Bartender.

The last few weeks were full of (new) experiences and they went so quick that it is hard to keep track of what all happened. Before I start writing down some of these experiences, I would like to thank the staff of Hostel Izhcayluma who gave me the opportunity to live and work with them.
I wasn’t looking forward to spend a lot of time working on my laptop to get my travel agency up and running, but it is because of them and the many interesting and nice guests who I met here at Izhcayluma that I’m having a great time. I think I found myself the best office that I could wish for, although the internet connection is sometimes terrible ;-)

All right let’s see how many things I can remember ;-)

Just after I arrived in Vilcabamba there was a national conference about tourism and the economical situation in Ecuador. Even the President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa was here to give a speech of about 45min.  When he left he passed me in his car with open window at less than 4 m distance and I could make a close up picture (or if I would have been a bad person I could have shot him…) I was a bit surprised that the president of Ecuador, who certainly has some enemies in Ecuador, came so close to us. But maybe this is his arrogance and strength. Instead of hiding in an office, he travels a lot and personally promotes his ideas and plans.
Too bad that apparently the president has a short vision if it comes to tourism. At least that’s what the spokesman of the minister of tourism told me when I asked if I could have a word with the minister…

Where the president of Ecuador was talking about positive things to improve the economy of Ecuador, right after he left there was an international spiritual conference. Here people from different nationalities, mostly the USA, came together to talk about the so called ‘Dark Forces’ (that is how some of them called it…) on earth. Several of them were staying in the hostel and at the bar I heard some of the discussions in which some of them said that they wanted to ‘shine their light’ on the darkness. Others believed even that the government was behind some of the robberies (several of the guests apparently ‘lost’ something on their way to the conference…).
I was quite amazed by the negativity that came from some of these people, who apparently held a conference only to complain without purpose. Because when I asked them to come with solutions instead of only complains, they had no answer and told me that that wasn’t their thing. Worse was that several people seemed to prefer to walk away from the problems (like going to live in Vilcabamba) instead of trying to solve them.
One of the people who organized this conference recently died of cancer… My sympathy goes to his family and friends.
To end on a more positive note I would really like to say that of course not every-one who I met from this conference was short sighted. There were luckily also several very nice and positive people who came to visit this conference. They were more open-minded, social and good  company at the bar, thanks  Hopefully they can make a difference…

Talking about people at the bar, being a bartender you would probably be able to write a book about things that drunk people do and interesting people you meet there. In my short time as a bartender I was fortunate to meet a lot of interesting and good people. Although some were a bit strange as well, like the guy who was called Boo. No, this wasn’t his nickname. When his father scared him as a baby, he started crying and at that moment his mother decided to call him Boo. As if this wasn’t enough, when Boo applied for a prestigious university his mother told him that if they wouldn’t accept him, everything he had done before would be for nothing and she would commit suicide. Now she wants to live in Vilcabamba and he came to visit her…

Some of the more funny stories include a girl who got so drunk that she walked into the swimming pool, or another one who fell asleep on the toilet and it was impossible to wake her up for over 2 hours, the previous bartender who gave a striptease and on top of all a spiritual wedding with great views and a live rock concert after.

What I do beside the bar-job? Many things, of course the most important one is working on the website and logistics of my travel agency Fairtravel4u, at least for a few hours a day (it usually takes more time than expected).
Beside that I join guests of the hostel on hikes in the surroundings of Vilcabamba. The hostel has set out several easy to follow and beautiful hiking routes, but sometimes people prefer that some-one goes with who knows the route, so then I join them. Not a bad deal 

