From papa to aaloo. Locro for me.

"After we spend time at the market, we will have lunch in Otavalo before we go to Peguche" the tour guide, Ivan, outlined the plan. "You can have some of the typical Ecuadorian food."

After having grown up in a strictly vegetarian home, and even though by now I have spent more years in the US than in India, I continue to be mostly a vegetarian, with a few inroads into the animal world as food.  And, when I travel, am all the more ready to stick to the vegetarian food because my nose and tongue can't quite feel comfortable even with the familiar chicken meat that is cooked very differently from how I am used to in the US.

So, there was really only one Ecuadorian food I was keen on: locro.

There are many variations of locro, of which the one I was after was locro con queso and with avocado.  A basic potato soup with fresh cheese and avocado.

The previous day, Mario had talked to me about this soup. Actually, the conversation began with his question "there is something from Ecuador that is used a lot even in India. Do you know what I am referring to?"

I had no idea what Mario had in mind.

"Potatoes!  Potatoes are from here" Mario proclaimed.

"Not true. Potatoes are from Peru" I replied. "But, Andean, we might agree."

"Peru claims potato came from there, but we believe it is from Ecuador" was Mario's comeback.  And then he went on to describe locro as a basic food item anywhere in Ecuador.  A national dish, of sorts.

So, there was no doubt in my mind that it was locro that I was going to have for lunch.  And not that other Ecuadorian claim to fame--guinea pig.  Yes, guinea pig meat was an item in the restaurant menu.  In fact, it was even available at casual stalls all over.

I ordered the locro and a fruit juice, while Ivan and Oscar had the day's special. The only other tourist, the Chinese-Canadian, decided to try out a regional pork specialty.

While we waited for the food, the Canadian asked Ivan and Oscar, "a lot of South American women win Miss World and Miss Universe contests.  Do you also think that the most beautiful women are from the countries here?"

Oscar, who was not texting at the table, hedged--his mother is Colombian.  Ivan, as a typical tourist guide, was not too keen on providing responses that could be unfavorable to the customer.  I am a useless bloke at these topics because I think pretty girls are everywhere!  The topic died out.

Meanwhile, in the background, a local musician was playing an acoustic guitar and a pan-flute (not at the same time.)  But, he was playing to the audience--tourists--and spent some time on his version of Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water.  I wished he played local melodies instead.

When the food came, I looked at Ivan and whined like a five-year old, "where is my avocado?"   Ivan translated that to the waitress and in a couple of minutes came a plate with beautifully sliced avaocado.

I added the hot sauce that every Ecuadorian restaurant has and had my first ever locro.  It was delicious.  The fruit juice was delicioso. The Canadian was having a great time with the pork and beer.  And Oscar and Ivan went after their meals with vigor.  Good times were had!

A few days after this, on my way to the airport at 4:30 in the morning, the cab driver asked me about Ecuador.

Buena vistas I replied.

"Guinea pig?" he asked.

I said no.

"But ... " and ...

I searched in my head for the few Spanish words that I know ... "Locro mucho gusto"

The cab driver gave me a wide smile.

Was going to Ecuador an Andean or a Mediterranean vacation? Or both?

The northernmost I have been to on this "third rock from the Sun" was during the trip to Alaska, when a bush plane took us from Fairbanks to an Inuit village a mile north of the Arctic Circle.  The southernmost point I have been to is Melbourne, Australia, where my brother lives.  But, not often have I crossed the Equator--most of my life has been only in the northern hemisphere.

Going to Ecuador meant that, for all purposes, I was just about walking along the equator all those six days.

La Mitad del Mundo (The Middle of the World) is, of course, the most well known monument that marks the equator.  But there is a lot more to the equator in Ecuador, and this predates the French astronomers' scientific expeditions in the 18th century.

As tour guides and museum exhibits repeatedly reminded me, the more archeological activities are carried out, the more the world is finding out about the peoples who lived in this part of the Andes, and how much they had understood the world while living at the earth's equatorial bulge.

