Monkey business

One of the booths that the Waorani Women’s Association set up during Carnaval was at a place called Paseo de los Monos which is a monkey rescue center and forest reserve with trails, etc. The owners invited the Waorani to give a cultural presentation to tourists and have their artesania on hand to sell. The place is about 10 minutes outside town, and rather than having to pay for a taxi, the owners graciously picked us up and loaded all of the stuff in their big, old beat-up truck that looked like it had at least 500,000 km on it and started without a key. I helped the women set up the booth, and then Manuela and I made some cool bag-like baskets out of palm leaves that we joked that we would try to sell to tourists. Around mid-day I ran back into town to get some stuff done. In the few hours I had been gone, and exactly 0 tourists came through, Manuela had somehow lost her cell phone. And not just any cell phone, a $400 cell phone. She doesn’t think she dropped it in the forest. I asked her if maybe one of the monkeys had grabbed it (there are a couple of aggressive ones that will steal anything it can get its hands on…and they can be sneaky). She said she didn’t think so. I kept trying to call it, but it was turned off. She definitely had it on when she last had it and had retraced all her steps, but couldn’t find it. She was really distraught so she decided to go to a shaman to have him tell her who took it. According to his report, one of the guys who had helped us set up and start a fire in the chosa (hut) where we had our booth had taken it. Manuela then had to confront the owners about it, but it was never recovered. I still suspect the monkeys…

I ended up working my tail off for the rest of Carnaval, helping the women set up and take down the OTHER booth near the big water park in town. Sales were slow. And the rains were frequent. One of the days we were able slip away to see the famous painted body exposition in the nearby town of Vera Cruz. Here’s the deal: a half dozen or so women strip down to their thong underwear and then get painted by local artists while whole families (not just dirty old men) look on. Some of them are really well done…and others not so much. Every parade in Puyo usually has at least one painted body. Vera Cruz was supposed to have some sort of food festival, but it felt like false advertising…very disappointing. We tried some sweet fried that was pretty unremarkable (so unremarkable that I forgot the name of the food) and what amounted to a frozen fruit salad on a stick.

The highlight of Carnaval, hands down, was seeing the Monday night parade in the city of Ambato. For whatever reason, Monday night is bigger here than say Fat Tuesday is in New Orleans and other places that have their own Carnaval or Mardi Gras festivities. There was not a hotel room in the entire city…and people had started reserving their spot on the street to watch the parade 10 hours before the parade was to start. We were invited to stay in the “Posh Corps” pad of a friend, where we had a little pre-parade party. At one point we mosied the 3 blocks to the parade route only to realize that a) there was absolutely no place to stand and be able to see anything; and b) the parade still hadn’t even started yet. We climbed into a truck bed parked on the street hoping the extra height (in addition to us being gringos and having a general height advantage anyway) would yield a glimpse of the street, but our views were still blocked. Later, one of our comrades would discover a stairway to a balcony of a burned-out building. It was probably not the safest or smartest move on our part, but we pressed on anyway. The stairs were sketchy, but once we were all on the balcony, we arguably had one of the best views of the parade in the city. It was phenomenal. The parade was no half-rate parade that we are used to seeing in our site. This was the real deal. Intricately sculptured floats made entirely of oranges and other fruit…elaborately dressed dance troupes spinning and grinding in synch… glamorous festival queens waving like Queen E while donning four foot wide peacock feather headdresses. We squeeled like schoolgirls at each passing float to try to convince them to throw us candy and fruit and prizes. There was so much electricity in the air which added to the rush of discovering our “own” private colonial balcony to view the spectacle. I have never been to any of the big parades in New York, New Orleans or Rio, but I have to say that the Carnaval parade Ambato was pretty amazing.