The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America Read online

  My own meager currency reserves were what attracted me to Quito’s Secret Garden hostel, where a dorm bed costs $9.80 a night. Wherever the Gringo Trail begins and ends, I am pretty certain it runs smack-dab through the middle of the Secret Garden. A narrow building with serpentine staircases and five mazelike stories—each crowded with cheerful English-speaking twentysomethings—the Secret Garden is what I imagine a frat house would look like at a nice liberal arts university in Whoville. The morning I arrived, the place was filled with attractive German girls gushing to their moms on Skype. As I humped my backpack up five flights to the reception area, I passed no fewer than eight of them, sprawled on couches, leaning on balconies, and chatting away on their laptops. The reception desk was on a sunny rooftop patio, with a bright yellow wall covered in posters for Spanish lessons and bike tours. Two American volunteers checked me in, both in their early twenties. He was a student and a part-time glassblower, eventually headed to Bolivia to volunteer with a land conservancy; she was killing time en route to a yoga retreat in Cusco.

  Bohemian travel motivations like these are in no short supply around places like the Secret Garden. Over the course of the next week, I found myself in many discussions about Amazonian weaving workshops and endangered sloth rescue centers. It had been a decade since my own short college stint abroad, the last time I’d mingled in a crowd of starry-eyed backpackers, and I’d forgotten just how ritualistically the conversations tend to unfold. The first line of questioning between any two hostel-mates is like a loosely choreographed dance, with steps that everyone knows and some room for improvisation:

  BACKPACKER 1: So, where are you from?

  BACKPACKER 2: San Francisco/Kansas. You?

  B1: Norway/Sydney.

  B2: Cool, I’ve always wanted to go to Norway/Sydney. I’d really like to see the fjords/opera house someday. Have you been?

  B1: Yeah, they’re/it’s pretty amazing. I have a cousin in San Francisco/Kansas who’s a Web designer/farmer. Is it really quite hilly/flat there?

  B2: Yes, it’s a beautiful city/soul-crushing landscape. How long have you been in Quito?

  B1: Four days. Tomorrow we leave to tour the Galápagos Islands/volunteer on a free-range sheep farm/study the Bhagavad Gita in a tree house.

  B2: Wow, I’m actually really into wildlife/animal husbandry/Sanskrit epics. I just got in yesterday from Colombia/Bolivia. Do you know where I can find an Internet café/vegetarian restaurant/bar where Ecuadorian girls will sleep with me?

  B1: There’s one on the corner. What did you think of Colombia/Bolivia? Is it really dangerous/cheap there?

  B2: Not really/absolutely. The guy who ran my hostel also owned a restaurant/led jungle tours/sold cocaine, so I got to try some traditional foods/see a monkey/do a lot of blow.

  B1: Wow, that sounds really awesome.

  And so on. None of this is to say that the conversations are fake or insincere. Relationships among backpackers are simply the friendship equivalent of mutually agreed-upon one-night stands. Everybody is just passing through, so the odds of forming meaningful, long-lasting friendships are slim. But regular backpackers can likely recall whole weeks spent in the very pleasant company of people they knew only as “the Danish guy” or “that couple from South Africa.”

  I spent several nights just hanging out on the Secret Garden’s rooftop—signing up for in-house dinners of curry and veggie lasagna, swilling beer around the fireplace afterward—because I so enjoyed the ease of these English conversations with a rotating cast of strangers. This, of course, is part of the siren’s song of the Gringo Trail. In your nicer hostels, it is alarmingly easy to be lulled by the relative comfort and the companionship of your countrymen, and I got the feeling there were folks around the Secret Garden who hadn’t left the premises for days. As Cohen writes about the “mass drifters” in his “four-fold typology”:

  The mass drifter is not really motivated to seek adventure.… Rather, he often prefers to be left alone to “do his own thing,” or focuses his attention on the counter-culture, represented by other drifters whom he encounters on his trip. His social contacts, hence, become progressively narrowed to the company of other drifters.

