Woman vs. Wild

The "safety briefing" at the US Embassy in Quito is an important rite of passage for anyone who lands in Ecuador with the help of government money. This one-hour conference, which is given by a beefy loud-talking foreign service officer who scares puppies in his free time, is designed to destroy any positive expectations you might have for your stay in Ecuador. It is characterized by hyperbolic stories about armed robberies gone wrong, unsolved kidnappings, and jungle diseases that eat away at your brain before you have time to register any symptoms. You leave the Embassy relatively sure you will be stabbed on your taxi ride home.

However, there is a bright side. At the end of the safety briefing, puppy-scaring man distributes a laminated card of emergency Embassy contact numbers. He assures you that if (/when) you're about to die in Ecuador, they will do their best to send a helicopter to rescue you. I've toted around my laminated card for a whole year. Last weekend was the first time I seriously considered dialing that emergency switchboard number.

My boyfriend Roberto invited me to go camping with several of his friends. I like camping, and haven't done anything fun since classes started, so I agreed. Our group of 8 headed out on Saturday-- a sunny, flawless afternoon. During the second pickup truck ride up steep mountain roads, a cold, thick, fog moved in. At that point, I suspected we were in for disaster. All doubt was removed when we got dropped at our "campsite": the deserted side of a mountain in the heart of the Northern Andean Páramo. The pickup truck drove away. Apparently overlymachoadventurerman (my nickname for a friend of a friend) knew the person who owned that face of the mountain.

After a year of living in the mountains, I think I understand why countless cultures have revered them to the point of worship. In the Ecuadorian Andes, the mountain can explode or shift or just stand there motionless, but either way it will kick your ass. You should fear the mountain. Saturday started out sunny, but it rained hard on the mountain. It kept raining, and it got dark. We made a campfire huddling under a plastic tarp that probably should have been used to protect the two shoddy tents we had as shelter.

In typical Ecuadorian fashion, no one else seemed quite as worried about what I registered as an actual survival situation. As you can see from the picture at left (8pm), Robert looks mildly uncomfortable but still optimistic about the state of the evening, and I look like I want to curl up in a ball and die. At 9 pm someone woke up and announced that the Rio Amazonas was running through our tent. Everything was soaked, and we huddled in the single dry spot in the tent, like sad polar bears floating on a chunk of warming ice. I was trying to recall what the first signs of hypothermia were from girl scout camp. 

At 11pm I wandered into the freezing blackness to find a cell phone signal. Around 1130pm I announced intentions to call the  Embassy, physically shaking from the cold. We debated whether the helicopter would rescue all of us, or only me--the American citizen. We decided the latter. Around midnight, overlymachoadventurerman finally called his aunt/uncle down the mountain to come rescue us (an indigenous couple who looked like they could spend days on the mountain without flinching). We spent an additional 45 minutes using machetes and our 3 flashlights to wander back to the "road," literally chopping down spiky bushes and screaming so our rescue team could hear us.

On Sunday, I woke up with a bronchial infection wearing dry clothes borrowed from a 4'10" pregnant lady (cousin of overlymachoadventurerman?). An indigenous woman rubbed leaves all over my chest and stuffed my shirt with hot newspaper. I thought it was probably anthropologically interesting, but was too exhausted and sick to take notes. As we sat by a fire waiting for our clothes to dry, I informed Robert that next time we were going to the beach.