On the way to Otavalo, we stopped at yet another marker for the zero degree latitude--at Cayambe.  Apparently the equatorial line at this spot has been determined to be within millimeters of accuracy.  While this determination itself is a modern one, studies by anthropologists and archeologists are apparently providing new insights into how the hills nearby were sites where in the past the indigenous Andean groups held celebrations marking the equinoxes and the solstices.

In other words, the people in the past knew they were high up on the equator.  The real "mediterranean" people, in contrast to those Europeans who incorrectly named the sea by their lands to be the middle of the earth.

It was a scenic spot where this marker lies.  But then, which place in Ecuador that I went to wasn't scenic!

Every one of these markers for the equator comes with stories--some of which might be exaggerations, of course--of the Andean peoples' knowledge of the equator. There was one point that the guide here said that made sense.  On a world map, as you trace a path along the equator, you notice that a lot of that is the rain-forests.  These places, naturally, did not lend themselves into understanding the sky, which was how we developed an understanding of the earth, its round shape.  If you lived amidst the jungles of the Amazon or the Congo, you had a very limited view of the sky.

The Ecuadorean northern highlands are a wonderful contrast to the forests--the open skies gave the indigenous groups, more so in the old days before electricity, one of the most expansive views of the sky ever possible on the planet.  They noticed the Sun moving around, and systematically.  The Sun went and came back.  The figured that there was a limit to which the Sun moved--the limits that we recognize today as the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.

The guide there was obviously passionate about the cultural heritage, and the urgency to preserve the sites with archeological significance.  I asked her, "when you think about it, don't you get upset that the Spaniards wiped out your peoples and their histories?"

I get charged up thinking about this.  It is horrendous.

"Yes. It upsets me even more that the ancient sites are being destroyed. All the mining is blowing up the historic sites" she replied.

I was beginning to feel the pain she walked around with.

"Even the churches at Quito were all built on sites that were of importance to our people.  They destroyed them."

There is simply no way to compensate for the injustice, I thought to myself. Here was this beautiful young woman struggling to deal with her own identity, her cultural heritage, and has to do that with fragmented stories from the past even while fighting to protect whatever remains from being destroyed.

"I am surprised that you are able to smile even as you say all these" I told her.

"It is all in the past. There is nothing we can do."

I asked for her permission to take a photograph, and she said "sure."

"You speak very good English.  Where did you pick it up"

"Mostly from talking to tourists" she said.

I wished her well, and dropped an additional dollar bill as my contribution to ensuring that the ancient sites will not be dynamited away.

It is difficult not to think about the Andean peoples.  I feel one with them.

Climate change: the Andean glaciers

In my intro and upper division courses, the final piece of the puzzle, so to say, is almost always the impacts on the environment.  I suppose I talk about these in the same dispassionately joking way that I discuss any of the topics.  But, most students know well that it is one hell of a serious person buried under all that humor.  (I wonder what the students will think if I told them that a faculty colleague accused me of not having a sense of humor--all because I questioned his pomposity!  I suppose my students know me way better than most colleagues do!!!)

With water as the theme for Geography Awareness this year, I had highlighted a few water issues through a couple of videos.  Apparently that caught the attention of a few students, at least.  It is not the polar ice caps melting kind of scenarios that interest me. Because, I think students are by now "enough already with that" attitude--their lives have been saturated with real info, and hyperbolic rhetoric.  I am, therefore, more interested in presenting to them the less discussed water and climate change issues.  Like how the people in the Maldives are seriously thinking about relocating because of rising sea levels.  Or, like the following one:

There are follow-up parts to this video here.  I might have a chance to spend a week in Ecuador next summer.  I hope that works out.  But, I will be far from these glaciers--I am more a city and human experience guy!

Maybe I should show my class the following video of the underwater cabinet meeting that the Maldives government held to highlight the urgency: