Author Archives: The Chronicler

Vignettes from the Road – FreeRider

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We’re making our way along the autopista that leaves Medillin, heading for the north and the last few climbs that conclude the Andes. An articulated lorry hauling a shipping container passes. Attached, limpet-like to the back doors is a youth. The driver slows at a roundabout. Stops. The boy climbs down and crouches down to look under the lorry’s undercarriage; he’s watching to see if the driver is aware of his presence. I pass. In my mirror I can watch the unfurling story. From my perspective I can watch the driver climb down, making his way along one side of his unit as his stealth passenger mirrors him up the other side. Then I lose track of the story only to get an update a short distance further on. That same lorry passes, moving downhill, climbing quickly through the gears. There, latched on yet again, is his stowaway.

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The antithesis of the free-rider.

One example of the ‘free rider’, an extreme one, but not unique. More usual is the stunt rider. Male, exclusively male, and as we recently discovered, not necessarily young. He’s coming downhill. Fast. Brakes hard when he sees us sitting by the roadside, executes a perfect u-turn and stops for a chat. Tee-shirt, sneaker and jeans. Defiantly no helmet. It gives me a chance to inspect his diminutive bike. Twenty inch wheels, heavily augmented front suspension, with front and rear disc brakes that would do credit on a motorcycle. Swatches of steel have been welded at vulnerable joints, a massive drive sprocket powers a single rear gear. He doesn’t need extra gears, he wouldn’t have time to use them. All he needs is a slow, climbing articulated lorry labouring up a long hill, one with a hand-hold on it’s rear. Pedal frantically up his slipstream, grab on to the tailgate and free-ride for awhile. The really skilled don’t even steady their handle bars, too busy waving to the incredulous traveller.

img_1983This is X-sport at its extreme. Oddly, I’ve not noticed it on offer alongside ‘tandem jumps’, ‘white-water rafting’, ‘down-hill mountain biking’ and the other standard visitor attractions. Although the ‘risk assessment’ along would make for amusing reading. And yet, is it any different from riding the ‘Poma’ tow on a dry-ski slope?
Our chat concluded, he speeds off downhill, sweeping gracefully through a linked succession of bends, there to cadge another tow uphill. Should he know better? Don’t see why – he’s only in his mid forties.

Lenten Abstinence

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img_2144So what have you given up for Lent?

Chocolate?.., it’s over thirty degrees, it would only melt all over any inappropriate surface. Cabernet?…not available, what grapes that are cultivated are for the table. Cigarettes?…never been tempted. Cervesa?…are you joking, beer’s cheaper than water here, and it’s served colder. Coffee?… get real, I’m in the Zona Café Colombia, where the brew costs two dollars a kilo, and anyway, it’s not a contender; I class it as research. Cycling?…now we’re being silly.

Lenten abstinence, it’s supposed to be an opportunity for purification and self improvement. My ch of the above are already ‘pure’, so that simply leaves ‘Cursing!’.

‘Curse!’, ‘cuss!’, ‘swear!’, or ‘invoking the invective’ and ‘profaning the profanities’. I’ve taken the pledge; but only against ‘TheTechnologies’. Close-passing cars will still receive their expletive-infused commentaries, as is their due. Dogs whose jaws are attached to my rear pannier will still receive a full throated roar of “please kindly desist from eating my bag” or something similar, shorter and infininitely more satisfactory.

img_7606For the next forty days I hereby pledge to abstain from commenting when my fully charged ‘phone remarkably and suddenly decides that it requires feeding yet again. Probably because that gremlin switched on the video. I will not thunder against the ‘photo-app’ when it arbitrarily decides to fill the delete album with my treasured pictures. I will be abstemious in my use of foul adjectives, even when the ‘blog-app’ wipes a piece I’ve been working on, allowing it to be washed away into the ether. I will not rant against the ‘great GodApple’, when one of his grand innovations renders one of my chosen pictures unrecoverable, unreadable, stuck, or so I’m being repeatedly informed, in one of his vowel-hyphenated meteorological atmospheric apparitions. I will not allow my mind to be clouded by verbal abuses of any deity’s name, even when attempting to capture a near-instantaneous moment, and the camera-app is suspended by a request as to whether I would consider this moment appropriate to carry out an update.

img_8029To all these minor interruptions, inferior annoyances, distracting discords I will smile, keep calm and carry on.

