VISITING A VOLCANO IN ECUADOR

COTOPAXI IN THE DISTANCE

The quake in Ecuador took me back to my recent visit to that country, a very enjoyable one. The capital Quito has three major volcanoes nearby, all of which are tourist destinations. They are part of what is known as the ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’, a group of active volcanoes that is in the shape of a horseshoe and passes from Western coasts of South and North America through the Pacific to Southeast Asia and reaches pretty close to India. In fact the 2004 Tsunami in South Asia in which thousands lost their lives and an entire train was washed away in Sri Lanka, was attributed to an under-sea volcanic eruption off the coast of Indonesia which is on the ‘Ring.’

Ecuador is bang on the Andes mountain chain and the tallest volcano it has is Cotopaxi (20000 feet), currently off-bounds for tourists as signs of activity have been noticed in it since 2015. But this does not take away from the fact that it is a symbol of Ecuador and even finds a place on its flag. A slightly lesser one is Cayambe northeast of Quito and at 19300 feet is the second highest mountain in the Ecuadorian Andes. The third is Pichincha which is very close to Quito. The province is named after this volcano. I went close the top two of them – Pichincha and Cayambe. Pichincha is right next to Quito and can be quickly reached by a Gondola which takes one from about 10,000 feet to 14000 ft. in just a few minutes. Cayambe is a little way off – about 70 kilometres to the northeast – and is a little tougher to reach. Cayambe is the name of the indigenous people who live in the region around the volcano. The small but old town at the base is also known as Cayambe. What follows is an account of the visit to Cayambe volcano or to be exact to the point where the glacier begins which is about 4000 feet below the crater. I was curious to see a volcano since the only one that I know of in India is Jwalamukhi in Himachal Pradesh which I have never visited.

Therefore we (my friend and me) decided to pay a visit to Cayambe and accordingly hired a tourist taxi for the purpose. We started off from our hotel ‘Sol De Quito’ (The soul of Quito) on Alemania Avenue in Quito early on a clear morning in a Hyundai MPV. Accompanied by the driver (a lady in blue jeans and jacket), and the guide we drove through the countryside dotted with green-houses where flowers are grown on a commercial basis (flowers by the way are a major export of Ecuador) stopping only once on the outskirts of Quito to take a picture of Cotopaxi. Then on to Cayambe past one of the several Mitad del Mundos (in Spanish it means middle of the world) strewn across Ecuador. Middle of the world refers to the fact that Ecuador lies on the Equator and even derives its name from it. So Ecuadoreans have woven it into their tourist business, a major foreign currency earner. Incidentally, the US dollar is the local currency of Ecuador, replacing its earlier inflation prone domestic currency. So earning dollars is the very life blood of its economy.  

CAYAMBE VOLCANO FROM AFAR

Since it is clear in the early part of the day, mount Cayambe is visible from many kilometres away. (photo) Its ice covered conical top, typical of a volcanic mountain, rises above the rest of the Andean range majestically. It is in that direction that we are headed and I wonder if, when I get to the top, I will be able to see “the creator smoking” , recalling the sic volcano joke goes. But first we stop for a brief loo break at Cayambe, a small town at 9000 feet and change from the MPV to a Mazda 4X4 mini-truck. Only 4X4 vehicles can easily negotiate the steep climb to nearly 15000 feet up a loose gravel road. As the climb begins the slope is gentle and on both sides there are checkerboard fields and even a hacienda, a Spanish colonial farmhouse. Here and there cattle graze on the grassy slopes. We come across small brick houses with tiled roofs, not unlike the ones in India. All the time the Cayambe top looms over us getting bigger and bigger against the clear deep blue sky as we get nearer.

A CLOSER LOOK AT CAYAMBE

  

Gradually, with increasing altitude, the nature of the vegetation begins to change and trees give way to clumps of long yellow grass while the mountainside is covered with pastures. In the Indian highlands these pastures are known as ‘bugiyals’.  We pass by a group of campers who are winding up and wave us on. Many visitors come to this point in vehicles and trek up the rest of the way. The trek seems to be fairly easy at to start with but the going gets tougher and tougher as one crosses the tree and vegetation line at about 14000 feet. After this one comes across just accidental patches of grass or moss or an occasional bunch of flowers growing on the rocks. 

