1.

"Loja! Loja! Loja!"

Only two nights after arriving in Zamora, we are leaving Zamora.

"Venga LOJA! LOJA! Venga LOJA!"

The blind guy standing beside the door of our bus, who is clearly neither driver nor sidekick (all drivers have sidekicks here), has taken it upon himself to promote our trip to Loja. Loudly. His hands are laced over the top of a bent aluminum cane, red polo shirt, black hat, a wild white eyeball spun up towards the sky. He mixes it up some, but the emphasis is always broken in to thirds.

"LOJA! Venga LOJA! LOJALOJALOJA!"

We're close enough to the inside door to make certain observations about the cockpit, which is sealed off in Ecuadorian busses, presumably to prevent passengers from getting front row seats to the gut-twisting slalom that Ecuadorian drivers specialize in as they plunge down the sides of all these Andean peaks. A long wooden rosary is dangling from the rearview in loops; what appears to be the lord's prayer in Spanish is printed on a little card above the door and adorned with the rainbow hues of an airbrushed Jesus. After a couple weeks of bussing around the south, I have come full circle from at first seeing the religious paraphernalia as a sign that the driver thinks himself immortal (which still might be the case) to now recognizing the beads and the Jesus and the well thumbed bible near the gear shift as standard; something to worry about if absent. Would Jesus pass that semi going downhill?

"Venga Loja! LOJA! VENGALOJA!"

Passengers are finally beginning to collect. Tiny Quechua women with long dark braids falling out behind dark panama hats are hauling themselves on board. Tiny, tidy, almost sacredly clean, their faces nut brown and square, eyes set, belying none of what must be the terrific effort it takes to haul huge webbed bags of produce up knee-high steps. Outside, sunlight is angling in under the long concrete awning that constitutes the station, and the engine rumbles to life under our seats. The blind guy's shouting takes on an urgent pitch.

"LOJA! LOJA LOJA!"

A little over a week ago, we were leaving Loja (which is something of a hub), on our way down to Vilcabamba, a tiny town made famous in the seventies (apparently) by an article written in National Geographic. The gist, I think, was that Vilcabambians live longer than their neighbors thanks to the myriad anti-oxidants to be found in the local fruits and vegetables. The live-longer bit turned out to be a hoax, but the whole region really is bursting at the seams with healthy produce, and that, along with the weird transference of credibility/fame from the article despite it being a hoax has attracted a veritable pilgrimage of real estate hungry foreigners, who at this point appear to have pretty much taken over.

Which means that traveling to Vilcabamba isn't like traveling to other Ecuadorian towns. In fact, it's rather like leaving Ecuador entirely and entering a strange netherworld between here and an American retirement community. Ameridor. And in much the same way that going to a restaurant with bad food these days is more a feature of shoddy research than it is bad luck, we knew this going in. Google threw up all the warning signs, but those signs - and they were legion - offered no real competition to our rather morbid, otherwise unanswerable, question: What does Ameridor feel like?

2.

A few years ago, I was traveling down the coast of Portugal with my laptop, spending about a week in each place, working, and moving between spots on the weekends when clients wouldn't notice my offline-edness. After several weeks in cities, I decided some small-town sunshine was in order, and took the train down to Lagos, photos of which had been featured on the cover of Portugal's Lonely Planet guide a few years back. Clear skies, white cobblestones, brightly painted fishing boats bobbing in sapphire swells ... steep red cliffs along white sandy beaches. Who could say no?

Me, it turned out. I could say no. The fishing boats were just as pretty as promised, but no amount of scenery could make up for what had happened to the town itself. Lagos had been gutted and wrung, claimed by the legions of twenty-four hour party people - Anglos and Aussies, mostly - that drank nonstop, never slept and spent most of the morning depositing whatever they'd been binging on across those beautiful white cobblestones. (Ask me about McDonalds and the bunk bed sometime.) Two days after arriving I was practically running back to the station. Clients be damned, I wanted out. I distinctly remember sitting outdoors for breakfast on my final morning as a stringy pink fluid oozed around a cobblestone corner, only to begin pooling near my table. Forty-eight hours too many.

So, after perusing a few travel blogs that featured posts like “Why Vilcabamba is Seriously Overrated” or “Vilcabamba : Paradise Going Bad”, our arrival (or my arrival anyways) came bundled with a certain amount of well-earned trepidation. But the ride there was so dizzyingly beautiful that the worry faded for a few minutes, while outside our window flew by what the guidebook referred to as "lowlands". "Low" turned out to be something of a misnomer. Our view was full of nothing but peaks that looked as verdant as they were vertical; cinched topography all covered with patchwork pastures and spiderlike cows that somehow clung to a hellishly steep grade. It was as though rural Vermont had been painted across a swath of the Alps. As we descended, a mist settled in the valley ahead: first gently erasing the rounded tops of mountains, then peaks that before had seemed to fold together like the knuckles of great green hands began to flatten and fade. I tried taking photos, but there was nothing for it, notes would have to suffice. Slopes that had been textured with forests and fields began to go smooth with the haze until all that remained were flat planes and darkened divots; oblong shapes like the eye sockets of a pale face withdrawing in to the mist until the only division left was between earth and sky; a ragged tear in the distance joining shades of blue.