  I’ll leave the comprehensive typologies to the sociologists, but after a few days at the Secret Garden, a few different backpacker “strains” certainly seemed to emerge. For starters, you had your garden-variety vacationers: athletic Norwegian students hiking the Andes between semesters; a pair of British secretaries sightseeing on their two-week holiday. These folks tended to spend less time around the hostel, having shorter timeframes and itineraries to follow. Budget is the primary difference between this crowd and the workaday tourists at the hotel up the street.

  Then you had your earnest world-changers: a bronzed and bearded Ohioan who’d spent his summer fighting developers in the coastal mangrove forests; intern after willowy intern promoting literacy, hand-washing, or sustainable gardening along Quito’s vast and slummy urban edge. The world-changers were a distinctly Gen-Y crowd, and many seemed to be hopping from volunteer gig to volunteer gig without much of a long-term plan. Most of them seemed to be more passionate about the general idea of helping people than about the specifics of their jobs, and in no instance did I meet anyone at the Secret Garden who was being paid for his or her work.

  Then there were the seekers, the vaguely New Age types for whom travel is an exercise in self-improvement: the elfin yoga instructor at the registration desk; an Australian who loudly shared the spiritual lessons she’d so far learned on her tour of holistic massage schools. I met at least half a dozen ayahuasca enthusiasts, fans of the psychoactive and allegedly sacred vine that’s increasingly marketed to gringos by “shamanistic retreat centers” and other purveyors of higher consciousness. Over beers on the rooftop, many of them acknowledged that, yes, the scene around the holy drug was indeed becoming commercialized, but that their shaman had been the real thing, man, a 130-year-old woman who ate nothing but burs and turned into a jaguar at night. Strangely enough, it was these ascetic would-be medicine men who tended to get the most excited when I mentioned Hunter Thompson.

  Finally, you had your hedonists: a squadron of young Israelis, just released from their compulsory military stint, partying their way across the continent; a hardworking chef to the royal family of Bahrain, boozing off stress in Quito simply because the airfare was cheap. I shared a room with an Australian playboy and hostel volunteer who was refreshingly candid about having come to South America primarily to get laid.

  Whether they’re tutoring the locals or humping them, nearly all of the Gringo Trail backpackers seemed to share certain rhetorical habits. I noticed, for example, that my Secret Garden hostel-mates rarely talked about “going” places, but instead about “doing” them. “We did Galápagos last week,” one of the Norwegian students told me, “and now we’re deciding whether to do Colombia or stay in Ecuador.” “Have you done Machu Picchu yet?” asked a couple of the ayahuasca devotees. “You should totally do Baños before you leave Ecuador,” said the cook from Bahrain. “The hot springs there are amazing!”

  If you want to read into this that many backpackers tend to treat the places they visit like theme-park attractions rather than complex landscapes and communities, you would not be alone in doing so. This is a common criticism of the Gringo Trail, that it alienates travelers from their environment rather than engaging them in it, presumably by creating a bubble of veggie lasagna and Skype from which travelers need only peek when they think there’s something worth seeing. You might then be tempted to ask whether there aren’t some parallels between this “do Ecuador” mentality and the old imperialist attitudes of segregation, superiority, and antagonism. And there again, our friend Erik Cohen and others will have you beat. “The easy-going tourist of our era,” the sociologist wrote in 1972, “might well complete the work of his predecessors, also travelers from the West—the conqueror and the colonialist.”

  III

  This particular easygo
ing tourist had plenty of time to contemplate all this thanks to two unforeseen events. The first was an e-mail from the US consulate in Guayaquil. As I’d told the old man back in the plaza, I had initially planned to stay in Quito for only a few days before moving on to that coastal city. I had tried to set up an interview at the Public Affairs Section of the consulate, which is the modern-day equivalent of the US Information Service that Thompson had covered in 1962. Unfortunately, said the e-mail, the public affairs officer had been called out of the country unexpectedly. Could I make an appointment with the embassy in Quito instead?

  “Embassy people are shits,” Thompson wrote to a friend after leaving Ecuador. “Consulates are better—this is a rule.”

  But I had no alternative. Anyway, Thompson was proving to be crotchety and wrong more often than he was right. So I e-mailed the embassy, hoping for a last-minute appointment and apologizing for the short notice. I had just clicked Send when my licentious Australian roommate walked in and collapsed on his bunk.