I’m on the wagon. I’ve signed the pledge. I’m sure I will manage. It will be easy, I’m sure that ‘TheTechnologies’ will cooperate. It will be harmony and concord.

My main concern is that the forty-first day is also my first day back at work. It’s the day when I will have to re-engage with ‘shop till’. A contraption which wilfully takes inordinate pleasure in frustrating my feeble attempts to master it, that, and I will need to create yet another set of passwords, ones that I will instantly forget. However, my concerns are not so much for the ‘Beast of Beelzebub but for my colleagues who will not only have to thole my post-travel enthusiasms, but also my newly released intemperances.

 

Storm

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For those in the know: Popyàn, (a colonial town in central Colombia).

img_2995One is standing, looking down on one’s heaving mass of plebeians, one’s soldiers ranked before one. One of those stable-lackey chappies is leading one’s parade horse. Maybe today one will go and mingle with one’s subjects. One notes that those verminous pigeons are back from the Square, back from shitting on Gran-mamma. Perhaps one could get Philip to shoot a few. One really must remember to have that costermonger who insists on selling those tuppenny-bags of seed, removed. He could go up on that fourth plinth; permanently. Oh, look there’s two of those ‘ethnic types’, wonder which of one’s dominions they’ve come to visit from? “What do you mean, they live here?” One cannot but help note that the priest next door is getting insistent, even impatient: that’s the second time he’s been chapping at his bell this morning. He’s calling his faithful flock in for mass. What a happy-clappy bunch of parishioners he serves, a proper sing-along – and he gets an ovation at the finish.img_2985

I’m temped to try a regal wave, if I could regally wave. But would anyone wave back?

A Catholic basilica right next door to a Protestant monarchical palace? I must be daydreaming. I must be having a ‘Buck House’ moment.

Recommendations can be invaluable. There’s simply no way that we would have ended up in this room if it wasn’t for those words of mouth. The entrance wrought-iron gate is a mere handlebar width, one that’s set into an anonymous white wall, that’s protecting the usual flight of vertigo stairs. At the top of which is an inspection grille in an intimidating door, one that’s mollified by a pasted up announcement.

It’s a scenario that we generally give a wide body swerve to, one akin to the conundrum posed by Aesop, a tale of river crossings with foxes, geese and bags of grain. Only ours involves panniers, bicycles and a busy, fully pedestrianised Plaza Principal.

img_2948Arriving late morning and the Forager gets to pick the best room in the place. (A trick that she’s starting to finesse). A room from the French Republican era, built from imported German materials, in a house built for a merchant. Reasons given as to why it has survived two earthquakes, shudders that have rendered the neighbour’s basilica once to destruction and once to extensive restoration. Classical high ceilings, tall spit doors and two vast windows, all combining to create that most unusual of Latino architectural features – daylight. One looks out over the plaza with its monumental podocarp pines and those heaving masses, the other onto the flock exiting mass and the huddled guardsmen in full battle dress and orange reflective puttees, all interrogating their cell ‘phones.

Make your way through the hostel’s inner atrium of floor cushions and verdant plants, to the kitchen, where there’s two stained-glass windows that, were they clear, would afford an aerial view of a different ecclesiastical altarpiece: Christ standing on a World globe. Then look upwards, through the sky-light at the Basilica’s dome, floodlit in purple. It’s an intriguing puzzle to untangle the various construction timelines. All that light gives the clue to the original purpose for our bedroom. It once was the ‘solar’ to the ‘salon’ that has now been converted into a multi bunk dormitory.

