Modern art is an oxymoron.
When you go to galleries and see ” modern ” art you are seeing art done by masters whose works have critical interest and investors fretting over value.
Modern Art in this gallery, this month, is Eduardo Sola Franco, an Ecuadorian native, who was not only a painter but a sculptor, stage set designer, illustrator, experimental film maker. He was born in 1915 and passed in the last few years.
This is a retrospective of some of his output, which is voluminous.
His art, like much Central and South American art, is conflicted, political, full of dark colors and religious symbolism. In America, we tend to keep spirits in their place, under the doormat. In South America, there is a rich tradition of giving spirits time in the spotlight.
Franco’s art is tormented but he has been identified as a Modern master of Ecuador, a non-conservative gay man captured in a conservative culture.
The Museum is quiet, free, with nice grounds, clean facilities, and bathrooms.
The art on the walls in this Contemporary Art Gallery is self absorbed,and, for this reason alone, completely of our time.
Plaza Otorongo is a popular meeting place.
It is at the bottom of a huge hill near the Tomebamba river and one way to enter and leave the plaza is ascending or descending a long and steep stairway. Stairs are grouped in sections with five steps and a landing to each section. Going down is hard, but going up, at eight thousand feet above sea level, is stout.
The Plaza has restaurants, lodgings, a yoga and pilates studio, art gallery, and a huge open courtyard. Certain times of day students use these steps as a shortcut to go down to the Plaza and across the river to the University of Cuenca.
This morning a young man exits at the top of the stairs. An old man is going down, the way I came up, moving diagonally down the stairs so he doesn’t pitch forward and fall down.
Street art reminds you that urban problems won’t disappear. Drugs, crime, deteriorating infrastructure, broken promises and broken dreams don’t go because we don’t like to see them. Street art is the safety cap on the tea kettle. If it is humming, you have to take a closer look at the fire.
Cuenca, for all it’s Old World charm, has New World pain..
Cities, like rivers, always have dangerous cross currents.
At the top of the hill are panoramic views.
Cuenca, Ecuador has expanded as far north and south as you can see, stopped only by the Cajas National Reserve on one end and more mountains on the other. Red tile roofs and reddish bricks look like a bloody battlefield but there are no wars here.
Andres, our guide, gives a history lesson.
” There are about half a million people in Cuenca. The major industries are tourism, building construction and fabrication, and selling homes.”
You can see a few landmarks from this observation point, if you know them. You can see the twin blue striped domes of the New Church in Parque Calderone. You can see the soccer stadium and the goldish planet shaped planatarium that locates Gringoland.
” Ecuadorians are a clean people. We are taught to pick things up and be polite.” Andres says.
The funniest thing is when I tell him I am from New Mexico. His ears perk up.
” What city? ”
” Albuquerque. ”
He smiles and says ” Breaking Bad. ” We both laugh.
” The best thing, ” he advises, ” is to buy land. ” You buy the land for ten thousand, build a house, sell the house”
There are plenty of Ex-Pats into real estate in Ecuador, buying up farms in the Andes, old homes in Cuenca, beach bungalows in Salinas.
Riding real estate waves is a popular financial sport for people who have money but want more, and making money without working sparkles like your girl’s best diamond ring.
All these places with good real estate deals that market to foreigners had even better deals before they were discovered.
In Ecuador, as elsewhere, it is best to hire a lawyer to represent you because ownership of properties is convoluted and price is always negotiable.
Riding real estate waves is not always without wipe outs.
Up top, on our double decker bus, you have wind and sun, but, on this trip, you can’t stand up because low hanging electric wires will take off your neck. Our guide reminds us to watch for low hanging wires, watch the tree on your right, don’t stand too close to the edge of the top floor rail. From the second deck, we all see the city as we pass through, weaving, bobbing, climbing, descending and ascending hills.
This Cuenca city tour takes us in a circle from Parque Calderone to the Mirador de Turi and back. We leave the Historical District, cross into a newer part of the city, climb hills to the famous look out point, then return through the opposite end of the Historical District that we left from, ending back at our beginning.
Andres gives commentary in English and Spanish but mostly all you have time on this tour to do is point your camera, shoot, enjoy the sights.
The ride costs $8.00 U.S. and takes, with a half hour stop at Turi, two hours. Along the way, I see a Panama Hat Museo that might be fun to visit. The Museo Pumapungo looks important. There are lots of churches crying for admiring photographers..