  “You coming out tonight?” he asked, stretching his arms lazily above his head. He was a lean guy with the perpetually tousled look of a surfer.

  “Um … maybe,” I said, in a tone that I hoped implied “Actually, I just bought a copy of The Ecuador Reader, and I’m sort of looking forward to raging the ‘Catholicism & Democracy’ chapter tonight.”

  “Come on, mate,” he urged good-naturedly. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like pussy?”

  I weighed my response.

  “No, pussy’s … great,” I said. “It’s just that, honestly, I don’t really go out that often.”

  “Fine,” he said, “but this is different. This is Carnaval!”

  I didn’t need to double-check the date to realize he was right. Of course it was Carnaval. I had completely forgotten about the multiday pre-Lenten bacchanal, synonymous in South America with parties, parades, costumes, music … and the nearly continent-wide closure of all businesses and services, public or private. I checked the website and discovered that, yes, it would be another five days before anyone at the embassy would even be around to answer the phone. It seemed I would be spending the next week in Quito.

  Like a lot of clueless non-Catholics, I associate Carnaval primarily with Brazil and, to a lesser extent, the Caribbean. Trinidad and St. Thomas, sure. Certainly Rio and Bahia. I had heard it was big in Barranquilla. But high-mountain Quito? In the dustiest corners of my mind, I knew that the festival was a worldwide phenomenon, celebrated virtually everywhere they have Catholicism, masks, and feathers, but if I’m on my default setting, then Carnaval to me is an inherently coastal Atlantic affair, the province of beach towns and sunny former plantation colonies.

  In fact, Carnaval is a pretty sterling example of cultural appropriation, a practice rooted in medieval Europe that most of us now unfailingly associate with the New World. Just like all those knockout cathedrals, it was a colonial import, emblematic of the new, European traditions and beliefs that were supposed to supplant the old. But rather than Europeanizing the people, Carnaval was indigenized by the zillion or so ethnic groups of Latin America, who now more or less own the holiday. In addition to the biggies along the coast, there are also massive celebrations in places like Oruro, Bolivia, where celebrants don the masks of horned Andean mountain gods, and Cajamarca, Peru, where the fest centers on the chopping of decorative trees. In Quito, it turns out, costumes and music take a backseat to messy pranks. Ecuadorian Carnaval embraces elements of a pre-Columbian festival from the central highlands, where natives once bedecked one another with flowers, perfumed extracts, and maize flour. Over time, that’s evolved into playful battles in the streets, in which strangers (and a lot of kids) chuck water balloons and handfuls of flour at one another and unsuspecting passersby. More recently, the Ecuadorians have embraced squirt guns and a white spray foam called carioca, a cross between Silly String and shaving cream. Within a day of learning it was Carnaval, I noticed bottles of the stuff for sale on seemingly every street corner in Quito, accompanied by mighty-lunged vendors crying, “Cariocas! Cariocaaas!”

  Carnaval lasts a four-day weekend, during which the city basically shuts down. Ironically enough, Thompson had run into similar troubles in Guayaquil fifty years earlier. “We just finished a five-day lull having to do with Ecuadorian history,” he wrote to his editor. “These holidays are maddening: every time you turn around they are rolling down the store fronts and locking the offices.” Ecuador’s biggest Carnaval celebrations actually happen outside of the capital, in the surrounding mountain towns, but I opted to spend the next few days just playing tourist around Quito. I watched a parade in the Plaza Grande and visited a colonial history museum. I toured the Basílica del Voto Nacional, a Gothic masterpiece and the tallest church in Ecuador (built seventy years after independence, so no credit to the Spanish for that one). I even spent a day hanging out in the bookshops and cafés of La Mariscal, the tourist neighborhood that the old couple in the plaza had mentioned. It’s a flashy district of hostels, nightclubs, and chichi outdoor apparel stores, and from the crew at the Secret Garden, I learned that it’s colloquially known as Gringolandia. The nickname is no joke. I knew I’d found the right neighborhood when Spanish all but evaporated from the street chatter around me. Gringolandia had twice as many cops and three times as many coffee bars. I bought a book about roses (Ecuador grows hundreds of millions each year in factory-like greenhouses), and I drank two beers at an Irish-owned Vietnamese restaurant with American bartenders.