One hike however had a less pleasant ending and I will try to explain shortly what happened:
I went hiking up the small Mandango mountain with another Dutch guest from the hostel. This is the only original hike from Vilcabamba that isn’t set out by Izhcayluma. A few years ago there had been a gang active in robbing people who climbed this mountain, but they caught them and then it became quite.
When we walked up it was a beautiful sunny day and we passed by an Ecuadorian family with children.
However when I reached the second and highest top of the mountain I heard some-one behind me yelling. I looked around a saw a Western guy waving with his arms and yelling something that I had to go down. Then I saw a passport on the ground and three Ecuadorians with at least one machete walked in my direction. I wasn`t really sure what to think of that, but I thought that it was probably better to leave. I decided to go almost straight down the steep mountain (not completely save) yelling to the guy who was with me to also go down. But he was already too close to the Ecuadorans and not so fast. Although I still wasn’t really sure what was going on, I felt bad leaving him, so when I was going down and looking for a spot to hide my valuables I run into a German couple. I told them that someone tried to rob us and gave them my bag, wallet and camera. I told the Germans that I wanted to check on my friend and that they had to go back. Then I quickly turned around and started to climb back up. I called the name of the guy that I was with and was wondering what I would walk into reaching the top.
When I arrived back at the top three guys with 2 machetes told me to lay on the ground. I saw the Dutch guy standing and he looked fine, so I did what they told me. They searched me and took my cell phone, which I had forgotten in my hurry, but they didn’t like my watch. One was talking about taking my shoes off, but the others preferred to quickly let me go in the opposite direction of where the Dutch guy was standing.
I walked towards the guy who had warned me and who was missing a shoe. Now three against three we would have a good change, but my experience with angry Ecuadorians with machetes is that they would use them and what is it worth to get serious injurious over material valuables. Instead, since the robbers seemed quite confident, I decided to go down a different way (the original was blocked by the robbers) and try to warn the police before they would decide to go down. I practically ran down and about 45 min later I was in the village. Calling the police took more time than needed and when they finally arrived I even had to show them the entrance of the trail to the mountain. When we arrived there the police told me that their shoes weren’t appropriate to ‘climb’ the mountain. I tried to argue that there were at least 4 tourists, a family with children and three robbers on that mountain, but they said that they (two of them) wanted to wait for backup. I decided to go back up on my own. I quickly met the Ecuadorian family, who hadn’t noticed anything and about 10 min. later I ran into the German couple. It turned out that I was about 15 min. late. The robbers had come down the same way and met the couple on their way. Now I did lose my money and camera, but they lost very expensive camera’s, an I-pod, backpack, 200 US$ a shoe and more. Plus that especially the girl got a small trauma from this bad experience.
To make a very (annoying) long story shorter; The police blamed us for climbing the mountain (apparently there had been two other robberies in the last few months…) and took more than three hours to write our reports. This was even only after I argued that they had to do this, because they wanted to send us to the nearest town.
After this, they and part of the village didn’t seem to care anymore. So it took us and Izhcayluma to print and spread warnings to prevent that more people get robbed on this mountain…

Ok, some more positive experiences now ;-)

For a long time already I’ve been curious about the working of the cactus drink from the San Pedro cactus. It is said that this drink has helped the shamans and kings of Latin America for centuries in understanding themselves, nature and even the Galaxy. In one of the theories this San Pedro drink has even helped in the designing of the Nasca Lines.
Vilcabamba is original a valley of the San Pedro cactus and this was even one of the reasons for the owners of Izhcayluma to come to visit Vilcabamba, the rest is  history.
Twice I joined  a San Pedro medicine ceremony with the local shaman who also married the couple in Izhcayluma. They say that this medicine journey in the first place is suppose to confront yourself with your own feelings, questions and problems and then could help to solve them.  One of the side effects is that the drink helps your mind to pictures your feelings and surroundings in unrealistic hallucinations.
During the first ceremony, that takes the whole night, I vomited (the vomiting is normal) once, felt very comfortable after and had trouble to stay awake.
During the second ceremony I drunk more of the drink, vomited three times and reached some state in-between dreaming and sleeping, a bit like just before you wake up. If I looked at the sky, the stars were moving and when I closed my eyes I dreamed about unimportant things. In the beginning, especially listening to the drum and rattle I also dreamed about small theatrical pictures. Maybe the strangest thing I saw was a bright light, like a big firefly sparkling in the grass when I went to pee.
Before people had told me stories about seeing many hallucinations, non-existing colors, trees making love or even a few darker experiences. I just felt calm and relaxed for most of the time. Revering at my own experiences I can now only conclude two things, either I’m not spiritual enough and too skeptical, or my inner self is just very calm and in peace ;-)