NEARER THE GLACIERS ON CAYAMBE

As the climb gets steeper our driver shifts to the four-wheel mode and we easily pass up the gravel road which has by now not only become seriously steep but also has somewhat larger loose stones and is deeply rutted in many places. The mini-truck stops at what is called ‘The Refuge’ at 14000 feet which has a washroom. The truck can go no further, 4X4 notwithstanding and we have to trek another 1000 feet upwards to reach the edge of the glaciers, roughly three-quarters of a kilometer away. It is now very cold and biting icy winds force us to cover our head and ears with the hood. We start off on the trail after imbibing some warm water and eating a banana each. Slithering, slipping and panting we trek along the rock wall. Nearby there is a stream from the melting glacier. But the slope there is so loose that it is impossible to walk up or down without technical support. We are now well above the vegetation line. So what to talk of trees, even grass is scarce. A patch of yellow flowers on a rock is the sum total of vegetation at that height. Must be the result of seeds in bird droppings. 

A FLOWER PATCH AT 14500 FEET

        

At the edge of the glacier it is 15000 feet and the ice has formed a tunnel-like structure from which water is dripping and flowing down the mountain-side in a stream. The top surface of the glacier is jagged and in the sunlight the ice is translucent and reflects various shades from snow white and dirty grey to sky blue. Set against the brown volcanic rocks it looks like an abstract painting. This is the highest point on the earth that I have been to in my life, higher than Leh. But even this point is a good four thousand feet below the crater of the volcano which last erupted in 1786. But the height is enough to dwarf the other hills in the distance.

MODERN ART IN ICE BY NATURE AT CAYAMBE-
beginning of the glacier. Another 3000 feet to the crater

Later we returned to Cayambe town for a lunch consisting of steak and eggs before returning to Quito. The trip to the glaciers was good though fairly tough in parts. Wish I could have trekked up the whole way though we did not have the luxury of time. But now among my limited accomplishments I have the satisfaction of having been at 15000 feet if that by itself is something to be pleased about.   

SELF AT 14500 FEET

A CHINESE WHO HELPED INDIA FIND IT’S LOST PAST

Indians take history for granted since perhaps they have a surfeit of it. New Delhi, started as a showpiece of the British Empire, is itself nearing a century. A trip to Delhi University inevitably takes one past the Old Fort and the Red Fort, both hundreds of years old. But rarely does one stop to think about their builders or the role that they played in making the past that brought us where we are now. The sceptic asks, how does the ‘dead past’ matter now? If Shahjahan built the Red Fort, in the 17^th century, what of it? Today’s builders (who are in trouble these days due to a slump in realty) are much more relevant to us because we buy and live in the houses that they build. 

My response to those asking this question is: why is Hitler’s holocaust kept alive to this day though more than 70 years have passed since it happened? None of the people who committed the atrocities are alive any more so why not forget and forgive? The Vietnamese say that while they have forgiven they have not forgotten and they keep alive in museums memories of their sufferings of decades ago when they became victims in a clash of ideologies during the Cold War. Why is the anniversary of Second World War, the most destructive war in history is observed every year though a good 70 years have passed since it came to an end? The simple answer is that these events help us to locate ourselves in the present. A quarter of a century has passed has gone by under the looming shadow of economic liberalization and phenomenal growth in India. For those it has touched but slightly it sometimes looks like a curse. But can we understand what’s happening without knowing that the Cold War was a barrier to globalization? And going back a little, can we explain the Cold War without knowing about the Second World War. The single-word answer is ‘NO’.

THE CHINESE PUZZLE

To return to the mystery of the Chinese and India’s lost past, let me begin by saying that much of India’s ‘historical’ as against ‘mythological’ past was discovered and recorded in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. As civilizations became literate, greater authenticity was attached to written records rather than to oral traditions, a category to which mythology belonged. And Indian mythology embodied in the ‘Puranas’ (or stories of times past) had nothing relating to Lord Buddha and Buddhism though it was later found that he belonged to the sub-continent and his followers occupied a prominent place in Indian culture for more than a 1000 years before mysteriously disappearing from the collective memory. Two men were instrumental in reviving that memory – a seventh century Chinese religious tourist Huen Tsang (Xuanzang according to modern phonetics) and many hundred years later by General Alexander Cunningham, a British army man with an interest in archaeology.

How did this happen? To start with how do we know that the Buddha was a virtually forgotten figure in India? Well, there is a painting of the Mahabodhi Temple made by a British official in 1799 with the caption ‘East View of Hindu Temple at Bode Gya’. The painting shows a dilapidated temple with some stone idols with some Hindu worshippers of Lord Vishnu (the preserver) and the Brahma Pipal that devotees believed had been planted by Brahma (the creator). This has been mentioned by a modern Chinese scholar Sun Shuyun in her book ‘Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud – An epic journey – One woman’s search for her roots’ published in 2003. It is Sun’s account of her 1999 travel in which retraced the 25000-km journey of Xuanzang (Huen Tsang) who travelled through China, central Asia and India over an 18-year period. It is interesting to note that the name of the town mentioned in the caption of the painting was Bodh Gaya, an obvious reference to the Buddha though well before this he had been installed in the Hindu pantheon as an incarnation of Vishnu.

