You can buy flowers all over Cuenca, but one of the best places to buy is at a small flower market in front of the Sanctuario Mariano, across from the New Cathedral, down the street from Parque Calderone. Daily, under white canvas tents, ladies and men do flower arrangements, sell flowers, meet the public.
Cut flowers are one of Ecuador’s big exports, number 3.
Roses are the most popular for export to the U.S. and the industry employs 103,000 people and generates 800 to 900 million dollars annually to the Ecuador economy. Despite stiff foreign competition and changing likes of customers, the industry has improved its working conditions. Ecuador roses are world class quality and benefit from a longer growing season with no winter and lots of natural light. Cool Andean nights give the roses time to add coloration.
Facts are facts, but roses are a way to a woman’s heart.
Men, with a briefcase in one hand and a bouquet of roses in the other, leave the market today with quiet hopeful smiles.
Our dad liked fishing. His dad liked fishing. So, sons and grandsons like fishing too.
The Rio Tomebamba bubbles up memories of trout streams in New Mexico, the Pecos and Jemez in particular. It also reminds me of the Conejos River in southern Colorado, or the Gila River near Silver City, New Mexico.
We have caught trout out of smaller streams than this. There are rocks behind which the trout can rest and deeper pools where they congregate. Running water keeps nutrients flowing on the surface for them to strike as they pick and choose when and what to eat.
This river remains an anchor in a big city, a place to relax and stroll, a jazz song out of nature’s music book. One of the better things about the city of Cuenca is that it hasn’t crowded out the nature that is inside it.
If I were to move here, I would look for a small apartment by this river so I could walk along its side every morning just like this.
Rivers are bright murmuring bow’s to life’s presents.
This morning, it rains.
Having an umbrella seems essential, but, even now, there are people walking to work without one.
Ladies in pants suits have raindrops form in their dark hair and drop down on their leather boots like melting black icicles.
Motorcycles speed by with drivers wearing plastic drop cloths pulled over their heads to keep them dry, plastic flapping in the air behind them like huge wings.
Within an hour, rain has moved through and the Earth’s sun comes out.
In Cuenca, the only difference between summer and winter is the amount of rain that falls. The weather this year is, as most people remark, nicer than usual.
Having weather co-operate is wonderful, but weather doesn’t take orders from us.
We sail the seas but we don’t control the currents.
The road from Cuenca to Saraguro is two way but wide with shoulders on both sides, coming and going.
It winds up and over several large mountain ranges, in and out of valleys, over a few bridges, and, all the way, runs just below huge clouds scraping the top of the mountains.
Part of Ecuador is on the Pacific coast where driving is flat, part is in the Amazon where there are few roads, and the remainder is in the Andes Mountains. If you get motion sickness you take dramimina because even a good driver is not going to take bumps and grinds out of this highway. Looking out you see a patchwork of green, some cultivated and some not. As far as you see there are mountains, clouds, green, and so many hills and valleys that it would take a road man centuries to level them out with his yellow Caterpiller.
Today, Marcos drives. He is an Ecuadoran who worked in the United States and came home. Marcos can help you get a bank account, settle up with a Doctor, find you a good lawyer, or just explain how things work. Today, he gets Carol and I to Saraguro and back and that is worth a million.
Today, I am feeling like a sailor on dry land after months at sea. Riding in the back seat is no positive. When you drive at the top of the world, vertigo is your companion. This must be what it feels like riding a bull in a Texas rodeo.
Photos and words have a hard time doing justice to these vistas.
It was Carol who put this trip together.
When we first met, I was struggling up the stairways from the Plaza Otorango faint with food poisoning. She took the time to help a stranger.
She gave me a few drops of Dragon’s Blood, a natural Ecuadorian remedy for the “grippa. ”
I recovered and came back to say a proper “Thank You.”
Good people are close at hand but it sometimes takes food poisoning to find them.
Leaving one place and moving to another is more difficult when you have enjoyed your stay. Then you have one place tugging at one arm and another place tugging at the other.
The Caribbean is worn, tattered, frayed, chipped, pieced together, bright colors, strange language, intense sun, stifling humidity, rain, mosquitoes, stewed chicken, rum punch, hesitation to do today what should have been done yesterday. The weather, people, traditions conspire to wring compulsions out of you like twisting a wet towel and snapping it in the air. Nature is everywhere; a lizard climbing up the front porch wall, a trail of ants along a fallen vine, fish in a bucket on a pier, a bird standing motionless in the sea until it sees its opportunity and comes up with a jitterbugging silver fish. The music is Latin, African, American rock and roll, Cuban and reggae. Rasta men stay to strict diets and a young crowd wears bling and attitudes more big city than island, more pretend than real.