I’ve got those windows wide open to try to catch what little breeze is moving, I’m reading, not overly aware of the changing weather outside. Thunder has been rumbling around the surrounding hills for many hours, and frankly I’d given up on any resolution coming from that direction. What did alert me was the most subtle of audio alteration. The cooing of pigeons increases in proportion to the diminution in the low burble of the plaza humanity. The birds have forsaken the square, fluttered up to roost on the religious ledges; the general populace has headed for the shelter of the overhung eaves. Great fat raindrops start to pock mark the ground. The daily, permanent bank queue shuffles sideways, away from the now-deceased shadows and in under the porticoes. The photographer and his llama do likewise.

img_3001As the rain turns to a downpour, the shoeshines and the penny-sweet-sellers, who’ve stayed dry under those pine spires, retreat, if only because there’s no custom left to serve. The itinerant vendor who’s been selling rosary beads and bicycle pumps seamlessly swops out his wares and is now concentrating on umbrellas. His stock slowly depleting with each subsequent rotation below my viewing platform. The cell phone lady in her day-glo tabard and her five mobiles chained about her person, stays perched on her plastic stool, opens a giant paralluvia and carries on trading, selling ‘phone calls at 3 cents a minute. An iridescent island in the premature dusk. No buyers; she waits, she’s patient. As she and as everybody else knows, the tempest will soon abate.img_2955

From downpour to drizzle, to instant dry pavement. Humidity climbs, night’s postponed. The bank queue reverts out into the open, the llama and his photographer return to their favoured stance. The seed-seller re-builds his cross-hatched stooks of bagged corn; there for the grand-mother to purchase, the mother to scatter so the toddler can chase the returned fat pigeons. A scenario that I’ve witnessed so often, that I wonder if it’s prescripted in the child rearing manuals under ‘gym-free exercise’.

The low murmured hum returns to the plaza. I return to my book, royal aspirations forgotten.

 

Mangoes or No-Mangoes

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img_9900They’re walking down the verge side, linking patches of deep tree shade. Walking home from school. Pristine in white blouse and plaid skirt; starched shirt and pressed chinos: eating mangoes. Instant irreparable stains, a glue juice that possesses its own gravitational field, one with an unerring attraction for the clean. How do they manage this feat?

Eating a mango is an art form. Whether to slice down either side of the stone, score into squares the inverted half moons. Gnaw on the cubes, then dribble down chin. Or to go for the beheading, off with the crown, just like an egg. Suck, then dribble down chin. You could always try being elegant and use a spoon. Beware, it will mark you as: ‘not from here’. Scoop. With greater glissading assets than a wet bar of soap, it will now immediately scoot off said appliance, land in your lap, having dribbled down chin.

And yet this near-ubiquitous fruit is one of the standard offerings at the stances where buses stop for comfort breaks. Stacked on drum lids, piled high in buckets, glistening in the hot sun. Pock marked, but never mis-shaped, the rejects of the un-exportable grades, a brock of the sweetest fruit. Piled up beside all the other fare that will explode from your fingers into your lap and the hot sticky bus seat as it cants around yet another corner. Sugar washed, desiccated doughnuts, gravy-drooling empanadas, grease dripping deep-fried everythings. Hyper-refined white carbohydrates.

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A plate of tripe.

Only we’re not on that bus. We’ve dropped down through the contours and cycled into a hot, late, lazy Sunday afternoon, into a small town whose sole preoccupation is feeding people. A place that’s well into its infinite bottle of beer. Dust, fumes and Mariachi are mixed in equal parts, to coat the alfresco diners at the plastic tables by the roadside. Every stance a clone of the previous, every menu a monotonous recurring echo. There’s only one brand of beer; another universal lager. This time it’s called ‘Poker’, so we must still be in Colombia.

We need to eat, only I can’t face yet another plate of some mummified hen swamped by dry rice that’s sat in a cauldron and a hot-box since mid morning. We walk the solitary street in two directions in the vain hope that something different will materialise, yet experience dictates that we won’t. No fresh vegetables, no new bread, not even the local delicacy of ‘Ternero’ – cow foetus soup; only stacks of mangoes. Cooking mangoes. Warm sticky mangoes with an affinity for my chin and that gritty dust.

