Lockdown in Ecuador by Jasper Hadman

 For two days we were happy. Tamarin monkeys came to visit us in droves at the scent of chopped bananas. Toucans hopped along the boughs of a favourite ceiba tree on the edge of the clearing. We ventured into the forest, plunging like pioneers through the boundary of tangled vegetation, into a world of dark shadows and wet leaves and life overlapping decay. 

 Margarita and I had been riding our motorcycle south from California for the past five months, aiming for Santiago, Chile. We had crossed into Ecuador the day the border had closed, and found an eco lodge perched on a muddy cliff overlooking the Rio Huataracu. We were the only guests. Beyond the river, the rainforest stretched as boundless as the luminous grey sky. Juan, our host, brought us reports on his phone of what was happening. The country was going into lockdown, he said; we hardly knew what it meant. 

We were treated like family, but we were cut off from the world. After two days Juan informed us that travel on the roads was banned, that the police and military were out in force, and that no movement was permitted for at least two weeks. He urged us to stay, but this was a harsh environment for us soft Europeans. The humidity was uncomfortable. The rain was too much for our tent. Our limbs and backs were tapestries of bites and scratches. Most of all, isolation and inertia loomed large. I didn’t even have a book. 

 We had heard of an agricultural commune in the mountains near Quito, where one could earn one’s keep. It was around five hours’ ride, crossing a high pass over the Andean cordillera. The road, when we reached it, was eerily quiet. We were fearful of being turned back by the police, but in the mountains our confidence grew. There, clouds enveloped us. We tunnelled through them, up and up until the whiteness vanished into clear air, revealing a band of steep forested slopes and something large blocking the road ahead: a front loader, parked at right angles. ‘Via Cerrada’ read a sign. There had been a landslide, a worker told us, a kilometre up the road: it was impossible to go on. 

There were two other routes to our destination, looping either north or south, each a journey of over eight hours. We decided on the southern route and to get as far as we could before dark. In the evening we arrived at the town of Baños de Santa Agua. The police told us we would not be permitted to continue our journey the next day.

We feel lucky. The air is cool and clear in Baños. The town is nestled between green hills, and on clear days we can see the peak of Mount Tungarahua, an active volcano over 5,000 metres high, from the grassy threshold of our tent. Our campsite is situated on a small slope of ground overlooking the town from the west. There’s a lawn, hammocks, an open-air kitchen, bathrooms, hot showers, a laundry basin, and in the centre, standing proud and monumental, a urinal. Marga despises this urinal, but it is extremely convenient. There are also a few rooms and a tiny flat where Fabricio, the owner, lives with his teenage son and elderly father.

I like Fabricio. Some hostel owners threw out their European guests when things became serious, believing them to be carriers of the virus even if they’d left Europe long before its outbreak. Fabricio took a more sensible view and has made us feel welcome. He keeps the campsite in good order, and often gives me breakfast since I’m up and about when he’s cooking for his family. There are five other guests staying here with us: Coco, a young Frenchman; JC, a French Canadian in his early sixties; Ornella and Isma, a couple in their early thirties from Argentina; and Victor, a Colombian, twenty-seven years old. Ornella, Isma and Victor are artisanal craftspeople. They are travelling slowly around South America, absorbing knowledge and passing it on. Their mission, as I see it, is to celebrate and preserve the indigenous roots of their continent, and to live a good life, close to nature and free of stress. Last year Isma and Ornella spent months on their own in a cabin in the wilderness, without electricity or supplies, living happily off the land. Victor is so resourceful he could probably build a house in the woods using only a machete. The three of them make beautiful jewellery based on ancient designs found in sculpture and carvings.

Victor is also a musician. He has dark eyes and long eyelashes, and his beard and hair are carefully oiled. He wears a single dangly earring that suits him well, and has numerous tattoos based on his drawings. He sings to himself and bears his soul with the broadest of smiles. And he’s a true artist; kind and sensitive, and prone to bouts of melancholy. The other night we sat alone together on the grass, staring into the fire. ‘Jasper, do you miss your family?’ he said. He has a baby son in France. He worries about his mother and sister; they both have cancer and he’s desperate to reach them in Colombia, but he’s trapped here. ‘Yes, I do,’ I replied in solidarity.

