Armed Guards and Markets with Pig Heads

(Beginning MARCH2009) For a moment I thought that we might not survive more than a few feet into Ecuador. The taxi driver that was to take us to the Peru-Ecuador boarder kept stopping along the road trying to tell us that we had to wait for his friend to come meet us. A friend? Maybe, but we did not believe him. After much arguing, he finally began to drive again. We thought things would move smoothly from there, but immediately, as we got to the boarder, we were told we would need armed guards by the Ecuadorian government to escort us over the boarder because I was, well, a gringa and this was the most dangerous boarder crossing. I quickly began to regret my decision to walk the boarder as my mind began to fill with memories of news stories of foreigners who went missing abroad.

They both carried concealed guns. My mind kept getting the best of me as I wondered, because I could not fully understand Spanish, if they were just going to kidnap us and were not guards at all; that they, in fact, were the real danger.

 They didn’t. 

We walked the boarder. One guard walked in front of us, carrying my backpack so I could walk faster, and the other behind us. Along the way, as we passed through the densely packed market, they shared stories of when they had been harmed on the job.

The market was unlike anything I had ever seen. The crowds of people were so dense I was afraid they might swallow us whole. The narrow path we walked was lined with vendors selling anything from live crabs, to pig heads, to caged chickens. The stores we passed were cramped full of items ranging from piles of mismatched shoes to cloth. It was a cultural experience like no other.

Finally breaking free from the marketplace, we hailed a cab to take us to the customs office in town to have our yellow cards inspected. The guards rode with us. Next they took us to a bus station, if it can be called a bus station, because it was run off the streets and only contained one bus. The station was again surrounded by vendors. In front of us a family was selling food. Their table was filled with pots and pans containing rice and meats for passerbys to eat. They washed the dishes right there, with dirty water, on the streets, continuously giving out the ‘clean’ plates to their next customers.

Then the guards wanted us to pay them forty USD each. We were quite shocked! This was how much we would spend on three days of food for each of us. My companion explained that we could only give them forty. We did not know, nor will we ever, if we had somehow agreed to pay the guards in the beginning, if we really needed them at all, or if they were trying to scam us. But, at least we had made it safe, save for a few slash marks on my companion’s bag, and we had gotten all of our paper work done.

Next to the bus were tons of parakeets and chickens, ready to be loaded onto the bus. It was finally our turn to get onto the cramped bus, full of people, to head to Guayaquil. Unlike Peru, who’s buses were of a very high style, this was just an older style coach bus. We got our seats and I was prepared for the three hour ride to Guyaquil.

I thought the ride would be quiet, but as we kept going it seemed the market we had just previously escaped from had followed us. At every cropping of buildings we came to, at every person we saw, the bus was stopped. Vendors of all sorts got on the buses; children selling ice cream and homemade banana chips, men selling crabs and milky colored water that one drinks from a bag, the whole time the ticket collector on the bus yelled “Guya! Guya!” to anyone outside.