February 16, Cuenca and Return City of Four Rivers 
Cuenca is Ecuador's third largest city, but it has only been in the last couple decades that it has been reliably joined with the rest of Ecuador, and the outside world. Its isolation is now broken by the Pan-American Highway as well as an occasionally reliable railroad; and, of course, the airport. While no place exists in the past any longer -- we are all here, now -- I have been to no other city of its size (350,000) that feels so much outside the flow of history. Perhaps it is the lush surroundings: the roads in are lined with flowerbushes, and the rivers that bisect the city are flecked with shallow rapids. Perhaps it is the prevalence of colonial-era architecture, not just in "historic" districts but throughout the city. Or the abundance of Catholic churches -- one for every Sunday of the year.
Once the hats were woven by nearly every chola woman in the Cuenca region, but along with her other family duties at most two hats per week were produced. Each hat takes 4-6 stems of the palm, the strands separated into fine threads before weaving, then soaked and bleached, shaped and dried. The current going price is generally between 6,000 and 2,5000 sucres, or two to eight dollars -- though the finest hats, so fine they can be rolled up and threaded between a man's ring, go for over ten times that amount. Today, though the weaving is still done by hand, the hats are finished in in factories, and dyed a multitude of colors. They say that in another generation, the traditional art of the paja toquilla will be lost.
Cuenca is an extraordinarily religious city; aside from its 52 churches, small altars, monasteries, convents and other religious structures seem to be everywhere. And it is uncynical about these religious structures, as if entire centuries of doubt and reformation had raged outside this garden valley, not within it. But this is not a city of ignorance, or blind faith: poets, musicians, writers and intellectuals have called Cuenca home, there's a respectable university here, and nowhere else in Ecuador have I seen so many Western-style business suites. On a visit to Museo de las Conceptas, a monastery converted to a museum, the guide dutifully took us into each room filled with the artifacts of isolation: the dolls of the young girls newly devoted to the Church, the bloody crucifixes of the indigeno artist Azuayo Gaspar Sangurima, the 18th century gold and platinum models of Cuenca's riverside apartments. He quickly passed by, however, three rooms of modern art, with bare-bre asted Madres de Terra spilling milk from their nipples, Christs crucified in psychedelic cylinders, and saints and heroes with digitized eyes. But the paintings were there, nonetheless.
From Turi, I catch a cab back toward the city. The driver is a young man dressed in a skull-decorated black shirt, with bizarre ritual objects of worship and rock'n'roll arrayed around his dashboard. Our destination is Todos Santos, a corner of Cuenca where at least three historical epochs overlap. On one hillside, rough Canari stonework shows that this was the center of culture five centuries ago. Overbuilding these walls, the more symmetrical and worked stone of Inca craftsmen was evidence that these Peruvian warriors had taken over the same stones, the same city, for their own purpose. Rising above both walls, a characteristic Spanish arch -- built of the same granite -- marks the site of a grain mill, built on the ruins of the ruins. On the south side of the Rio Tomebamba, the Avenida 12 de Abril follows the river's grassy banks, while on the other side stand the old 18th century apartments. The buildings are decrepit, in need of paint, irregular in lines and style; but they are still standing and still inhabited, overlooking the river and the new University. I walk along this road, with the rushing traffic on one side and the rushing Tomebamba on the other, as if I walk the seam between centuries. Occasionally I stop to take a picture; nearly everyone within range of my lens turns away, unwilling to be photographed. Sometimes a water balloon splashes near my feet -- it is the weekend before Carnaval, and for some reason pelting friends and strangers with water is the thing to do. Near the university, it is a war zone, with clutches of bucket-bearing students chasing taxis and buses down the street.
Half a lifetime ago, the water balloons of Carnaval in Ecuador were
made of wax, each built by hand in special molds, and filled not just
with hose spill but water scented with cologne. Then in 1972, when the
first barrel of oil was pumped out of the Oriente and paraded through
the streets of Quito, hundreds of the grateful populace reached out
to touch the oil, to smell it, to rub it on their faces like holy water.
Then the air began to fill with gases, and the streets with honking,
and the cities with poor, and today the water balloons are made out
of plastic, just like anywhere else. -- Christian Kallen
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Cholas are of mixed race, Spanish and Indian like mestizos; but cholas tend toward the indigenous end of the spectrum, while mestizos tend toward the white. The chola women of Cuenca wear bright dresses and shawls, braid their hair in twin rows, and cover their heads with different versions of the paja toquilla , made from the fibers of the Carludovica palmata tree. The fact that we know these hats as Panamas is one of the ironies of history: the bleached, tightly woven hats came to the U.S. as a result of the laborers working on the Panama Canal at the beginning of the century.
Outside the elaborate New Cathedral, with its distinctive blue domes that dominate the colonial architecture of the city, the flower market of the Plaza del Carmen is a riot of color and scent. On this day after Valentine's it's difficult not to sweep up a armful for a loved one, but there's no loved one around. Other chola women carry sheaves of the palm fiber to market, where the artisans make their selection for weaving the hats. Inside the cathedral, the organ music of the on-going mass is redolent of American soap operas, and the stained glass windows are derivative of Notre Dame, Michelangelo, and other European influences. Still, the dark skinned Chola madonna represented on one colorful window, and the mestizo supplicants on another, show that the local influence penetrated even the hallowed halls of the Catholicism.
The most famous view of Cuenca is from Turi, a hillside village just south of the city. Nearly every rooftop in view is red tile: what few modern buildings there are north of the Rio Tomebamba stick out like sore thumbs, and such architectural experiments are no longer allowed. The fact that the tallest building in sight seems to be the blue-domed Cathedral is indicative of the conservative and religious nature of Cuenca -- but even a liberal renegade like me can appreciate all that Cuenca preserves, and values.
A morning flight took me back up the Avenue of the Volcanoes in less than an hour, compressing my journey of three days into an afterthought. Back at the Hotel Sebastian, a message told me to be ready at 7 AM the next morning for the flight to the Galapagos. That would be an entirely different world, one far away from the Ecuador of haciendas and Incas, internet access and yellow taxis, red tile roofs and water ballons.
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