They released a big bull, and they had to try and capture the pig while eluding a bull. This was not that easy, since any time a woman made a move, the bull would chase them AND the pig. Fortunately the whole event was very tame and ended up being a lot of fun.

Our first night ended with dinner in the courtyard, a few cervezas of our own and a good night’s sleep. What a great first day!