February 13, Riobamba Down the Pan-American Highway The view from the hotel roof ("La Techa del Mundo," read the button in the elevator, the Top of the World) extended over the city to the flanks of Pichincha, where in 1822 Field Commander Antonio Jose de Sucre defeated the troops of the Spanish royalists, guaranteeing independence for Ecuador. Then as now, Quito was the capital city; prior to independence, the land was actually known as the Kingdom of Quito. Shortly after Sucre's triumph, his commander Simon Bolivar arrived in Quito, where he met and immediately fell in love with Manuela Saenz, and began an affair that lasted the rest of his life. The liberation of Ecuador was Bolivar's final triumph, and led to the creation of the short-lived "Gran Colombia" uniting Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. And Sucre? They named the money after him -- currently trading at about 2900 to the dollar.
Though there are Indian markets in the region, notably at Pujili (not to be confused with Pujil) and Sasquinsi, the pervading atmosphere is that of the Old West. Or the age of the haciendas, in fact, when the Criollo built dynasties of goods and influence, largely on the backs of the indigenous population. The public architecture of San Miguel de Salcedo, in the heartland of the haciendas, emphasized worked leather, dark wood, and brass, with saddles and guns and old black cracked yokes as decorative elements. It is tempting to think the useful rope knot of cowboy, caballero and gaucho, the lasso, was named after this fiefdom; perhaps further research will reveal this to be true.
The road to Cuenca passes between the narrow inter-Andean valley -- averaging fewer than 30 miles in width -- between twin rows of towering volcanoes. Alexander von Humboldt, a protean explorer and scientist who arrived in Ecuador in 1802, gave the name that stuck to this corridor, the Avenue of the Volcanoes. However, except for one time -- on the 8th of February, when the snowy dome of Cayam be taunted us late in the afternoon as we returned to noxious Quito -- I have yet to see a summit. Above the Quito skyline, for instance, Pinchachi is said to reign. North of Otavalo, Cotacaxi is usually visible. One of the most famous regents of the Avenue of Volcanoes is Cotopaxi, second highest of Ecuador's mountains and the farthest point from the center of the earth. Here another famous hacienda, La Cienega, is said to provide the most elegant base to explore the dramatic bulk of the mountain. But on our journey, even this signature summit fails to sign itself. On this journey down the Avenue of the Volcanoes, we are without our escorts, for a low thick cloud cover hides both sky and summits. Atapaxi, Corazon, Cotapaxi, Illinzia: they march by unseen, sile nt, abtuse. Our drive takes us over a high plateau at 11,800 feet, where black swift bulls are bred for the bullrings; between walls of cultivation rising in swatches up the skirts of the volcanoes into the clouds; and at last down into the province of Chimborazo. As well as hosting the country's highest peak, Chimborazo also serves as the center of the indigenous population in Ecuador, 64% of whom live here. Here the markets are not showplaces of arts and crafts, but gatherings of farmers, harvesters and husbanders. Here they are selling and sharing their fruit, vegetables, household necessities, and stock. It's a market in a truer sense than Otavalo can any longer pretend, an economic anchor for a far-flung network of interdependencies. Chimborazo is also Ecuador's most beautiful and diverse provinces, with its plunging western canyons, patchwork of cultivation, and towering summit. By late afternoon we reach Riobamba, one of those towns destroyed by earthquake at some point in Ecuador's past -- 1797 to be exact . This is also where the first constitution of the Republic of Ecu ador was signed, in 1830. After some years of uncertainty, Gran Colombia broke up into its constituent parts, and the great dream of the Liberator was ended. Today, Simon Bolivar's own Riobamba home has been transformed into a restaurant and bar, El Delirio -- named after a famous poem he wrote on the failure of his dream, his personal delirium. Surely Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator of South America and one
of the most powerful forces of change in history, deserves his own home
page.
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All the
taxis in Quito are bright yellow, and watching the streets of the city
from a high vantage -- as the roof of the Hotel Quito, on a scout for
a QTVR -- one has the sense the cabs are tracers in the capillaries,
indicating the flow of money throughout the city. They are not, surprisingly,
the city's worst drivers: one just never knows when any car will turn
out to be your death on wheels, be it a bug or a bus. Coupled with a
recent rise in gasoline prices (this insults a country that produces
oil, and refines it) the alchemy of traffic is outrage mixed with desperation.
By now nearly everybody knows the opening of the Oriente to oil development,
in 1972, was something of a mistake. The once-stable economy (Oswaldo
Munoz had compared it to a Shangri-La) had mushroomed into speculation,
inflation, and depression. The legendary air of the city of Quito was
but a bitter memory, obscured by clouds of exhaust. And now again a
political campaign was underway, with its brightly painted walls and
brighter promises. Not a pretty sight. 
Today, the Pan-American Highway divides the country, or brings it together, depending on your perspective. But it seems to have a different purpose, too: south from the capital city the more colonial history of Ecuador is on stage. On a van journey to Cuenca, organized by Ecuador's largest tour operator Metropolitan, we stopped off for breakfast a colonial-era hacienda, Hualilalua, on the outskirts of an enormous Spanish land-grant to the Lasso family. The proprietors of this ranch -- with its cattle and its crops -- were Old Family, a diplomatic merger of the landed class. For a time, in the 1950s, the indigenistas had impounded some of the larger houses in the region. By the year land reform came to Lasso, 1962, the Lasso clans had divvied up the original land grant into a number of parcels, all owned by kin. Now the lord of this particular manor supervised a computer network among the region's ranchers, and the lady served breakfast to tourists.
Once senses that for some, this was a golden age for the Republic of Ecuador, when there was order in the land and fortunes to be made. In the years between the liberation of Ecuador, in 1822, and the completion of the Quayaquil-to-Quito railroad, in 1904, now there was a time: when Humboldt and Whymper climbed the frosted equatorial mountains, and Church painted them; when the restless crater
s of fire erupted and the very earth shook, yet the extent of cultivation grew ever broader, when the indigenous population that lived on a land grant was regarded as little more than property, to be used at will. What brought this era to an end... was it perhaps when the Pan-American itself was completed, and suddenly the world was not so far away after all? Before the natives got restless...?
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