From Macas

Alana and I arrived in Macas today after 9 hours on two buses. The highlight of our journey was being crowded into the bed of a truck with 18 other people for a ride across a rickety bridge spanning a gigantic muddy river. We were not the only tourists on board, there was a Italian couple and a couple from Arizona.

Macas is on the edge of the Andes on the eastern side. Far below us almost perpetually obscured by clouds lies the Amazon basin. Im sure the river we crossed is one of hundreds like it that feed the Amazon river. It sits on the confluence of two mighty rivers. It has been raining nonstop today, and the rivers are swollen and muddy. Many of the roads in this part of Ecuador are in poor repair, with washouts and land slides a common sight.

I am learning new Spanish words every day. Just yesterday I had a 30 minute conversation with a man in Spanish. He wanted to know how far California was from Miami, and how far away Puerto Rico was. I asked him how he knew of those places and he said he had seen them on TV.

I find the people here very friendly, always willing to point me in the right direction when I ask in my garbled Spanish where something is. They seem used to tourists here, unlike India where a tourist is like an escaped zoo creature. But they are not burned out on tourism, which is nice.

From here Alana and I travel to the ancient seat of pre Spanish power, the city of Cuzco high in the Andes Mountains.

-Xerxes