Life and Soul

Equador – Part16

For such a small country, slightly smaller than the UK, Ecuador boasts a wonderfully diverse climate & terrain. Roughly 600km’s wide & 1000km’s long the country is spit along the middle by the Andes mountain range. The seasons, as such, are wet & dry with the rainy season lasting around 3-4 months from April. All areas are lush and green with an outrageous variety of plants and wildlife; this gets more dense & fruitful as you journey away from the mountains towards the coast.

The altitude descending towards the coast, the climate sneaks from dry hot to wet hot (humid), the mountains are fresh with an average temperature of 25 degrees C with the nights getting colder, some volcanoes and higher areas are covered in show all year round.

As you travel down out from the mountains towards the coast the freshness disappears being replaced by warm, humid air. The coast is considerably hotter up in the 30’s for the best part of the year, at times reaching up into the 40’s, the waters are warm & the surf is great & sandy beaches all the way down the coast make a perfect beach paradise.

Many surfers travel Ecuador searching the perfect break, because the sun sets over the west cost you get an amazing sunset, on the horizon, incredibly beautiful. Many of the visitors to the coast are to be found lining the beaches half an hour before sunset ready for their next dose of awe as they experience the wonder that are the planets & life thereon.

The wildlife, in fact everything on the coast seems bigger & more colourful, so diverse. The bugs, birds, animals, plants, trees; everything natural seems to thrive, in a seemingly perfect climate. Life’s pace also slows, the heat & humidity taking its toll on all that live & work along the coast, this seems to add happiness so the atmosphere as people take things at their own pace, creating time out to enjoy.

Mind you, you can’t have it good all the time without some kind of balancing effect, in Ecuador this comes around every five years or so in the shape of “El Nino” as it arrives to wreak havoc with all life. Rivers busting their banks flooding roads, villages, crops, animals; the devastation is Hugh.
95% of the houses are built on stilts so avoid being washed away with everything else. The rainfall can be so dense that literally everything is washed from the farms into the rivers, cattle, crops, outbuildings the lot all is washed downstream, where the rivers meet the sea you find the estuaries & beaches littered with the debris, the locals will tell of how eerie the sight, the beach littered with cows, trees, animals & fruits.

The last time El Nino hit was just over five years ago so they presently wait knowing they have effectively run out of time before the next strikes, the evidence of the last still present on the beach, half berried trees still poking through the sand, if you walk around the estuaries with a little searching you can come across Incan pottery & such stuff washed down from age old sites up in the hills, some well over a thousand years old.
Venture the other side of Ecuador, the eastern boarders with Peru & Brazil; you will soon get surrounded by dense thick jungle, proper rainforest, in fact the Amazon Rainforest that stretches 5000km into Brazil to the far eastern coasts of South America. The jungle is so vast it is one of the last unknown or mapped places left on our planet with many areas left un-explored.

New species & old settlements are being found each year as we look deeper into the Amazon, who knows what we will find. The story of the Incas past tells that when the Incan chiefs knew they were doomed to defeat at the hands of the Spanish they amassed their most precious belonging sending them to be hidden in the jungle. The loyal men in command were given instructions that when they reached the hiding place they would kill the workers then themselves to ensure that the location of the treasure would never be revealed.

Somewhere out in the Amazon could lie the hidden treasure of the Incan empire, people still look today but the jungle is so dense & overgrown it his incredibly hard going even with today’s toys.
If you do venture out into these most harsh & difficult terrain you will find unimaginable insects, bugs, creatures & animals along with the Indians that still live there; oh yes & of coarse Americans looking for oil.
Bitch is about 10 years ago the found some, not just a little either, they found loads. Part of the deal gave the Americans mining rights to Ecuador’s oil, they are now in bed together, the American have the machinery & technical know-how and they are out in the jungles setting up the pumps & the pipelines. All the oil extracted goes to America, they let Ecuador have cheap supplies to service there needs with the main people involved getting massive payoffs growing rich & fat, the rest of the oil gets piped & shipped out to the US to service Uncle Sam’s bullshit.

There are companies in the Amazon with no care for what they do, devastating large areas of jungle in their pursuit of the black gold; this is happening now, as you read, in our day.

