Walk south but carry a big stick?

Since I centered my attention on Ecuador I have participated in an expat blog (http://www.expatexchange.com/). Its regulars are expats of long standing in Ecuador. It gets lots of traffic from people about to go there or thinking about it. I was one of the latter but now I've bought the tickets ($724, Maine to Quito R/T) so it's serious. The forum is a skewed sample as just about all samples are. The most popular theme seems to be fear. Close behind that is money, then climate.

So the forum tends to fear (of crime), Money (cost of living) and climate (personal taste). If you don't factor in this "skew", this bias (overwhelmingly fear) you will get a inaccurate picture. Every view is subjective. So every answer and question is as well. Objective truth (surprise!) is not to be found. Everyone has an angle, contrived or innate. Sometimes it's commercial, nothing wrong with that. Usually it's to shore up a personal world view. The world (Ecuador) is out to get me or the world loves me. You can prove either view (to yourself anyway). But anyone bearing "Truth" somehow needs to convince others (like the truth can't stand alone?). The ones who think the world is out to get them show up briefly, feeling exposed maybe?. Those who are living this dream or those wanting to stay around.

The regulars will tell stories collected over the years of bad things that happened to tourists and other foreigners. They relate personal experience, crimes that were committed against them. Some strive to educate the new wannabe expat with these stories. Others argue that in their decades of experience they have never been afraid. Proponents of both these views advise caution and common sense. Paradise is apparently not to be found on Earth, in either hemisphere.

A statistical analysis (dubious because of data quality) seems to suggest that on average you will be just as safe in Ecuador as in the USA. "on average" covers a huge area.... big city or rural area?, do you fit in or stand out?, have you street savvy or are you clueless? In Maine the tourists are culturally clueless and to them I don't stand out. To the Mainers I am clearly from "away". In Ecuador I will be as inconspicuous as an elephant in a flea circus. So I will need to ramp up my situational awareness and work at reading the people around me. I think these skills have atrophied over the years. And then there is good luck. For that I'm thinking of a good luck charm. A walking stick maybe, with a really hard handle and a lanyard. Think of a traveling Buddhist monk or Little John, peaceable but ready. We shall see.

Fear and Crime, Here and There

The recent labor unrest in Ecuador seems to have excited a lot of the fear Gringos have of crime. Not all gringos but many vocal ones. A strike by police wanting to keep their perks is worried into a revolution. I would say this bidding up of events was because US citizens have such a tranquil existence...but it's not true. Plenty of the run of the mill human emotion spills over and onto the street here. Why should it seem more extreme when it happens elsewhere. Does it reinforce the perception that the world hates us?

Anyway, the president of Ecuador will survive this and the Ecuadorian government will deal with the law that prompted it. One government ratchets up the benefits given to its political base and the next government, unable to pay these perks, attempts to reduce them. Same situation was happening that week in Europe. Strikes over new labor laws in Spain.



Its Fall and what TECH to take

It is fall. It's the first day of fall 2010. Arguably the best season in New England. There are many warm days before we relinquish the land to winter. The air is dry and crisp, perfect for working out doors. Splitting and stacking fire wood and waving at passing tourists. The great buses full of what we call "Leaf Peepers" are on the highways. The "colors" sweep down from north and the leaves drop. The Peepers are driven up from the south. I encourage them to take the leaves when they go. Only a few do and those don't take enough. We still have too many to rake up. 


It was a fantastic summer by all accounts.  The summer of 2009 was awful. It was damp and sunless and gardens suffered. The dampness brought a blight that infected potatoes and tomatoes. The same scourge that sent the Irish across the sea a hundred and sixty years ago. At the end of that year I crossed the sea as well, to Madrid. I thought Madrid's winter would be mild. I understood from the web that it would be winter but tolerable. Just reaching the mid 30's at night then warming to 65F during the day. Sunny and dry. It wasn't like that. It was the wettest, coldest winter Madrid had seen in 50 years. All of Europe set records for winter's discomfort. The train that passed under the English Channel froze up and didn't run. Airplanes sat on tarmac aprons and didn't fly. I decided this winter would be different, for me anyway.


I am taking a lot of technology with me to Ecuador. A laptop computer, a page scanner, camera, MP3 player, Ebook, batteries and a charger. I could go cold turkey for three months. I don't know what I would gain by doing that. Less crap to haul thru airports and streets? Would my character improve? I'd find plenty to do. But I wouldn't listen to Spanish language broadcasts and lessons on internet radio. I wouldn't be able to listen to all the old BBC comedies I like. The great novels I want to write wouldn't be typed. This blog and others would have to wait for my visit to an internet cafe. There are substitutes for all this. The camera and scanner I'd take to support the web page(s), scanning drawings of things real and things imagined. Photos of Ecuador and the people I meet. There are programs on the laptop to let me manipulate the images and scanned drawings. I'll limit the stuff I do take. I'll not take anything I can't afford to have grow legs and walk off. If everything did suddenly disappear I could be content with a pad of paper and a couple of pens. With that I could write those great stories and accounts. A pad and drawing pens would be enough to render scenes of the towns and mountains. The story could be told in ink, as was done hundreds of years ago.

The new book

I love to read. Reading has been my education. All my life I have read books and collected books. I have hauled tons of books (I'm sure its been tons) as I've moved from place to place. I have haunted book stores. The titles that wouldn't sell, the remaindered books on the tables in front of the store, I've bought so many of them.

