Ecuador Highlands; Closest to Heaven.

Today our hosts, The Brosters, led us from Quito to Baños by circling the volcano Chimborazo on dirt roads and we got a real sense of the landscape, the indigenous people, and the real Ecuador.

First Chimborazo. When the German explorer, Alexander von Humboldt, and his French assistant, Aime Bonpland, climbed and surveyed this mountain in 1802 it was thought to be the highest mountain in the world. It is, in fact, the highest peak from the centre of the earth due to the bulging waistline of the Earth. In Ecuador they say it more poetically; Ecuador is the piece of the world that is closest to heaven.

More recently we have adopted mean sea level (MSL) as a datum for measuring altitude because altitude from sea level measures what humans care about – oxygen.

Here, in the Avenue of Volcanoes in norther Ecuador from Quito to Cuenca, running between the two cordilleras of the Andes, there are seven peaks over 17,000 feet and they are, in fact, ALL further from the centre of the Earth than Mount Everest. (*)

One of the amazing effects of these massive volcanoes is that they mess with the climate. On the west side is arid desert and on the rainy east side there are huge tracts of lush, green cattle ranches. We bumped into indigenous people living very different lives on the different sides. As we rode past Chimborazo it SNOWED.

On the dry side – a woman coming back from shopping carrying her purchases on a mule many miles from anywhere; a group of farmers tending sheep and llamas on land that can barely support life. On the wet side – a weekend rodeo of horsemen roping calves decked in gaucho gear that probably hasn’t changed in centuries. We stopped and mingled and took photos and met a number of spectators and watched the horsemen who were universally shit-faced drunk on some kind of local moonshine before they entered the ring to try and rope calves.