A 'Cultural' Family Visit - Canelos, Ecuador

“Why am I in Puyo?” I thought. I had been stirred from my sleep by a chorus of chickens cowering from the rain. We had no plans to quest into the Amazon and we had already exhausted half of Puyo's top tourist attractions: an exotic bird park and a monkey sanctuary (every city in the tropics has a monkey sanctuary). I waited for my girlfriend to wake up, get ready, and head out to the communal breakfast area first. My Spanish is bad, and I was in no mood to initiate a conversation with our host's first thing in the morning. She left the room, I gave her 5 minutes, then joined her.

Our Ecuadorian hosts, a German couple, and my girlfriend were all chatting in varied fluencies of Spanish when I emerged. The German lady said she was heading to the village of Canelos on the fringes of the Amazon to see our host’s friend, Doña Betty. She asked if we wanted to join. I find the act of tourists observing the day-to-day activities of other cultures to be a bizarre practice. After all, I would take great pity on a tourist having to observe a British family drinking tea, moaning about the weather, and watching the BBC for an afternoon. Yet, as all I had planned for the day was a visit to a market and a botanical garden (the other half of Puyo's attractions), I agreed to come. A good tip for bad travellers is to follow good travellers; there is no responsibility, research, or organization involved.

The bus operator we used shall remain nameless because I can’t remember its name. It departs from one of Puyo's lesser-known bus terminals (El Mercado Mariscal), next to the laundromat with the life-sized photo of a lady in a short skirt holding a racing flag. At this station, they do not charge you for using the toilet, a refreshing change. The bus timetable states that the bus leaves at 9:30 am. The bus itself leaves at 10:10 am.

In Ecuador, every bus (restaurant, bar and barber for that matter) has a TV showing Spanish dubbed American movies. I was temporarily relieved for the children on board that the in-bus entertainment was not another action flick. Instead, it was what I initially assumed to be a child-friendly movie – Woody the Woodpecker. It quickly became apparent how irritating this bird was. Woody proceeded to torture and torment the child protagonist’s parents. In one scene, the psychopathic bird trapped the parents in a car which he then filled with concrete. This scene was met with smiles and laughs from the delighted mothers and children of the bus. I soon yearned for the action films of my previous Ecuadorian bus journeys. A movie about Jason Statham caving in the skull of an Albanian gangster would not only be less damaging to child viewers, but more educational. Hence, my descent into the green abyss was somewhat distracted by this stupid film.

Our travel party consisted of myself, my girlfriend, and the Germany lady. As the two conversed, I observed the changing landscape as we left Puyo and headed south towards Macas, and then off the main road towards the end-of-the-road village of Canelos. Winding down a descent of 300 metres, maize gave way to the jungle. As Woody formed a band with a group of kids and began playing a dreadful ‘Bird is the Word’ parody, I was treated to endless green forest, man-sized potholes and coffee brown rivers. The cost of this hour and a half bus journey was 2 dollars, the going rate for most things in Ecuador – from haircuts to handjobs. We trundled to our stop after crossing a great blue bridge. I was gutted as the film had just gotten good. Woody had been captured by animal traffickers who I assumed would now sell his body parts to be used as medicine in Vietnam.

We were met off the bus by André, a relation of Doña. It was humid, but then again jungles normally are. He led us along a dirt road, over a creaky bridge – which he insisted on swinging – and into the bush. This wasn’t your National Geographic, shoot a monkey with a frog poison arrow kind of village. There was the occasional car, the hum of generators and Coca-Cola adverts.

There was no path now as we waded through a palm forest. Dogs from a nearby homestead yapped at me, alarmed by this white monstrosity hulking awkwardly over the tattered branches. André stopped to show us some fibres from a palm tree and said they were used to make brooms, a mildly interesting fact. We emerged from tree cover to find ourselves on a deforested hillside. Men were cutting down trees with chainsaws, women were planting crops, and children were getting in the way. Here we were introduced to Doña, a short and hardy woman. At her side was a small girl holding a passive puppy named Jesus. Doña asked my name and I told her. She butchered the pronunciation and from there on I was affectionately known by the family as ‘Jimmy’.

Doña crushed some seeds into a potent red dye and applied it to the chin of my girlfriend and the German lady. I enthusiastically bent down for my turn. She looked at me horrified and wagged her finger. Apparently, this honour is only afforded to the women and children of the family as it brings fertility to the field. She called it tradition. I called it a bit rude. Instead, she handed me a stick and told me to start punching holes into the soft earth. It took me 5 minutes before I realised this wasn’t some masculine cultural practice but instead, I was farming yuca. I would punch a hole into the ground, severing worms and roots, and the women would follow me placing yuca sticks in the holes.