Victor met Ornella and Isma recently and they came to Baños together. Ornella is petite and studious with a strong, caring nature and dreadlocks coming down to her waist. She exudes compassion and gentleness. She bonded instantly with Marga. They spend whole afternoons chatting away, making arepas and empanadas; in the evenings, when we sit drinking hot canelazo in the glow of the fire, these two end up together, lost in conversation for hours. Talking to Ornella always leaves Marga feeling energised and bursting with exciting new ideas. Like me, Ornella is an early riser. We keep company in the mornings, but in silence as my Spanish is no good. She writes in her journal, sipping her mate, sketching figures in the margins that she will later carve out of metal. Her journal itself is a work of art, but her extra-curricular skill must be gymnastics. She was a gymnast as a young girl and each day she performs a superhuman routine of stretches and calisthenic exercises. On the other hand, Isma’s only exercise is playing ‘fuchi’ or hacky sack, of which he is a master. He has scraggly, dark hair, a hooked nose and a wispy beard. He wears loose knitted jumpers and his eyes stand out boldly: they are a piercing blue against his otherwise Semitic features. I initially thought his name was short for Ismail, but his actual name is Geronimo, though only his parents call him that. He has built a beautiful herb garden just outside the kitchen, and he and Ornella tend to it daily. Isma is always laughing, and making everyone else laugh too; even me, and I can only understand a few words. ‘Spanish, please!’ he tells me whenever I start speaking English. We are trying to learn each other’s languages; it’s some consolation that we’re both as terrible as each other.

JC arrived some weeks after the rest of us. He’d been staying in a hostel in town, locked indoors for most of the day due to the curfew. He escaped that place to stay with his ‘Amazonian’ on-off girlfriend. ‘She’s one heck of a woman,’ he told us, ‘but quarantine together was kinda intense.’ He was relieved to find refuge in Fabricio’s campsite and we are very happy to have him here. He’s a man with nothing to prove. He used to work for the Montreal transportation department, fixing buses, and these days he travels, making the most of his retirement. He smokes heavily, drinks a lot, gets stoned, and looks pretty good for all of that. There are two things I like about him most. One is his linguistic prowess (a bit of a joke). When speaking English, JC has a knack for misplacing the emphasis on practically every single word, and his Spanish, spoken with absolute confidence, is 70 per cent gibberish (80 per cent when he’s a few glasses down). Isma’s eyebrows rise to astonishing heights when he’s trying to understand what JC’s saying, but JC’s efforts are highly respected, especially by me; I only wish I had his confidence. Then there is JC’s generosity. Upon his arrival he gave us each a small cannabis pipe, and he’s been making sure we put it to good use. He’s always handing out cigarettes, opening another bottle of rum for the table, or tossing us each a bag of weed with a casual, ‘Here ya go’. And late at night, when the table is littered with empty bottles, the stories come out. He got a call from his sister before leaving on this trip, saying she was scared for her son, that he was drinking too much and she didn’t know what he might do. JC went to live with his nephew for a month. He banned alcohol but they smoked themselves silly and talked over the problems. Now his nephew is back in work; he’s a paramedic, working 16-hour days on the corona virus response. JC is proud of him. As for himself, he counts his blessings. ‘Just look around,’ he says, gesturing at snow-capped Tungarahua, the cascade in the distance, and the low clouds rushing across the sky. ‘I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.’

Lastly we have Coco, a skinny twenty-two-year-old Frenchman from the Ardennes. He had never left France before this trip, but he’s made up for that over the last six months by hitchhiking from Canada. He’s a young eccentric with the appearance of someone who got lost a long time ago walking home from a music festival. His clothes, to begin with, are torn rags. Daytime pyjamas are all he has – not the most hardwearing garments – and Coco mends them himself using butcher’s string and rolled up lengths of electrical tape. He’s very proud of his work, and fortunately he’s immune to the cold. Then there are his boots; they look as though they’ve been run over by a motorised cavalcade. They too are held together with electrical tape (he wears a roll of the stuff on a lace around his neck for easy access). But this is beside the point as Coco goes barefoot most of the time, even on shopping trips into town. The terrified locals are convinced he has the virus. And then there is his hair. It has a naturally electrified look; ‘Coco, you comb with 220?’ joked Isma. It might have to do with his tendency to electrocute himself on the juicer. Rarely a day goes by without a shriek erupting from the kitchen and Coco jumping about like an exploding firework. He’s cursed by his own irrepressible energy; it makes him do things in rapid burst. ‘I know I will not get through life with all my fingers,’ he told Marga after he’d cut his hand badly, ‘but whenever I’m chopping vegetables I say to myself, “Not today, please not today”.’ There is much to say about Coco. When he runs out of rolling papers he uses the skin of a spring onion. When he runs out of tobacco he smokes oregano. He doesn’t like to waste water and so showers only twice a week; but he’s not a slob, and he cleans up after himself. He loves cooking and will eat anything. He once made a weed pipe out of a banana and electrical tape; we all had a smoke. Three days later he found the banana on the ground, squished and blackened with rot and burnt tar. He ate it without a second thought. He adores jazz and dances to it in the kitchen like a man in a trance. He’s a mathematical genius. He spends hours writing out reams of indecipherable calculations, solving near-impossible equations for the pure delight of it. He is considering doing a PhD when he returns to France – ‘But there is more to life than maths,’ he assures me. Meanwhile he’s working on his crocheting. We all love him. He is a good person to the absolute core.

