We're in Los Rios?

So today I was supposed to be planting tree seeds with a guy named Rodrigo from the Ministry of Environment. Since by Wednesday I hadn't heard a word from the man in something like 2 weeks, I went to track him down. Turns out he can't come today, but he said he was going just past Chillanes (which is maybe an hour and a half from San Lorenzo) on Thursday and asked me to come along to collect some seeds which we could then plant. Well, that sounded interesting, and he said he had to be back by early afternoon, so I figured why not.



Well, really, I had some clues that we were going a little farther than "just past Chillanes." Thing one, he was going to stop in at a cacao processing plant that needed some sort of license. Thing two, he thought we might be able to get rice hulls near there to use in the soil mixture for planting trees. These are coastal things, not Sierra things, but remember, he said we'd be back by early afternoon.



So we head out in a very beat-up pickup at about 7AM. Including a couple seed-collecting stops and breakfast it was about 2 hours to Chillanes, where we picked up some more seeds (It was nice to identify some trees--and it'll definitely be good to learn how to collect, prep, and plant tree seeds). And then we had to stop to change the tire. And then we headed for San Jose del Tambo, which is the town with the cacao plant he wants to check out. So we're winding down this narrow dirt road, and we keep going down, and down, and it keeps getting more and more tropical. We're talking sugar cane and bananas and cloud forests, and we keep going down for about 2 hours till we get to San Jose del Tambo, where we stop in to try to see several people, who are not there because there's a big meeting of cacao producers in Guayaquil that day. At this point, I start wondering why this guy has wasted all this time driving down here, when he asks the secretary for the guy's phone number and realize we've fallen in the Ecuadorian "we have phones but why not just go see the guy" trap. It's about then that I get a phone call from Susan, a volunteer in Guaranda I'd asked to help me locate Rodrigo earlier in the week. She is calling to tell me she's just come from his office where she was supposed to be having a meeting with him. "Well," I told her, "I actually found him yesterday, and I'm here with him right now in the middle of nowhere in the subtropics." So the man is not good at keeping appointments.

So once we failed to meet the people he wanted to meet, we went looking for a place to get the tire fixed. Nothing doing in town, but people assured us we could both fix our tire and get rice hulls in Mata de Cacao, half an hour away. So we headed off, and before long I started seeing signs talking about the wonderful road the government of the municipality of Babahoyo or the province of Los Rios had built. And it was flat, and hot, and I'm wondering how I suddenly ended up in Ecuador's coastal plain. It's a different world, I'm telling you. Hot and humid, flat, corn and rice fields (well, the corn's the same, except for the flat part). And to top it all off I saw a John Deere combine with what I can only assume was a rice header sitting in a barn.

So in Mata de Cacao we fixed the tire, got a truckfull of rice husks for free, ate lunch, and headed back. Climbing up beyond San Jose del Tambo we almost hit an iguana--it was sitting in the road sunning itself and took off faster than it looks like an iguana could run, back into the bush.

And the rest of the trip back up to San Lorenzo was pretty much uneventfull.

So that was my 12-hour trip to the tropics.