What started as a fun experience soon turned into half an hour of generic farm work under the equatorial sun. I realised that a life of toiling in a field was not for me. There seemed little method to this agricultural practice, or the way I practised it at least. I walked around, randomly poking holes of various depths, and in doing so trampling over previously planted yuca. Exhausted, my pleas of ‘Cansado’ were eventually heeded by André who took my stick. I laid my hat on a log and sat next to Jesus; watching André re-do my holes. Doña gazed at me with amused disappointment. She inspected my hands and said that they belonged to a pretty boy. “Jimmy”, she sighed. Before leaving the field, we stopped to chew on cinnamon leaves. This was obviously not nice. Never would I normally enjoy eating cinnamon on its own and doing so in the jungle was no different.

Doña led us through the forest and back to her home. We took a perfectly reasonable path, which made me question why the hell André had taken us through a palm forest in the first place. Before reaching Doña’s house, we stopped by a stream. Dona picked up some leaves and waved them furiously in my face. She then proceeded to do the same to my girlfriend and the German lady. I imagined waving some broccoli in the face of my next house guest. If they asked why I would simply reply, “Culture”. The house was large, with a wide-open dirt floor under a tin roof. I was invited to join the men. They offered me what they called ‘whisky’. It was clear, kept in a used coke bottle and smelled of fermented fruit. I cheekily asked if it was Scotch. They said it was better than Scotch. I had a sip, it was not.

Next up was lunch. Ladies brought us yuca with an egg. The men, next to me, had a chicken broth. As the family around me tucked into their meal I experienced a strong sense of ASMR. The men chomped and sucked on chicken bones, spitting out fragments of gristle which cascaded down off their chins into the dirt. The scraps were picked up by scrawny dogs, nervously darting between our chairs.

Doña emerged from the kitchen saying she had a special drink for ‘Jimmy’. She presented me with a bowl of creamy liquid. One sniff and I recognised it to be a maize beer drink I had loathed in Africa. It wasn’t. The family had chewed chunks of yuca and spat the masticated remnants into a bowl. Over a sustained period, their saliva had fermented the liquid into an alcoholic beer known as chicha. This was what I was served. I knew none of this at the time and politely lapped up half the bowl, which had the taste and consistency of vomit.

Doña insisted we go swimming in the river with the children. What she really meant was that we supervise her children. Having forgotten swimsuits, my girlfriend and the German lady wore kids' football outfits. I wore a swimming costume from the 1980s, fit for a man half my weight and size. I decided it would be best to wear my boxers under the costume to prevent anything from flopping out – a situation best avoided when surrounded by children. The river was murky, the water refreshingly cool. The children took great pleasure in riding a dug-out canoe down rapids, which on most voyages sunk. For each of these voyages, they insisted that ‘Jimmy’ should join. I bent to peer pressure and journeyed with the children for voyage after voyage. During one such voyage a young boy clung to me for what seemed like dear life. I later found out that he could not swim, so he actually was clinging to me for dear life.

Doña spent the afternoon showing us how to make traditional pottery. I felt my skills were more akin to a potter than a farmer. That was until Doña said my cup looked like it was made by a 3-year-old. She took it off me and began remaking it. “Jimmy” she tutted. Doña then offered to paint our faces in the traditional fashion and each of us received a different animal story. Mine was supposedly a snake. My girlfriend was a parrot. The German lady was also a snake (apparently, Doña had run out of ideas). Doña did not mention that the paint takes 2 weeks to fade. I was hence branded as a ‘Gringo’ for the remainder of my travels in Ecuador.

Before leaving, Doña gave each of us a completed vase from the nearby pottery store as a ‘thank you for visiting’. She would not take ‘no’ for an answer and insisted we take this very impractical travelling gift. Displaying utmost decorum, I smiled and thanked her. I said that it would be displayed proudly on my office desk for years to come. I don’t have an office. The vase did not leave Puyo with me the following day.

After donating some cash to Doña’s charity, we headed back to the bridge to catch our bus. My ‘goodbye’ with Doña was emotional. She looked at me long and hard, shook her head and exhaled “Jimmy…”, before giving me a hug. Doña was not the first woman I had disappointed and she would not be the last. Well after the sun had set, the bus appeared and ferried us back to Puyo. I reflected on my day, I had farmed for the first time and drunk spit. It made me wonder if this is what it meant to be a traveller.