We perch on the edge of the bed, the only level surface in the room, trying not to shed crumbs, drip grease or explode those sugar coatings. Some days you’re reduced to eating rubbish.

As for the mango, it’s an uncontested fact: the only safe way to consume one is naked, in the shower.

 

Superlatives

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img_2810Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, Cayambe. The furthest, the highest, the nearest.

They’re all on prescriptions for celebrity, all seeking an oxygen of publicity. All volcanoes with a claim to fame. Volcán Chimborazo: the hill whose summit is further from the centre of the earth than the top of Mount Everest, this statistic the result of the equatorial bulge. In essence, the earth isn’t a perfect spherical ball.

Volcán Cotopaxi: simply the world’s highest active volcano.

fullsizerender-7And now I’ve discovered Volcán Cayambe. Whose summit is but a few metres from being dissected by Line 0°, making its rump the world’s highest point on the equator. A schizophrenic hill, but not bi-polar, neither of the north nor the south, but out of both. Three volcanoes with deserved superlatives. The others scattered the length of Volcano Avenue have to be satisfied with donating their names to provincial governments, bags of coffee or instant credit shops. Some awaiting a return to notoriety and celebrity, that thin, seeping wisp of smoke; a warning. And if that isn’t discouragement enough, Volcán Galeras is supposedly mined to dissuade the wayward wanderer.

img_2880Their near-perfect symmetry, unable to contain a sadness. I’m seeing them in the present tense, a single snap-shot of now. Yet grainy, sepia’d historical photographs are all too easy to find, and then it’s all too easy to measure the shrinking depletion. The not so slow retreat. All are losing their caps of glacial ice. Some are in their death throes, impoverished, reduced to slivered remnants that cling onto the serrated mountain edge. Their diets, their sustainable wet season snows replaced by that thin gruel of rain. Some are accumulating melt-water lakes. Just one shake and the greater part of Ciudad Huaraz would be obliterated.

img_2870It’s all happened before. 31st May 1970, was a festival day in Yungay. The local population swollen to four times normal. An earthquake dislodged a glacial serac, high up on Huascaran, that travels at 125 kph, gathering up a mulch of mud and stone, smothering the town and an almost unquantifiable 70,000 people. The site is now designated as a ‘Pueblo Sepulchral’, the new town resurrecting a short distance away. Yet what fascinates me, with all of these natural disasters, is how humans start to re-inhabit the devastated zones. Yungay has resurrected a couple of kilometres away, but already a school campus and a part-constructed hostel are encroaching that old avalanche path.

Yet, is it any different from the foxglove plant that’s a primary coloniser after a woodland clear-fell or the fireweed that invaded the London blitz gap-sites? Or the property developer who plants executive homes on the River Tweed’s flood plain?

 

Quitting Quito.

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For those in the know: Heading north out of the Ecuadorean capital; or, ‘picking black bogies’.
img_3002Our attack on Quito may have been a belated win. Our retreat from the capital more of a draw.

The Navigator, true to her nature and her title had interrogated the ‘app-map’, terrorised it into submission and concluded a route for our escape. A nice simple linear line, a logical route heading directly in the desired direction, all neatly pegged with dropped pins. We set off at first light, intending to reach a known camp ground. Mistake.

A route that started well, following the electrically powered, clean living trolley-buses. Which all decided to turn left and disappeared down underpasses. Leaving us turning ever increasingly to the right and the eastern outskirts of town, to leave us floundering amongst the ferments of fumes. Pushing us out onto the steep valley sides and into one of the most remarkable pieces of non-road design. ‘Houdini and The Gordian Knot’. We simply want to turn left.

img_2811Eventually we do turn left, only in between there are several scampers over multiple lanes, back-tracks and pushes through the now-stationary vehicles. A state that seems to be the norm for most of the city bound. We’re concentrating so hard I forget to search for the ‘hanging tree’. There has to be a gibbet, one with the skeletal rotting remains of the deranged road engineer responsible for this muddled chaos. The app-map can’t do any justice to these ructions of roads, if only because it can’t record the travelling directional changes that alter with the time of day. Traffic flows are reversed, oncoming cars jump the central reservation, certain categories of number plates are restricted, only to park up on our hard shoulder until sanctions are lifted. Resulting in our use of the inner motorway lane. Which somewhat bothered us, that is until we’re passed by a peloton of mountain bikers. I’d forgotten, we’re in TheAmericas.