Forty-eight hours later, we're sitting by the door at Charlito's, a burger joint down near the town square that is owned by a middle aged Virginian - Charlie - and his new Ecuadorian wife, who Charlie refers to as "my Ecuadorian wife". She stays in the kitchen while Charlie shoots the shit with his regulars all day. "Regulars" in the case being the cadre of older American dudes who hang out and wear sunglasses indoors and occupy the plastic picnic tables on the porch, sipping beer, eating fries and keeping up a steady patter of commentary about herbal joint remedies, unfair visa requirements and - clearly the favorite topic - how much crazier everyone else is.

"Ecuador's very own open air asylum" is Charlie's favorite line, and though Charlie doesn't have a particular tic himself he does possess a certain nonplussed air that (oddly) seems to lend him credibility with his regulars, even as he's busy insulting them. "People here are a little off" he'll muse to no one in particular after serving up your burger, and he's seriously understating the case. They may not be as completely batshit as the guy with droopy neck skin who sits out on the stoop shouting obscenities at passing dogs and children, but ask the Kiwi cowboy to show you his poetry and watch as he unfolds a grimy printout that describes how reality really is: a jumble of disjointed verbs and threatening adjectives that makes you scoot your chair back a little. Watch the shy, rabbity homeless guy, who likes to poke foreign women with his popsicle stick, poke your girlfriend with his popsicle stick. Go talk to Doug (who looks exactly like my Uncle Bill, plus about 300 lbs) and listen as he describes his magical vortex juice (several gallons of which he carries around in his backpack) or the secret billion dollar deals he has going with the Philippine government. The spectrum is wide.

Charlie isn't crazy so much as he's a perfect example of the kind of American guy who moves down to Ecuador these days, which is to say of the save-yourself-while-you-still-can variety. Older men who pride themselves on their ability to stay calm and see things as they really are. Both "America is a police state already, no doubt about it." and "America is a socialist country ... and socialism just produces lazy people" came out of his mouth within minutes of each other. He's soft looking, nearly bald, a little salt & pepper around the edges. He was born in Alabama and moved to Virginia when he was young - clearly thinks himself something of an aesthete. "Oh, I ran a theater company in Richmond" is how he deflects questions about his past, but is a little too proud of the time he spent in prison (for dealing pot) to leave that out too. "Ridiculous really. Me? A risk?". Taught some of the guys inside how to read, write legal briefs. "Some of them were so young I could have easily been their father", which is when you realize that Charlie was in prison recently .

3.

And so it went. Our hostel was a lovely reprieve, a jungly paradise about ten minutes away from town - along a winding river, over a red metal bridge - full of exactly the kind of travelers you hope to meet when setting out on a trip. A french couple who came back exhausted and smiling each day from eight hour hikes. A lovely English/Italian couple - he a translator, she a puppeteer - figuring out how to live on the road indefinitely. And Dmitri, a rock-climbing Londoner who had flown in to Buenos Aires in May, expecting to stay only a few months. Plans change. He'd just purchased a minibus in Bolivia, and was headed for San Francisco. All of them excited, all friendly and intelligent and yes, all a little crazy. The good kind.

Did Vilcabamba rank down there with Lagos? Depends on who you ask. For us, the ex-patriot loonies were little more than an anthropological sideshow. Something to chuckle about over an evening beer, so long as that beer was enjoyed safely on the saner side of our red metal bridge. For the locals, the poor Ecuadorians who are stuck with these guys for the foreseeable future, the situation looks a little more dire. What would you do? There are retreats, certainly (there aren't many white faces to be found at the town's nightly volleyball game), but you do hear that the really irritating ones - y'know, the guys who shout obscenities at children - sometimes just sort of ... disappear. Really.

A week after our return to Cuenca, I was in the dingy little kitchen of our new hostel, helping a Japanese/American couple light the stove to make dinner. They are traveling with their daughter - a little girl of perhaps twelve - who is the perfect opposite of shy. The moment the stove was lit, she started in with a barrage of questions that her parents' rolled eyes suggested was a fairly normal routine. Was I staying for long? Where were we headed? Why Ecuador? How tall are you? I survived the first round reasonably well, then, after a quick recovery breath : "Did you go to Vilcabamba? Wasn't it amazing? Did you think it was amazing? I thought it was amazing. It was amazing."