However, doubts arose in the minds of a number of people including the British who had gathered from accounts of many people from countries where Buddhism was a major religion that the birthplace, enlightenment and death of the Buddha was in the Indian subcontinent. The crucial turning point came around the middle of the 19^th century when travelogues of the Chinese pilgrims became available in the English language. Cunningham for example took the help of the record of Xuanzang (Huen Tsang) whose writings went under the title ‘Record of the Western Regions.” From the descriptions of Xuanzang the British archaeologist could conclude that the Brahm Pipal tree at Bodh Gaya was the one under which the Buddha attained enlightenment while the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya was not a Vishnu temple but was the one built by a king called Ashok to commemorate that event about three centuries later.  

KASHIPUR

A view of the remains of the Panchayatna temple, Kashipur

Here I must reveal that what led me to Xuanzang (Huen Tsang) and Cunningham was a recent visit to Kashipur in the foothills of the Himalayas near Corbett Park. Kashipur is a typical small town whose claim to fame is of recent origin. For one thing a little more than a decade back it was earmarked as an industrial zone by the newly formed state of Uttarakhand and for the other it has become the site of an Indian Institute of Management (IIM) which was started in 2013. But I found that Kashipur had an even older reason for being famous (much older in fact than even when it acquired its current name) and this was that it was one of the places where Xuanzang (Huen Tsang) stopped during his travel in India. The name of the place (which today is Kashipur) has been given as Govisana in the ‘Record of the Western Regions’. Cunningham zeroed in on the place by following the directions given by the Chinese traveler and even found a mound described by him. Excavation of the mound was carried out well after the death of Cunningham, revealing the remains a 7^th century temple complex built during the reign of Harshavardhan whose capital was Kannauj. This complex, known as a Panchayatna temple, is maintained by the Archaeological Survey of India but its existence is not very well known even in Kashipur itself.

However, to conclude, we must thank history for our proud present since two important symbols of our nation – the national flag and the official emblem – contain symbols that originate in Buddhism. They are the wheel in the white strip of the flag which is the Buddhist dhamma chakra and the four sided lion capital of Emperor Ashok which is known as the Ashok pillar and is the official seal of India. And all this thanks to a 7^th century Chinese traveler and a 19^th century Scotsman. 

LITTLE KNOWN FACTS ABOUT DELHI

Over the next few months I plan to write a series about little known facts of Delhi. As William Dalrymple writes, its a city full of Djinns. And where there are Djinns there are stories. The sum of these stories constitute the heritage of the city inherited by its inhabitants. Happy journey.

DOES DELHI HAVE SOMETHING TO LEARN FROM QUITO?

A view of Quito with Andes mountains in the backdrop

When I mention the name ‘Quito’ few of my students and friends can tell whether I am talking about a person, place or thing. Many of my younger friends have heard of Ecuador, though, but mostly because of their prominence in football and of course because of Julian Assange, the Swede of the Wikileaks fame who has been given asylum at the Ecuador embassy in London. For the others who may not be quite as sports or leak minded Quito is the capital of Ecuador, a country located in the north-western tip of South America which I had the good fortune of visiting last winter, officially to attend an international conference of academics but in reality just lured by the attraction of a chance to see a Latin American country.

We (my friend, his wife and me) arrived in Quito late in the night on a flight from Atlanta (USA) and it was well past midnight that we were able to complete the airport and visa formalities. We hired a taxi and as we drove in the night the people on the roads and the houses made me feel as if I was home in Delhi. The same haphazard off-white and white buildings with flat concrete roofs and dark windows staring at us through the darkness. When we were close to the hotel where we had booked our stay, the taxi driver wanted to take a turn that we thought was an attempt to fleece us (like taxi and auto drivers often do in Delhi). But later we discovered that the driver was right and we had entered the street to our hotel (Sol De Quito or the ‘Soul of Quito’) driving the wrong way on a one-way-street.

We stayed in Quito for just under ten days but during the entire period I could not but help compare the city with our own capital Delhi. Unlike Delhi which is just 500 feet above sea level, Quito is at an elevation of a good 9000 feet. So when I was planning my trip, I had expected that Quito would be very cold. At comparable heights in the Himalayas in India, (say Harsil near Badrinath) it is much colder even during the summer months. And I was visiting Quito during only the beginning of summer there. But to my surprise I found the weather to be very comfortable even at that height possibly because it was located right on the equator. In fact, the zero degree line is a major selling point for tourism, a big business in Ecuador. If you look at the photograph of the city, you will find that it resembles any large Indian hill town - the same somewhat haphazard arrangement of houses painted in myriad colours.   