The Caribbean is a worn pair of house shoes that you favor because they give you support but don’t constrict you. In the Caribbean, you find boundaries erased and a tolerance for eccentricity. You feel your mind slip and inhibitions drift away from their pier.
The vista changes as we fly. It starts with blue green turquoise water, small green clusters of mangrove islands, sand bars, and just above the water line, land. Then, sea and land is obscured by clouds. Breezing across the Caribbean we cut over Panama and Columbia down to Ecuador, over the Andes Mountains. Ecuador sprawls, the color of a leprecaun’s green patched jacket.
Over Cuenca, tonight, you see man-made lights that look like burning matches in a dark room. In San Pedro Town, you see what there is too see in a month. In a city the size of Cuenca, you can only see your small part of the reef, the little hump of coral around which you live, sleep, do your shopping, cultivate friends and neighbors.
We are going to be good friends, this city and I.
Not finding things to do here would take a monumental effort.
The last rainbow gracing these postings was in San Jose, Costa Rica near the Hotel Aranjuez.
This masterpiece is between Belize City and Ambergris Caye on the boat ride back from a tour of Lamanai, Mayan ruins in Orange Walk, Belize.
Mother Nature sends us a parting bouquet of flowers, a little good by kiss, a temporary light show, a reminder of who is behind all that we have been observing.
It is the end of another day on Planet Earth , November 23, 2015.
The final stretch to Lamanai is a fifteen mile ride up the Old River.
The river reminds me of a Mazatlan boat ride and a ride down the Tortuga river in Panama. I am a city guy but get to the country as much as I can. Many city denizens know nature only when it bites them.
We are enroute to an ancient Mayan city built where the land rises higher and trees stand taller. There were many different tribes living under the Mayan umbrella. Their pyramids were built before Christ and these Lamanai ruins, saved from the jungle by British archeologists, give us glimpses of an ancient vanished past.
Without explorers and discoverers, who venture to places everyone else finds not worth the effort, our lives would be dry.
Without the world’s historians and storytellers, we would think we were the first to be here and there was nothing more here to learn.
We would be intolerable.
There are as many tour companies in San Pedro Town as there are bars, restaurants, or lodgings.
The day tour from San Pedro Town to the Mayan ruins at Lamanai on the Belize mainland, including drinks, transport , food, a guide and park fee is $150.00 U.S . We are gone an entire day, from 7 in the morning till six in the evening and see Belize by boat, foot and bus.
Our trip starts as a tour boat picks up guests at the end of piers where they are staying. There are twenty of us,this trip, young and old. The boat captain is Erin and our guide is Gustavo.
On the way to the mainland we get educated about mangroves, weather, ecosystems, navigating sand bars, pirates, and answers to any questions we ask.
As often is the case, guests are not asking questions but Gustavo tells us history and habits of those who live here. He makes himself available but not obnoxious. A good guide opens the book and points you to good parts, explains, but doesn’t read the words to you.
Even though this is a Sea-Rious tour we all go home, at the end of the day, smarter than we started and with smiles on our faces.
From eleven to twelve, the Walkaholics stroll from Crazy Canuck’s to Wayo’s without wetting a whistle.
From twelve to four, on the way back, there are stops at the Sandbar for drinks and lunch, Licks, the Runway Bar and Crazy Canuck’s for more drinks and toasts.
The sun and surf and sky give us a show.
We are numbers in a mathematical equation, written on a chalkboard, described by Einstein and Newton, buzzing in time and space like sand fleas on a great sand beach. The equation looks like a bird nest.
There are times when the universe’s mystery puts your skull in a nutcracker and cracks your head wide open until the confetti inside is picked up by the afternoon breeze and scattered.
There are several water taxis in Ambergris Caye. The Belize Express goes to Caye Caulker and Belize City on a two hour schedule, and Chetumal, Mexico and back once a day.
Inside the enclosed boat we are shaded from intense sun.
We follow the reef as we head north back to San Pedro Town from Caye Caulker. Sea colors are blue, green, with white crested breaking waves to our left.
When you see a moving boat coming towards you, you look at it with relief.
Looking at stillness too long changes things between your ears.
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