Second Collegian Column

Mindo is a small town in the cloudforest. It’s small enough that two churches and one school serve the entire population, and that naked children play up and down their porches. Yet, on the main street, there are seven pizza restaurants and three internet cafés. There seem to be enough beds for rent to host the whole town once over.

This is because Mindo has the mixed fortune to be the closest cloudforest town to Quito, the capital of Ecuador and the point of arrival for nearly all international flights.

Though the town is relatively close to Quito, it feels a world apart. Quito lies in a high, dry valley between two mountain ranges. But Mindo is near tropical, with tree frogs and large spindly bugs, giant ferns and wetness all over the place.

Tourism has taken hold in Mindo, and it caters to the aspiring Indiana Jones in us norteamericanos. As you walk out of the town, hostels lining the gravel track pump out ambient jungle noises à la Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise. Thatch-roofed bamboo huts serve up fruit smoothies, and you can buy fresh-roasted, fair trade robusto coffee—a rarity in a country that drinks mostly Nescafé. If you’re feeling more adventurous, you can zip on cables over the forest, or innertube the Río Nambillo.

It’s amazing how Ecuador presents itself to you, in the manner of an overworked policeman trying to direct attention away from a particularly gruesome car wreck. The country knows what you think you want, and what you expect, and it’s ready to give you that. An uninquisitive visitor gets caught in this whirlpool of the Ecuadorian façade, this sweetly, faintly familiar fragrance, and lulls you to sleep, gently now like chloroform, soon you’ll be back at the airport going home.

The real Ecuador, a more flawed and perfected Ecuador, is waiting, skating away and out of sight when you blunder too closely, like a family of foxes protective of its young. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of the last particles of dust falling to the ground. These moments taint the projection, the part you’re allowed to see. I keep looking for ways inside, but I know it can’t happen. I’d need years, and a command of Spanish that’s far beyond me, to get beyond the graffito I saw today: “Fuera Yankees de América Latina.”

So I settle for the glimpses: A churchyard after services, crowded with people greeting each other and smiling; night games of pick-up volleyball with the bleachers packed; the man I saw in Mindo driving around in his canvas-topped pickup, preaching the love of Jesucristo through a microphone and a loudspeaker; Quiteño busdrivers on strike, slapping each other jovially and grinning as their machines idle; a little girl smiling at me through the window of a Chinese restaurant, which they call “Chifa” here. From behind each and every feint escapes the irrepressibility of Ecuador.