Lalo Loor - Hughesy is at the beach, in the dark

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  Tabuga, Ecuador
Sunday, September 9, 2007

Hola all

Apologies for lack of photos and rubbish spelling. Crapy connectoin and even crappier keyboard here.

Well I´ve left La Hesperia for a month, and gone to another reserve, Lalo Loor which is on the coast, about 5-6 hours away. Its a bit of a change to be honest. Theres no electricity, so my new portable dvd player , plus massive collection of 75p dvds, have been left behind, theres only a compost toilet so after finally getting used to putting the paper in the bin and not the pan I now need to remember to do what I had just remembered not to. Theres also no'one who speaks English here apart from Tom, and he makes very little sense most of the time anyway. At the reserve at the moment there are two high school kids from the shuar tribe in the oriente who are here on a kind of work experience thing and a large moustachoed fella named bigote (which strangely is also spanish for moustache...) he´s our cook and resident entertianer. He manage with the baret of ingredients to russle up amazing meals like rice, mashed potatos and tortillas. Nairly a vegetable or bit of protein in sight. And impressivley always gets the rice nice and crispy aswell. He manges all this while singing constantly, and I´m failry sure he´s actually singing advertising jingles.

So far we´ve built two new bed in the tree nursery and started fixing the sendero mariposa (butterfly trail) for tourists to use. Its tough going trying to make steps in rock hard hard that hasnt had rain for months, when yu´re using an old knackered hoe, but kinda satisfying too. We´re making the escalons nice and pretty with bamboo to stop them disappearing when the rains do eventually come back. Its too dry at the moment to plant any trees or seeds so cant do any of that so can everyone stop using fossil fuels for a couple of months until I can get back to planting more trees to offset. Ta.

The average day starts with a hearty two small rolls and egg (recently supplemented by hte purchase of essential oats) then we work 8 til 4, have lunch (rice and someut) when its ready and go back to work about 2-4. Then take cold shower and attemt to remove large quantitie of soil from my hair and laze around in a hammock for a while, whlst failing to do the crossoword or reading through some more La Guerra de los Mundos. Have more rice when it gets dark and then Tom and I have a romantic game of chess by candlelight and go to bed about 8 - 8.30 (9 if we´re going wild).

We also went to the local yougurt making place the other night to see it being, well botled really not actually made whih wa quite interesting for 10-15 mins UNfortunately we were there for about 2 hours which was a tad longr than necessary, but the free samples were worth it. Had two more bottles since, lovely stuff.

We came to PEdernales, which is the nearest town for the weekend in a futile attempt to find omewhere showing the rugby. Needed ESPN 2 when they only have 1 here. They were showing motor sport when wales were playing - whats that all about? Its the world cup! Still, should be able to see some of it at leAst next month

ITs the big Annual feStivla in tabuga (the community where lal loor) is next weekend so everyones really excited about that. Then the following weekend we´re heading back to have another go at cotopaxi, of course if we just ge there it will be an improvement, not spending the day in casualty will be an improvement. We´re planning on going up a smaller volcano on the friday to help acclimastise and then head off about 2am suday morning from the refuge for the summit. Wish us luck, we´re going to need it. its big. Very big.

Will post some photos of the reserve when I´m in civilization.

hasta luego

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