Canoa and the Coast

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how the hotel garden grows...
The hammock-laden, bungalow encircled courtyard of our ocean-front hotel is brimming with life. Chickens claw into the dirt among the fumbling chicks that surround them; dogs run laps as lizards rustle the bush and a kitten tries to eat rocks.

My hair whips in the wind along the first leg of our nine-hour bus ride back to Quito. Cacti grow here; the air is dry and hot, and the windows are necessarily open. We'll be passing through alluvial flood lands and steamy rainforest as we ascend the western face of the Andes to our home in its narrow valley. In Quito, the weather is generally so comfortable, that it becomes quickly taken for granted, It is like a perfect spring day, with air neither moist nor dry. Lately, we are in the quadrant of the year when the rains come. For several hours a day, the sky cracks with lightning while the booming thunder reverberates in our bodies and compels me to note that I am as alive as the world I inhabit.