The Isle of Gallardo

The vacation is over, back to traveling. For the last week and a half I`ve been living quite high off the proverbial hog. When I came from Huanchaco to Guayaquil to visit my old friends the Gallardo Family, I had planned on staying only a few days...I promise. I arrived on Tuesday and my hosts insisted that I accompany them to their beach house in Salinas for the weekend, which just happened to be Carnaval. Why not? (Salinas is to Ecuador what Cancun is to Mexico). Carnaval in Ecuador is basically a 4 day long water fight (sometimes egg, urine, etc...it gets ugly) with a lot of partying, dancing, beaching and eating interspersed.
So from Wednesday to Friday I woke up late, ate breakfast and lunch served by Mari the Empleada, swam in the Pool, read, ran errands with Mom Gallardo, and didn`t blog.
Funny that I should be an unproductive, lounging moucher while reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Somehow my conscience let me get away with it.
At niht I went out with Alejandra and Uti to Kareoke clubs and mingled with Ecuador`s elite singles. The most affluent playboys, pretty boys, mamma`s boys and vacant party girls; for a week I was a fly on the wall of the Ecuadorian 90210, or worse yet....it`s O.C. As shallow, pampered and eletist as they were, they sure knew how to have a good time.

Kareoke`s where you can`t hear the person with the mic because EVERYONE in the place is singing along at the top of their lungs. Concerts that get kicked off at around 2 a.m. and go until 6, with all the dancing your legs can take (cue the sarcastic remarks from Tom, Jared and Spencer about Joey and latin dancing), lounging by the pool of the Yacht Club, yup the Yatch Club, by day. I remembered why I love Latin America; Latin Americans. They`re just so laid back and fun loving...even the snobs.
Tuesday was the end of Carnaval, Wednesday was to be a day of recovery and Thursday I was headed for the Oriente (Ecuador`s Amazon jungle) for a crossing into Peru and a trip down the Rio Napo to Iquitos, the largest city not attainable over land. BUT, Mom Gallardo suggested a trip to Banos for the weekend. What the hell right??...another couple days of Mari`s cooking and service, poolide lounging and flirting with Alejandra and her friends wasn`t going to kill me. I began to feel like Odysseus who was "waylaid on the Isle of Circe (the enchantress who initially turned his men to swine), and spent a luxurious year enjoying the bounty of the Goddess". I knew I should move on, but couldn`t quite figure out how to do it, or really why I should.
Baños, or Bathrooms in the parlance of our times, is in the mountains in Central Ecuador. A tag-along on a family vacation, I wish I could say I enjoyed the 5 hr. car ride up through the fog drifted, zero-visibility Andean roads...but decaying infrastructure + thousand foot sheer mountain dropoffs + fog like Jimi`s Haze + crazy mario andretti ecuadorian driving does NOT equal enjoyable ride. Baños has been cool though. The Gallardos are gone since day before yesterday but not before we went on hikes, saw the pailon del Diablo and "bungee" jumped off a bridge.
On my own again, feels both good and bad. I`m going to miss the Isle of Gallardo.
for more pictures check out my flickr account http://www.flickr.com/photos/82872306@N00/