Aqui No Hay Gringos

For your reading pleasure I present a special guest blog written by my dad who recently came down with my step mom to visited me here in Ecuador...

So if you are a Norte Americano (gringo/gringa, race is actually not important) who has traveled in Ecuador outside of Quito, you may skip this blog entry. You already know about the God belief inducing scenery of the Andean mountains and the Amazon jungle, the long dusty gut sickening bus rides, the seemingly poor but self sufficient indigenous people, the total lack of central heat and the gently relentless entrepreneurial spirit where one can buy anything from nail clippers to a live guinea pig on the street. This morning we passed a Quichua girl carrying a live chicken in a bucket, lending new meaning to the term "bucket of chicken." You have already seen four feet tall women the color of good coffee, their necks wrapped in tiny gold beads, carrying huge bags of Alpaca shawls and scarves with a leather forehead strap. You have stayed in hotels that cost $15 American with fantastic courtyard gardens filled with white and yellow calla lillies, hand painted frescos on walls and celings, and mattresses hard enough to grind corn on. You know about the Parque Condor where the endangered carrion eating birds with the ten foot wingspans are rescued from extinction by a few dedicated Ecuadorians. You know about the incredible open air market in Otavalo where we spent the day shopping row after row of wool and leather goods, tiny paintings and strange to me fruits and vegetables never seen in El Norte. You are familiar with scruffy street dogs who turn up their noses at my wife´s offering of fresh bread to tear open a bag of garbage and chow down with tooth and paw.

What you may not have noticed here, however, was that almost all gringos and gringas are, like ghosts or certain same-gender species of insects, invisible to each other. You can be walking down a very narrow sidewalk populated by numerous locals, any one of whom will say buenos dias, but when you encounter a gringo (easily identified by the fact that they are usually at least a foot and a half taller than everyone else and wearing adventure clothing worth roughly one year´s earnings for the average Ecuadorian. They almost never say "hello" or even make eye contact. Are they afraid of being caught 3000 miles from home, as if this were some sort of international crime? Do they not wish to be reminded that they are rich, and possibly rude as well? Some sort of reverse comeraderie is at work here and it baffles me. I want to scream "It´s OK, at least you´re not on a cruise ship". But of course they are already gone at warp speed in their perfectly broken-in Merrills.