Smile; Wonder; CycleOn.

Of course we escape. In truth, the traffic is well behaved. It’s the topography and the dirty fuel that’s problematic. Steep, granny-grinding hills, labouring, heavy articulated lorries and a headache that develops with each cycled mile. Then a blessed compensation from this riotous affray.

We round a corner, there on the horizon is Volcán Cotopaxi. Faint, smoked in haze blue, rising clear above the city’s smog, a wisp of smoke spiralling from its caldera, it’s summit glaciers smugged in ash. Up until now it’s been shrouded by mist, and this will be our last chance to view it. For some reason this hill has always occupied a place in my memory. It dates back to school, Cotopaxi was the archetypical volcano, the one that was depicted every time the geography syllabus encountered vulcanology. Strangely, I probably couldn’t have named which country it occupied.

Our mistake? To tangle with the school run. It might have been better to have drop-pinned on the elementary schools, then plotted a navigation avoiding them. School starts early here, and the sproggs are delivered on motos, in taxis and out of the back of cars, all of whom pass, then immediately draw up right in front, there to be abandoned in the middle of the road. Door flies open, an indiscriminate number of uniform, immaculately uniformed minor scholars pile out. Boys in a Militarism of dress khakis, girls in a Catholicism of plaid skirt and white socks. Racing for the array of mobile ‘tuck-shops’ that materialise and dematerialise with the passing of the school day. Driver then climbs out reaches into the back seat and retrieves the abandoned ruc-sac, then heads off in the same direction. The abandoned car and its flung doors remain blocking our way.

Smile; Pirouette; CycleOn.

We cycle our hoped for distance, but only reach the halfway point to that camping. Such were the twists and turns, deviations and diversions. Three of which were an ice cream, an eatery and an hosteria room. The chance to regroup, draw breath and clean up. The colour of the shirt washing water sets a new tide-line on the ‘murk-scale’.

Smile; Eat; CycleOn.

 

Attack on a Capital.

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img_2659A six lane autopista feeds the traffic in towards the capital. The road climbs away from the shrouded views of Cotopaxi’s slopes. It’s Sunday morning and the racing cyclists are out training, passing uphill at speeds we wouldn’t contemplate going downhill. Six lanes, for which there appears to be a certain lane apartheid. Outside for cars, middle for trucks, inside for road warriors, hard shoulder for touring hill-slugs. On one section of descent, I watch with amusment as one Lycra-clad overtakes a slow moving truck loaded with untethered cauliflowers. No one seems concerned, certainly not the transit police. It’s a picture that will be repeated and repeated.

We’d planned our attack on the capital with militaristic precision. We needed to arrive midday on a Sunday, to be able to catch the ‘ciclo-paseo’. Thirty kilometres of traffic-closed roads that lead into what one guidebook describes as a ‘deserted city centre’. That planning started to come adrift when we couldn’t determine the outer reaches of the closure, nor download a map. So we do the British thing: ask a police person. The whole length of Av. Sucre is closed, the answer. So we start to contour around the southern reaches of the Quito, to pick-up the named road and follow it downhill. Downhill….surrounded by the now expected antics of buses, combis and pedestrians. None of whom have any regard for lane discipline.
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Down, down, down…..in ever increasing clouds of diesel fumes. To the point where I’d given up hope. A cake shop materialises on a corner. If we can’t have a quiet traffic-free road, we can at least have a chocolate infused croissant. Where the disinterested police lady failed, the baker delivered. It’s only three blocks over. Interestingly, had we not done the Brit-Bit we would have been on it already. An object lesson in trusting your instincts