Another view of Quito 

A STUDY IN CONTRAST

But coming back to comparing the capital of Ecuador with Delhi, the most noticeable thing is that it is much cleaner. Perhaps we could learn a thing or two from the people of this small South American country who put their best foot forward to welcome tourists, one of their major foreign currency earners. Ecuadorians seem to have learnt the self-discipline of not littering. Unlike Indians they do not consider the whole outdoors as their toilet. So one is not overpowered by the stench of urine at crowded street corners. Clean toilets are provided the city’s main business and shopping areas unlike the ones provided by the municipal authorities that are simply unusable as they are never cleaned. To make matters worse, Delhi’s municipal toilets are covered so that anyone wanting to use them need clothesline clips on their noses. Much like tourists in Bikaner who are forced to tie up their noses with a scarf while going on the heritage walk of havelis (traditional houses of the wealthy) to keep out the stink from open sewers!! Someone said during preparations for the Beijing Olympics that the champion spitters of the world were the Chinese. I think it’s hard to beat pan (betel leaf) chewing Indians who leave no public wall or staircase unscathed from red stains. People sticking their heads out of luxury cars to spew out betel. By contrast, in Quito they paint graffiti on public walls. In fact the BMX tracks on which youngsters perform acrobatic stunts on special bicycles are also covered with spray painted graffiti. (photo attached). For the uninitiated, BMX stands for Bike Motor Cross.

Karol Bagh? No, a middle class neighbourhood in Quito

If some figures are compared the contrast becomes starker. Quito’s population is more than 2.5 million, not small for a town situated among high mountains. While the per capita income or gdp of Ecuador is double that of India (12000 dollars as against 6000 dollars), our country is not only much bigger but has an economy and society with a much larger variety. Petroleum, bananas and cocoa are its major dollar earners in addition to tourism. Many expatriate Ecuadorians also send remittances from the US and Spain. Ecuador has no manufacturing or services sector to speak of. It got out of monster inflation about a decade-and-a-half back by making the US dollar its official currency. But overall the position of Ecuador in the world can be said to be much humbler than that of India in terms of numbers, area and complexity of every nature.

PUBLIC TRANSPORT

The other remarkable feature of Quito is its most efficient public transport system consisting of trolley buses and bus rapid transport, the famous BRT which received an unceremonious kick from Delhi. Like I mentioned before, the people of Ecuador are more disciplined and have better self-control than the people of India. What is more, the staff that manage the bus system are also way more efficient and are not prone to skipping the rules. So the BRT buses only stop at the stops meant for them unlike in India where drivers have no qualms about opening the hydraulic doors to let passengers board buses or alight from them at any old place including traffic lights. Though the car population of Quito is not small, automobiles usually leave the BRT corridors alone for the buses. Not so in Delhi where these corridors are the preferred routes for the VIP minded Indian car drivers who feel that their prestige has been shattered just by waiting their turn in the traffic.

These observations I made by actually using the BRT services in Quito. They are as crowded as in Delhi but in our capital I am really scared to use buses mostly because of the free-for-all that one cannot avoid while boarding even though the vehicle might be completely empty. And of course they are much cheaper than taxis. A dollar will carry you a long way. And let me tell you there is no better way of getting to know a city than by travelling by its public transport. The Delhi metro rail will prove my point. And by the way, to strike a positive note, there is nothing like the Delhi metro in Quito!! But in any case I think Delhi has given up a good thing by discontinuing the BRT.

Quito also has trolley buses which is a cross between a tram and a bus. Simply speaking it is a bus which runs on rubber wheels but is powered by overhead wires. It has a larger carrying capacity since it is two buses joined in the centre which consists of flexible bellows. Such buses are known as articulated buses. 

However, I am convinced that India and particularly Delhi has a lot to learn from Ecuador. And of course, I dare say Indians will find South American countries way more interesting than the United States. And therefore a must visit.          

ANNOUNCEMENT

AFTER LETTING THE BLOG SLEEP FOR ABOUT SIX YEARS I AM NOW REVIVING IT. THOUGH DELHI WILL REMAIN AT THE CENTRE, POSTS WILL INCLUDE STORIES OF PLACES THAT ARE NOT NECESSARILY IN DELHI THOUGH THE THEME WILL CONTINUE TO BE THE SAME. I PROMISE THAT THIS TIME THE POSTS WILL FOLLOW AT REGULAR INTERVALS. I WILL TRY TO INCLUDE VIDEOS AND AUDIOS IN ADDITION TO PHOTOGRAPHS WHICH I ALREADY POST.

SO HERE'S WISHING YOU ALL A HAPPY HOLI AND CONTINUATION OF A 

JOURNEY.