Now that I work less or don't have to work I'm reading even more. Up until the last decade or so I could take enough books when I traveled to keep me reading until I was home again. Not any more. The friendly skies have turned greedy and every pound beyond the essentials must be paid for. Also, every pound of baggage has to be pulled and pushed and now rolled on tiny little brittle plastic wheels thru the hells called terminals.

Modern electronics to the rescue. The flash memory is the star of semiconductors. It has gone beyond the wildest expectations anyone had for it thirty years ago when it was first introduced. Together with the microcomputer it has enabled something called the "Ebook". The "book" will never die but it will no longer be ink on paper. The ebook pictured cost me about $100 a month ago. I got it from J&R in NYC and I love it. There are tens of thousands of books available on the web for free so content is not a problem. It takes the same 2 Gig SD flash sticks my FujiFilm camera uses. Same batteries too, rechargeable AA NiMh (two sets of 4). Text is loaded into it simply as files transferred to a (virtual) hard drive.

Hundreds of five pound novels can be stored on one SD flash drive. These SDs are $6 each. So I'll truly have a half ton of books (or more) when I fly. A black day for the English language book stores frequented by tourists and expats the world over.

So what is loaded now? Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game and The Shadow of the Wind (in Spanish and English). Alexander Solzhenitsyn - the First Circle. The complete works of Vladimir Nabokov. The complete works of Raymond Chandler. The complete works of John Cheever. Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths. Hesse - Magister Ludi. Kafka - The Castle. Mann - Doctor Faustus. Marquez - In Evil Hour and Memories of my melancholy Putas. Saramago - Seeing.

Thats just some of the stuff I have recently loaded into it. I've already gone thru everything P.K.Dick ever published and a ton of Science Fiction from the pulps of the 50's, stuff I was weaned on - the reading that hooked me for life.

Bringing the theme full circle, when I am waiting in the terminals on my way to and from Ecuador, I'll not be bored. In line or on plastic seating I will be with Solzhenitsyn in a Soviet prison camp or following Carlos Zafon thu the streets of Barcelona.

The wonderful world of Jet travel

There was a time when the journey was much of the experience. There wasn't any choice. It took such a long time to travel via road or sail. Weeks or months of uncomfortable contemplation of the home left behind or the unknowns ahead. Now the transition is close to seamless, by comparison anyway. Half a day to anywhere in the world. As for the contemplation, stressful. Information overload. The ill fitting experience of others.

In this case, going from the mid coast of Maine to Cuenca Ecuador the options are narrow. Flying, of course. There are two places to arrive, Quito and Guayaquil. From there its a short hop on a domestic jet to Cuenca. The arrival in Quito seems to be just before midnight. I haven't found any exceptions. For Guayaquil there is mid evening or early morning. I am favoring the 6am Guayaquil arrival as I hunt Orbitz before plopping my money down.

The two directions to go after arriving in Guayaquil are a jet to Cuenca that morning....or, Getting a bus for the Santa Elena Peninsula. I would still make it to the Coast if I flew that morning to Quenca, but I would do it later, after setting up a base camp in Cuenca. That way I could explore with just a backpack. Lesson one is travel light whenever possible.

The cost seems to be stuck at $800. It might go a little less on the tickets, but it'll be substantially that. About what going to Madrid (via Barcelona) cost last year. Somewhat like telecommunications its not (just) about distance. The deals seen in the last ten years have gone, maybe for good.

A Gringo's Ecuador Blog

This is my Ecuador blog. For most of 2010 I've been learning about Ecuador and the possibility of living there. At the end of 2009 for the first time since I was twenty and foot-loose I had the means of living where I chose for the winter. So I lived in Madrid for three months. It was very interesting & educational but not too warm. It was also fairly expensive. Those factors, the climate and cost, made me consider Latin America for the winter of 2010/11.

At first I considered Panama. In the mountains west of Madrid I met a native of Panama. She had me pretty much convinced that I should spend my next winter abroad there. As I investigated the country on the web I learned that Gringos had been pouring into Panama, in a flood, for ten years. What had been very attractive, over that time, became less so. Then there was the climate, humid. I reconsidered Panama. When I looked around I found the new Gringo magnet was Ecuador. The qualities and circumstance of the country made it a magnet. It also seemed that 2010 was still early enough in the Gringo Tsunami that Ecuador's qualities could persist, at least for a while.

One experience expats have to compare is the reaction of family and friends when they first announced they were pulling up stakes and leaving the country. It does go to the heart of some of our cultural comfort and assumptions. When I told everyone I was going to spend the three months of winter in Madrid one co-worker ask, "What will you do?". That struck me as so interesting. Not, how will you live without the familiar, the language, the cultural....but how will you pass the time. It was a great question to push thinking. I proposed that I would (and subsequently did) pretty much what I do here. Spend time with friends and associates, draw and paint, learn Spanish, surf the web, visit interesting venues (museums, exhibits, galleries). I knew from previous experience overseas that people everywhere are friendly, usually very friendly and welcoming and curious. This truth is the gate thru which everything else flows, leading to an enriching experience and much learning.

In this blog I want to record my thoughts as they occur. I will go back and forth and hem and haw, roll and yaw, but eventually land somewhere specific. That's just my way. Look for the bits of useful information and references. I do drift but the sea of ideas and imagination is very wide and the ports are conjured so we will arrive eventually. I have one of my daughter's cast off laptop computers for the trip. I will buy a portable page scanner (I draw) for the trip too. With these I should be able to contribute my day to day or at least weekly experience. I hope you find my efforts interesting or useful as you require. Thanks