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In Lima they section off a major flat thoroughfare; in Quito they link together a series of side streets, and being Ecuador, a series of hills. Not a particularly difficult exercise given the topography. A lot of left and right turns, contra-gyrations around roundabouts, rattling over cobbles, swerving wheel grabbing grates and dodging sunken drain covers. Seeming to have way more uphill than downhill, but well stewarded with tapes and crowd barriers. Fathers with novices wobbling along on starter trikes, manicured mothers and elegant daughters, grey beards rediscovering the bike. Through these we make our way, smug satisfaction when we crest yet another rise, heart rate steady, surrounded by puffing locals.

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As we had anticipated, the paseo makes its way into the main square. That supposedly deserted plaza in the middle of that supposedly deserted city centre. There’s a group of acrobats performing to a crowd of hundreds, there’s a vendor making ice cream for a queue of tens, there’s the hawker of the new and the resurrected: selfie-sticks and nose crashing ‘clackers’. The juice sellers are crushing an exotica of jungle fruits, another is spinning blue candy-floss. Families wander unhindered as music drifts from somewhere to my left. The transit police rendered redundant, reduced to interrogating their mobiles.

Silent Sunday in Colonial Quito. Tomorrow it will be a very different place.

 

Absence of Consequence

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For those in the know: Cuenca ~

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All that’s missing is a chalked outline and a grumpy detective

The new, the different, the oddity, all are easy to spot.

The lady crouched on the step stitching a belt? her ancient, knurled fingers producing the intricate, detailed repetitive pattern. The tableaux of effigies awaiting incineration on old years night, that days later still leave an ash shadow. A story that, had I not witnessed its beginning, I would not have recognised, nor even noted. No, it’s the sudden appearance of a minor vignette that serves to depict an absence.

Wandering past the law court and its attendant lawyer offices, I spot a pinstriped lady shading her head with a large envelope. An absence: head shading is a common occurrence, given the proximity of the sun, yet nobody wears a hat. The indigenous will triple fold a shawl to create a neat symmetry to their traditional attire, others simply drape a t-shirt over their heads. Neither are suitable solutions for her. But that wasn’t what caught my attention; it was the general lack of ochre A3 envelopes, coupled with the want of shops selling ink-pads and rubber stamps. The scarcity of men with manual typewriters, shade-sheltering under spreading trees and roof eaves in the close proximity to every government office. That envelope is the Peruvian badge of profession. The scribe, the ‘franker’ and the typed, triplicated form, the essential product for their bureaucracy.

img_2822It’s early evening and we’re walking along under the arched porticoes that surround the plaza, stepping around the stuffed black garbage bags stacked against the stone pillars, there awaiting their nightly collection. Not one single bag has been shredded. Not one sack is spewing its entrails. It’s only then that I realise another absence. There’s simply no dogs in the centre of this city. And as a consequence the streets are litter free, probably the cleanest city we’ve visited.

img_2093Next morning we wander downhill, no particular destination in mind, happy to let serendipity be our provider.An effluent-free city centre river, giant water-worn granite boulders and manicured grass, arched footbridges rendered in burnished steel. An exaggerated extravaganza of the classic water feature, one that, all too often is stranded in a suburban back garden. I almost expect to find a fishing gnome around the next bend. Only it’s a chainsaw carver who’s creating tactile seating in a newly created park. Another absence. One that serves to emphasise the preponderance of M. Eiffel (et al.) and their cast-iron foundries, that totally dominate all of South America’s street and plaza furniture.

This city is drawing us in.

Yet the most surreal ‘absence of consequence’ comes that evening. Our wanderings had sourced the location of the ‘exotic’ eateries. A street of ethnic food set within the confines of Ecuadorean cuisine. A restaurant that claims to be using Pakistani spices, that’s called ‘The Taj Mahal’ that’s serving doner kebabs. A fusion that probably should have served as a warning. We order and are asked if we want our Bombay aloo with or without ‘picante’? I’m in a South Asian eatery; since when was there a choice of ‘bland spice’ or ‘slightly bland spice’? For that’s exactly how it arrived. An absence that serves to re-emphasise how un-challenged our taste buds have been for the last considerable time.