  But the best day I spent in Quito was also by far the most prosaic, and with nary a gringo in sight. One afternoon, I rode the bus to a large green spot on the map called Parque La Carolina, in the middle of the city’s business district. I’d read about a natural history museum there and had seen a flyer in Gringolandia for something called a vivarium, which I thought might be a giant musical instrument but turns out to be a kind of reptile zoo. When I got there, I found the museum closed, but the park itself grabbed my attention. Shady, green, and swarming with happy quiteño families, Parque La Carolina is the kind of omnipurpose recreational Eden that urban planners fantasize about. It isn’t huge—at 166 acres, it’s about the size of your average community college—but the place was basically a showroom for the vast infrastructure of fun. It was like one of those science experiments where biologists replicate all of the world’s ecosystems under a glass dome—a biosphere of fun. It seemed to have everything, every apparatus and pleasuring ground on which I could have imagined playing, plus another handful I never would have thought of—all of them being used, all at once, all around me.

  It was a beautiful sight to behold, probably the most innocently uplifting thing I’d seen since my last elementary school play. The air in Parque La Carolina was practically dewy with laughter. Not far from where I wandered in, children were pinging like free radicals off every manner of playground equipment: swings, merry-go-rounds, a small Ferris wheel, a spinning gyroscope, and several rather sculptural variations on the jungle gym. Everywhere I looked, there was movement. Bicycle traffic flowing briskly. Joggers streaming by from every direction: joggers with strollers, joggers with dogs, joggers with absurdly small athletic shorts. There were so many, it seemed impossible that they weren’t running into one another, each one focused on his or her own thoughts, bouncing to a backbeat of a dozen dribbling basketballs on a dozen blacktop courts.

  I walked the pedestrian paths like one of those Buddhist mandalas, just grinning like an idiot and taking everything in. There were families playing keep-away and families having pull-up contests. There were people on roller skates and people on Rollerblades and people with those sneakers where the wheels just pop out somehow. Ecuadorians love volleyball, a three-on-three version with a high net that they call ecuavolley, and teams were fanned out everywhere, serving over raggedy nets, monkey bars, and frayed ropes tied between trees. Needless to say, there were no fewer than fifty fútbol games, raging across every open patch of dirt, concrete, and grass. Every
so often, an errant ball would come my way, and I would kick it back to some small fanfare.

  Mothers lined up alongside playgrounds like columns of sentries, watchfully observing. Dads pushed their kids on training wheels and tended imaginary goals. I watched one father help his toddler sight a miniature rifle with a dart in the end of it, aiming for a bulletin board covered in candy and prizes. The dart struck a fun-size Snickers with the sound of a wet gavel, and I’d never seen such celebrating. The barker, a shuffling abuelita, broke open the rifle in a single movement, then inserted a new dart and closed the action by jerking one arm, like a no-nonsense lawman in a TV western.

  “Cariocas!” cried the vendors. “Cariocaaas!”

  Popped-collar toughs walked by with shouldered boom boxes and cigarettes dangling, extras in their own ’80s rap video. White-haired old men, dignified in gray slacks and golf hats, strolled past with their heads down and hands behind their backs. Occasionally, two or three teenage girls ran by, screaming and bathed in carioca, while packs of puppy-eyed boys tripped over one another to catch up. Older teens nestled against tree trunks, sucking face shamelessly in the way that only Latin American teenagers can. Impossibly small kids walked impossibly small dogs. I saw dogs in strollers and dogs cradled like infants in slings. I saw dogs in matching two-piece outfits. I saw dogs in leopard skin.

  The sweet smell of fried plantains filled the air. Armies of vendors sold ice cream, chorizo, candy apples, ceviche, pastries. Smoke from the grills hung in fragrant little clouds over the vendors’ stands, and from anywhere in the park you could hear sausages sizzling nearby, quietly but unmistakably. For $1.25 I ate a kabob with chorizo, potato, yuca, plantain, and a whole thigh of barbecued chicken. I washed it down with ice cream. And then a beer. For a moment, I even considered buying cotton candy from a costumed character whose head was a squirrel but who was clearly Winnie-the-Pooh from the neck down.