The authentic Ecuador
By Rafo León – Peru
May 16, 2002
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Ecuador, May 16, 2002.- As we listen to Rodrigo Flores, we can see that the world has not lost the ability to learn from its mistakes. “We don’t want tourists to come and look at us as if we were some strange species or to see our culture as a folklore phenomenon,” he tells us seriously. “We Otavalos receive our visitors in order to exchange viewpoints with them, to show them how we live and, at the same time, to learn about their lives.”
That attitude, involving a dialogue of identities, is diametrically opposed to those sorry spectacles to which everyday tourists have submitted so many original cultures in Africa, Asia and America, where “tribes” disguised as themselves sell their customs under the shoddiest merchandising package to visitors charmed to buy a pastiche that does not question their position in the world.
Rodrigo Flores is a 27 year-old member of the Otavalo group that lives in northern Ecuador. He holds a degree in tourism and runs the project “Runa Tupari” – Rural Tourism with a Native Identity. This is a living tourism product, in which visitors can come into contact with the everyday life of an indigenous group as part of an immensely rich natural spectacle. The purpose is to show them that the official world is not the only one, that there are ethnic phenomena filled with meaning and perspective, looking toward the future from the platform of a cultural past that refuses to die.
Cotacachi is the largest canton in Imbabura Province, a mountainous area located in northwestern Ecuador.
Its living zones extend from the Humid Mountain Forest to the Very Humid Pre-mountain Forest. Situated at 2,418 masl, Cotacachi is home to native, mestizo and African-Ecuadorian groups. Spanish and Quichua are the languages most spoken among its dwellers. Runa Tupari was created in this context, as part of a strategy developed jointly by the community, aid institutions and the government. Its purpose is to boost the economic involvement of small and medium enterprise by developing tourist activities –but not just any kind of tourism, and therein lies the crux of the matter.
Guest quarters
On reaching the city of Otavalo, travelers are greeted at the company’s office located on the same square occupied by a spreading and “touristy” handicraft market. From there, they will be taken to one of the four communities where guest quarters have been equipped to house them, but always inside the living area of the community itself. We were received by Pedro Lima (41 years old, married, with seven children) in his home, where he has built an enchanting cottage in his patio, using traditional building materials from the area. There is room for three people in these quarters marked by the simplicity for which those of us who dwell in hollow cities filled with artificial air so yearn.
Pedro Lima sits down to converse and tells us that his oldest son lives in Lisbon, where he works selling Otavalo textiles (that is when we realize why Latin Americans call the Otavalos “the Phoenicians of Ecuador”). He also asks us about our own work, family, health, age, likes and dislikes, and ideas. He really makes us feel at home.
After a nap enlivened by the songs of thousands of birds at sunset, we join other visitors at the community center that also functions as the town school. There, the community members sing and dance, not only for us, but also for everyone who wishes to join the party. We listen to a group of young people who are trained as tourist guides play traditional music; also another group in which an excellent violin plays a counterpoint to Andean pan pipes and drum.
Later, a group of girls dance and a singer sings solos in the mode of the Latin American songs of the seventies. Before dinner, our hosts invite us to dance and learn about the games that adults traditionally use to console grieving family members at community wakes, by drawing on laughter as an unbeatable instrument for raising their spirits. Games that are amusing, relaxing and intense –in effect, that are capable of restoring spirits through this joint ritual.
Our supper is based on the typical Otavalo diet, with certain changes to guarantee easy nighttime digestion. Starchy soups with potatoes, cuy, or guinea pig with leached corn, and tree tomato juice. We return to our cottage to sleep and our last thoughts mingle with the strains of the songs of a group of young people preparing for the feast of the Inti Raymi, which is celebrated on June 24 in homage to the Sun.
The Runa Tupari offering broadens the next day with trekkings and visits to sacred sites and to other communities. Here, travelers can walk the shores of Lake Cotacachi, climb the magnificent volcano of the same name, make a four day ascent to the lagoons and the cloud forest of Piñán, meet the Andean high plateau in Cuicocha and Mojanda, and delve deeper into the ancestral worship of the Sun and the Pachamama, or Earth Mother, which have survived as part of a patchwork of different beliefs.
Dropping down to the coast
After visiting a while with our Otavalo hosts, we return to Quito to board the flight that will take us to Guayaquil. In less than three hours, we plunge from the mountains to the steaming tropics. A businessman from Guayaquil tells us that twenty years ago the World Almanac called Guayaquil the dirtiest city in the world, as he gestures toward the spotless Simón Bolívar Malecón, or Riverfront Boulevard, which was rescued from decay two years ago in an intelligent urban rehabilitation project.
Guayaquil today is not only a progressive and dynamic city, but is also so attractive that it boasts magnetism. Its personality springs from the Guayas River, the historical resource that has made it a port center. Thanks to that role, it exhibits traces of French architecture, much of it designed by the company of Gustav Eiffel in the golden years of the cacao boom.
Like so many other economic phenomena in this part of the world, the cacao boom crashed around the nineteen twenties and plunged Guayaquil into a crisis, tinged, as is usual in the case of ports, with a sense of lawlessness and disorganization. What we feel in Guayaquil today, however, is a sense of vitality, progress and a unique form of modern culture, marked by the recovery of the Riverfront Boulevard under a vanguard architectural concept that incorporates the icons that history has left along its lengthy course: monuments, arbors, railroad cars, fountains, which share their space with modern sculptures, areas for recreation and imposing fast food joints.
Ecuador’s enormous diversity opens up before our eyes. From Guayaquil, we can travel to any of the country’s beautiful beaches, to the Amazon, to other parts of the cordillera, to Galapagos. What is most interesting about any of the choices we decide upon is the confirmation that from the Otavalos and Guayaquil’s tourist entrepreneurs to the urban and rural dwellers, including government officials and non-government groups, the most important items on Ecuador’s agenda today are the national identity and its conservation –in short, the option to turn what is authentically Ecuadorian into an advantage before the world.
Source: CAN General Secretariat
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