 

Night Interruptions.

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Cotopaxi lost in cloud.

We’re using a new tent, one that is in essence a mosquito proof bivvi. A free-standing, rather upmarket bivouac. One, that in extremis will pitch in a bug-infested room. With its vast mesh screen and the flysheet folded back, offers a widescreen view, and on a hot night, one that will capture any cooling breeze that might be passing. That uninterrupted view has another advantage. It’s a pacifier when wild camping. Rustles in the night will always be amplified and when filtered through a part comatose brain, an ant becomes an elephant, a falling leaf, a knife wielding maniac. I can, at least rouse an eye and not see that gremlin’s shadow. Still, sleep is never perfect.

Volcán Chimborazo lost in cloud.

I’ve spent the day cycling past the warnings. Which way to head in the event of exploding mountains, splitting earth and smothering ash. In Latacumba, I’d got excited by the prospect of green-painted arrows on the tarmacadam, only the cycle route didn’t want to cooperate. Kept heading away from the mountain. Of course. It was the evacuation route. Sitting in an eatery, I inspect the map on the wall. It’s shaded in green and grey. Potential beds for lava-flowing rivers. Then there was the road cutting. Hacking its way through the hillside, exposing a classic soil profile, a timeline of Volcan Cotopaxi’s tempestuous past.

Cotopaxi lost in cloud.

All very sobering. So it’s of little surprise that my sleep-fuddled brain was attuned to all things of a destructive nature. A slow, low grumbling coming from somewhere over there. An erupting volcano. A mobile erupting volcano. Or the lumbering Ecuadorean military aeroplane returning to its base.

So I settle back, count the stars, sleep-doze, with smug satisfaction. That whining mozzie can’t get me.

 

It’s Not a Panama Hat.

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Panama hats don’t come from Panama. They come from Ecuador. Only they’re not Panama hats. They’re a Toquilla Straw Hat, or a Jipyapa; this from the plant’s indigenous name. But only the very best get to be called a Monticristi, named for the town of origin and the foundation that protects and grades these hats.

It’s probably the greatest ‘term theft’ and the least understood misnomer. One that is easily explained.

Hat weaving began on the Ecuadorean coast in the sixteenth century. It was, as it still is, a cottage craft industry. Using the fronds of the Carludovica palmata, a palm like plant that is indigenous to Province Manabi. The new shoots are harvested, beaten on the ground to remove the young leaves, boiled and dried, bleached in sulphur, shrunk and rolled. Transported from the lowlands to Cuenca, up in the mountains. Only then can the weaving begin.

It gained its mismatched appellation because, for a considerable amount of time it was exported, like much of the South America’s production, across the Panama isthmus. Gaining further credence in 1904, when President Roosevelt visits the canal excavations and is photographed in one of these eponymous hats. Or so the histories relate.

I’m slowly riding along a pueblo’s concrete street, I glance to one side. Through an open door I catch a glimpse of a lady on her stool, illuminated against the corridor’s gloom, using the cool of the morning and the low directional light to weave a part completed hat. Some will claim that the best hats are woven by moonlight, when fingers have less tendency to perspiration. Which sounds more like a tenet from Demeter orthodoxy. Turning the corner I come on a workshop whose sole advertisement is a trip hazard of hats set out in a grid on the pavement. Walking on, past a few more anonymous doors, I glance up an alley, to a man stacking a toppling column of yet more hats.

Most will be of the lower grades, either ‘standard’ or ‘superior’, for the visitor market. The ‘fino’ and ‘super fino’, those for the discerning gent in his linen suit, regimental tie and deep pockets, are through the back. The latter has the mystique that no light nor water will pass through it, the very best, those ‘Monticristis’, with their crochet weave in excess of three thousand pleats to the square inch, which, when rolled up, will pass through a wedding ring. The dollar bill-roll to pay for it might not.