Cristina, hasta cuando te quedas en Ecuador?

...was the question i kept hearing on the salsa dancefloor.
To finish off with Peru: the mini buses, which function as blackmarket transport. We caught several of them, and in one of them, fit to seat 15 midgets including the driver, actually squeezed in 23, 4 of us sitting in that little space behind the driver facing the audience and when we thought how could they fit all this in, these shoved in another 4 blokes who hunched standing. The difference between a $1 fare to one 7 or 10 times as much - and who doesn´t know me as cheapskate. Oh, and another delight i tasted was anticuchos which is pieces of beef heart on a scewer, barbequed and served with corn, followed by picarones (donuts with syrup) - delicious! And the cebiche... yes Chile makes great cebiche but that´s not to say it isn´t spectacular in Peru. Cebiche is seafood or fish, raw but cooked by the acid of lemon juice and salt, mixed with onions or purple olive paste, or chilli paste... god it was good.

So we arrive in Ecuador 17 January in the city of Cuenca. A pretty colonial town with an awsome museum, half of which is dedicated to the ethnographic study of the country. The best bit i have to say was seeing the shrunken heads - yes that´s right. One of the practices of the (iforgottheirname)peoples who still live in the Amazon jungle was to cut of the heads their enemy, clean out and remove everything from inside the head, then boil it in specially selected hearbs which preserve it and srink it, sew up orifices and then let it out to dry, of course. It´s really wierd, shunken heads the size or a bit bigger than your fist with long hair and all.

Stayed there a few days and took a day trip to visit a few villages nearby, Gualaceo, Chordeleg and Sigsig. In Gualaceo we had a chat with an old women sitting in the park and making straw hats, but we couldn´t take her picture because whe was afraid her photo might end up in the wrong hands and she´d get bewitched or something horribly similar. Chordoleg is famous for it´s jewellery, gold and silver, so we went nuts for a few hours. But i had to get my arse to Sigsig cos they´re famous for making hats and i wanted one! Got there on a saturday thinking market day would be huge for that but instead we found a little festival in the town square with performances and giggling girls in big red skirts and 5 or 6 whole roasted pigs being sold in makeshift restaurants along the side of the street. I lucked out with the hat market but after roaming around the village for a while, up and down hills, i made do and found something that would protect my porcelain features...

Folks seem to sell anything they get their hands on. I passed a corner store that not only sold furniture but also paper cups and plates and other cutlery, sandwiches and shewing-gum, notebooks, hats and T-shirts etc, but just a few of each. Or is the blue glowing stereo under the seat of the driver of a horse drawn cart weirder? But how about these bananas here! I´ve never been a fan of bananas other than their plain fruit form, but there are these huge green ones which you just can´t eat raw and there cooked in a variety of delectable ways. They can be barbequed and served with main meals - especially on rice, or thinly sliced and fried just like potatoe chips with salt, or otherwise with a bit of sugar, mmmm.

They road north to Riobamba we took by train, well, one old bus on train tracks literally. But there is a side trip which we took around the nearby mountains on the same "train" were we got to sit on top of it like looneys to get a good view and to touch the clouds floating around us. Our one-carriage train had to stop several times to measure the width of the tracks, make sure it was ok, as well as to scrape the fresh carcas of just run over dog.

We get on buses galore: Riobamba to Latacunga, get on a local ute in Zumbahue to arrive to beautiful Lake Quilotoa. The 10-house village, at about 4000m above sealevel, hasn´t got much more than rudementary lodgings for freaks who like to hike around the rim of an extinct (as of 300 years ago) volcano, in which lies a lake. Pretty as a picture but i sure as hell didn´t trek around it for 6 hours. I decided i´d just go down to the shores and up again.

23rd January and we´re in Quito and i´m still getting used to using US dollars. A plethora of churches and cathedrals and another massive and important colonial centre. So what do i do? Go to a SALSOTECA of course. Yes, salsa venue and Rosana is in heaven dancing away. I was shy at first but hell, boys kept asking me to dance and etiquette tells you to accept, so wiggled my hips i did. Today i went to the centre of the world, 0´ latitude. I weighed 1kg lighter on the line and saw water swirl in oposite directions on the north and southern sides of it - very interesting.

Heard of the ecuatorian artist called Oswaldo Guayasamin (1919-1999)? Went to his museum and discovered a artistic genius interested in social justice, also a buddy of Fidel. Awestruck i was, and took endless amounts of pictures of his work. Check him out.

I´m leaving Quito tomorrow and should be crossing the border into Columbia within days. Wish me luck.