Before oil topped the stock in Ecuador the largest product relating to GDP was bananas, they were the main export; much of the land in the south is covered for miles with banana plantations. They accounted for 40% of Ecuador’s income through export, now oil is number one. The jungle & the Indian tribes that have lived there for thousands of years are the ones paying the price; once again somebody suffers at the hands of the Americans in their relentless quest for oil & the wealth & power it brings. Why can’t the Americans stay out of other’s countries & live off there own lands & produce. (Its not even there’s it’s the Indians) Same shit different place.
Now with the dollar the country struggles with its exports because prices are too high compared with the normal trade partners, Peru, Columbia, Bolivia & Venezuela; trade is being lost to them with growing regularity.
Now established into the S.A economy & the pickings of the oil fields the Americans can be seen eyeing up other countries for their picking.

They already have oil arrangements with Venezuela similar to those with Ecuador, in fact at present there is much rioting going on related to the Americanization of Venezuela & the sell off of its commodities. As travellers we have been advised to steer clear of Venezuela we could easily be mistaken for Americans. (And that wouldn’t do)

For some years they have been running what can only be described as a 2ost century protection racket, for example, they would have talks with one country, elaborating on the possibilities of conflict or war with neighbouring countries, giving the impression that they are not safe & need the back-up & military backing of the U.S.

Should such a situation ever arise the jolly old U.S of A would fly in & kill everybody for them. In return the grateful country would give a certain % of its produce to the U.S in payment; no cash needed, just the pick of all your crops & produce. Basically they play all the countries against each other creating invasion hysteria; all this just to get what they want! (The best of the best remember)

The more they are involved militarily around the world the more equipment, arms & ammunition they require, more sales for our “don’t give a shit” arms companies.
We were in a bar in Quito last night enjoying a tequila, on the wall of the bar was a poster in the style of the wild west’s wanted posters, it had a picture of George W Bush with a heading; “Wanted Dead or Alive for Climate Crimes”.

How perfect, I hope you know it was Mr Bush that pulled out of world talks on environment & pollution; if only the wanted man could be tracked down & brought to justice.

Seeing where chatting about happy subjects lets pause on oil for a moment & the impending situation that we & our children have looming over us, a situation that will change all our lives over the next 20 years. Conservative estimates give the world a maximum of 30 years before we exhaust our supply of oil, its remotely possible that we find more somewhere but most of the world’s surface has been drilled & surveyed for any signs that might mean oil.

Over the past 100 years the earths population has raised from 1 billion to 6 billion, one of the main factures in the increase of population is our ability to grow more food, more than ever before possible, due to the invention of machines, growing ever more powerful, first steam then oil driven inventions came to our aid.
It wasn’t long before the machines effortlessly exceeding the work of many humans. More food, more babies, people moved into the cities to look for work as there was little left on the farms or in the factories, the machines were in control there.

The cities grew, London now has 13 million people, the population of the whole of Ecuador, to feed this increasing number of people in the cities more food has to be produced and brought in from the country or imported from abroad if the need arose or taste dictated.
A gigantic amount of food is needed to keep a city fed & operating; riots would soon break out if the food supply failed.

“Last Days of Ancient Sunlight” by Thom Hartman is an amazing insight into this situation we face if we leave investment in our future too long or allow ourselves to become complacent & greedy, by trying to make the most from the oil we have left.

It’s a sorta catch 22; if we don’t leave time to deign & make new machines that don’t need fossil fuels to operate, we will find ourselves in a situation where we run out of oil, so we can’t run the machines we need to make the parts of the new machines & therefore left with nothing, no machinery at all.
OK you would hope we would not let ourselves get into this situation, yet imagine when the worlds supplies were getting low, we would (already have with Iraq) start fighting over the oil that is left, countries trying to keep there industry, machines & cities going.

Some would loose, their cities supply’s cut off bringing starvation, riots & chaos. You can’t run a war without oil so any war is going to have to happen well before you get close to running out, who holds the oil, the reigns, has the power to run his machines of war & therefore conquer all resistance.
I don’t suppose this sounds familiar in any way? At present it seems that America will do anything it has to, to enable an attack on Iraq, what do you think the motives are? Time most certainly is a changing, do we have any sort of understanding as to what we are causing & the repercussions that we will surly feel within this generation.
Read the book “Last Days of Ancient Sunlight”
Make up your own mind.