All right, back to reality. In the past few weeks I’ve accompliced most of what I wanted to before I came to Izhcayluma.  An interesting coincident was that right when I opened my website for public, Merazonia received a Puma. The Puma, can be seen as a symbol of the reason why Merazonia and Fairtravel4u exist…
Although I’m a bit disappointed that the website still isn’t finished yet, I’m satisfied with the setup and I can start selling tours. In contrary I also gained some unexpected things from being/ working at Izhcayluma. I met very nice people, some possible contacts to work with and I’m mostly proud of the job-offer that I got from one of the owners of Izhcayluma. He told me that if my agency wouldn’t work out, next year he could offer me a job as manager of Hostel Izhcayluma 

For now I just accepted to guide another tour of 2 months for the Dutch agency. Although I really don’t like the setup of the group, four elderly families, two from Belgium and two from Holland, the money it earns me would allow me to pay most, or even all my bills…
Without these worries, it will be easier to concentrate in continue to work on my own travel agency.
One ‘little obstacle’ on the way is that my Ecuadorian visa runs out before the tour allows me to leave Ecuador. I think I have a solution for this, but things are never sure around here.

While I was already writing this story, last night I met a very interesting person. He is a geologist and editor from Germany who is already been working and living in Latin America for 20 years. During these years he has been involved in protecting nature and culture and investigating the human impact on nature. His specialism is climate changes, but recently (2011) he edited a book for a huge international organization called IUCN, about the protected nature areas in Latin America. In this book they describe the variation of the areas, their importance for the world, the need to protect them, but also the possibilities they have in producing more money as sustainable tourist areas instead of industrial mining areas. They talk about the responsibility of the rich countries in helping the poor with protecting their nature, like the great example in the Yasuni reserve in Ecuador (see earlier story). Although there is a big oil reserve under this nature reserve, the western countries told Ecuador that it would be a shame if Ecuador would destroy this beautiful and important ecological reserve to extract the oil. Ecuador in return answered that they wouldn’t touch the oil if the world would compensate half of the estimated value of the oil. A fair deal I would say and a good example of how protecting nature could provide a new income for the poor countries in Latin America.

The geologist told me that last year he lost the last bit of confidence that he still had in the capability of big organizations and governments to protect nature. This happened after one of the directors of Unesco opened last years conference with a speech in which he declared that The Galapagos Islands were fine now and didn’t need to be on the red list anymore. He came to this conclusion after he visited the islands just for one day…
You know why Machu Picchu suddenly limits the amount of visitors, the geologist asked me. It is only politics. For years already Unesco threatens the government of Peru that if they don’t limit the amount of visitors of Machu Picchu, they will put the site on the red list. For years nothing happened, while studies each year prove that the max amount of visitors shouldn’t exceed over 1600 persons a day. Until last year Unesco finally gave a written warning that the amount of visitors should be limited. Even with this serious threat the Peruvian government waited until the last moment to actually show some response by suddenly deciding on the 25th of July that Machu Picchu wouldn’t allow more than 2500 visitors a day (normally in-between 3000 and 3500 a day during high season…). This action doesn’t really protect M.P., but prevents the site from arriving on the red list of Unesco.

It was also very interesting and sad to hear from someone who had worked for 20 years in organizations that protect nature and culture and who is specialized in climate changes, that mayor global studies indeed show that the world is heating up more than it should do.
He says that the studies also prove that mankind indeed has a big influence on these climate changes, but no-one really seems to believe it or willing to do something about it.
If the earth continues to heat up the way it did over the past years, global sea level rises between one till even till even7 meters in the next 100 year. Just a few degrees can cause a chain reaction in the melting of the ice caps and after that it is only simple mathematics. It is already known how much ice there is on the poles, so not to difficult to calculate how much water will be released if this all melts…
When I asked him if he had lost all hope, he told me that he didn’t want to, because then there is nothing left…

One of the things we agreed on, while having a drink at the bar, was that information and education are some of the most important tools we have in trying to make a difference in the abuse of nature.
The geologist now also gives ‘climate classes’ to students with a university degree and I hope in the future that Fairtravel4u can help in promoting sustainable tourism and volunteer work.
Only by really seeing, experiencing and doing something you can appreciate the whole value of it, so this is why I believe in a combination of travelling and volunteer work.

Saludos desde Izhcayluma!
Martijn