If the sky is clear in the early morning the view of Mt Tungarahua is enough to make you forget that you are trapped and cannot leave. In fact the volcano is one of the few things that could precipitate our departure; it’s two years overdue for an eruption. In the morning the kitchen is filled with the woodsy scent of fried chapatis; Ornella is making breakfast. I make coffee. While waiting for it to brew I used to check the virus worldometer, a morbid league table of infections and deaths ranked by country. They are now saying that the UK is to be the worst hit in Europe. People blame the government; the government blames the people. In Guayaquil, Ecuador’s second city, boxed corpses are being left to rot on pavements and in living rooms. The authorities can’t cope. But here there are no cases and we don’t talk much about the virus anymore. The lockdown, however, rules our daily lives.

After breakfast Marga and I head into town for groceries and a change of scene. Masks are obligatory and seem like normal attire these days, but I’ll never get used to the ensemble worn by the supermarket check-out staff. They dress in hooded white coveralls, nitrile gloves, medical facemasks, and full-face shields; we have our shopping bagged by forensic scientists. Outside, the marketplace stands empty. A tanker comes once a week to flood it with disinfectant. There are few vehicles on the streets but plenty of pedestrians. On market days they gather in crowds around vendors selling produce out the back of trucks – people are generally cautious, but not at the expense of a good bargain. Only pharmacies and food shops have been permitted to stay open, so everyone has become a grocer. We buy fish from a nail salon and vegetables from a bookshop. The locals treat us kindly. At 2pm curfew is announced by an air raid siren echoing across the valley. Fire engines drive through the streets blasting out their daily mantra: ‘We are inside the curfew. You must be inside your homes.’ Back at the campsite I look down upon the deserted streets. The dogs are perplexed.

Activity is stirring in the kitchen. Ornella, Isma and Victor are outstanding cooks and we are lucky to share our meals. The table is crowded with wonderful dishes: empanadas, guacamole, arepas, stuffed bread, salads – everything is homemade. On Sundays we have an asado, or barbeque. It’s a grand affair: Victor and Isma do the honours of making the fire and cooking the meat; Ornella and Marga make an array of salads, each one spectacular; Coco works on something experimental which is almost always delicious; and JC and I observe attentively, on hand to support where needed while making sure all glasses are kept topped up. After lunch the kitchen and patio transform into an improvised beach bar. Victor hands out the mojitos, the pipes are lit, the Latino music plays, and we dance into the night as the sun’s last rays drift over the peak of Tungarahua. At 9pm, without fail, a hooded figure is seen shuffling in the shadows nearby. It is Pablito, Fabricio’s father. He mutters to himself loudly about the neighbours and the music and the police . . . Isma calls him ‘La Parca’, the Grim Reaper. ‘Viva la fiesta,’ Pablito says with a surly look. To appease him we move up the garden to the fire pit, where Coco teaches us drinking games we have long-forgotten and Victor plays his sentimental songs.

We have had many memorable days and nights like this, but equally there are days when we are sick of this place; when the rain never stops and our dark tent is our only comfortable refuge. Depression lingers on the peripheries of this strange purgatory. A commendable routine – exercise, Spanish, writing – stumbles once and then slips and cannot be regained. The hours sweep by, wasted. We should be in Machu Picchu by now, or Lake Titicaca, or the Atacama Desert, but we are here in this garden in Baños, a dead end. Our phones try to control us; ‘I can’t look at it anymore,’ says Marga. ‘Oh my God my eyes are squares.’ And more days go by – most a blur, some significant. On the anniversary of my sister’s death I read her eulogy; it had been lost in the chaos eleven years ago and rediscovered only now. I felt her presence in this place. The next day I got news that the brother of one of my best friends had killed himself. I felt a bitter stab of his pain. The others, too, have sorrows that flare up now and then. I saw Ornella crying one morning in a corner of the garden and Isma with his arms wrapped around her. And Marga is desperate to get home. She misses her family. It’s now been seven months – two of those in Baños, going nowhere.

But when I picture Baños now, I don’t see these low moments so much. I see the faces of friends. I see Victor laughing, insisting I down my glass of rum; I see Coco dancing in ecstasy to his interminable jazz; I see JC excited, telling me about this incredible bird he’s just seen glide across the garden; I see Isma running with his homemade kite, trying to get it airborne; I see Ornella offering round a plate of freshly baked empanadas; I see Fabricio chatting to me about bikes as I hang out my laundry in the sun; and I see Marga’s beautiful face, lit up, radiant with smiles, as she comes to tell me that the embassy is putting us on a repatriation flight, that we are going home. And I think of that landslide, and I’m glad for it.