Our guide tells us that Cuenca, a World Heritage City, has only five murders a year instead of Chicago’s five a day.
After driving in this mid day traffic, I would think bus drivers here would shoot at least one person a day so the murder rate in Cuenca wouldn’t sound fictitious.
On Wednesday thru Saturday nights, from 6:30-10:00 pm, on the 2nd floor of La Vina Restaurant, at Luis Cordero 5-101 y Juan Jaramillo, the Jazz Society of Ecuador holds forth.
The group this evening is piano, drums, bass, and a tenor saxophonist who play mainstream jazz.
Having a restaurant downstairs, I can’t not take photos for Leigh
She is an artist, and artists like to see visions on walls as well as canvas. Both floors of this establishment are awash with art and it seems like a bohemian French cafe where crazy impressionist painters sipped absinthe and shattered old school standards,
The songs the band plays were written fifty years ago, or longer – ” Stella by Starlight “, ” Summertime, ” ” Night in Tunisia, ” ” Love Walked In. ”
They are played with reverence but played tonight with more rhythmic twists and subtle harmonic modulations than when they were new kids on the block. This is music I listened to while peers swooned over Elvis, Bo Didley, and Little Richard.
I never figured to hear live jazz in Cuenca, Ecuador.
The art on the walls is icing on the cake.
In the historical district are public mercados where vendors sell fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, and sundries from little stalls inside huge open buildings. There are modern groceries in Cuenca but visitors, and locals, like to shop in this old way.
On the square outside the Mercado are even smaller vendors selling religious artifacts, sunglasses, performing music, socializing, and today watching men change an electrical light on a next door building with a bucket crane.
Pigeons waddle in large groups on the plaza and lift into the air when little boys run through them with arms extended like airplane wings.
I have been told that bartering in Cuenca is the rule, instead of the exception.
It isn’t crowded this morning but women reach out to engage me as I walk down the aisles. They know if they get my attention, move me to look at their produce, I will buy something. The lady I buy the pineapple from, sells me, in quick succession, a papaya, a bunch of bananas, a bag of apples.
This trip to the market takes two hours.
Saving a few dollars on groceries may not be a good deal when I eat up 1- 12th of my day in the bargaining.
We start on a clear day, end in a driving rain, complete a two hour guided tour of the Hol Chan Marine Reserve,
The fish are many, the coral reef is intact, and there have to be more snorkelers in this reserve than fish. I start my snorkel with ten fingers and still have them when I climb the ladder back into the boat after I’m done for the afternoon.
Underwater, a manta ray glided past me, like an alien space ship with a long tail, passing me like I was a slow farm machine in the right hand lane on a busy highway.
Hol Chan is the most frequented reef locale on Ambergris Caye and it saves lives that tourists meet nature in this safe place with guides. On the other side of the reef, sea currents can sweep you out and turn you into shark bait. This trip, including park fee and a guide who swims you through the reef ecosystem, is fifty dollars U.S. a person.
Ambergris Caye would be nothing but a bald head on the ocean without this reef. A visit to Belize without getting wet is a sacrilege and coming here is almost a rite of passage.
I didn’t see sharks down there but know they are close and pray, for those still in the water, that the predators haven’t been drinking.
I don’t want anyone to be their bar snack.
What I should have done was read about the ruins before I got here.
Lamanai, which means submerged crocodile, is a Mayan city in the Orange District of Belize. It dates to the sixteenth century B.C. and was occupied into the seventeen hundreds A.D. It was a city of forty thousand and combined farming and fishing and large trade networks for success.
The three main structures, excavated in the 1970’s by David Pendergast, are the Jaguar temple, the Mask, the High Temple. The Mask Temple is the tombs of successive rulers who built their burial place atop that of their predecessor. The High Temple is in a natural amphitheater and was the site of public spectacles, religious ceremonies, and political grandstanding.
Standing in this hot humid jungle looking at tourists climbing to the top of huge stone structures, I weigh the manpower and skills needed to build them and the spiritual and political reasons for completing them.
Longevity speaks of doing things right for a long time in the time and place you find yourself.
What would they have thought of our world if they could have imagined it?
Would they choose, if they had the choice, our world over theirs?
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.
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