Everyday Travel

It takes us two whole days to get from Latacunga to Canoa, Ecuador's coast. There we have an appointment with Tobi, who emigrated with his family from Germany and bought a property 4 km outside of Canoa. They have only been here for 4 months and we want to help on their finca for 1 week.

When Miriam wakes up the next morning, she feels sick, she vomits several times and can't keep any water down either. This is exactly how it started last time when she got dengue fever in Thailand, which is why she is afraid of being infected again. While she sleeps in the shade on a sleeping mat, Tobi and Jakob work in Tobi's bamboo house, sanding walls and painting. Afterwards, they both go to Canoa, which is 4 km away, for errands. There is no bus and hitchhiking is the only option. Jakob soon returns alone to take care of Miriam. We wait for Tobi all evening, his wife and children have been in Quito for a few days and so we are alone on the finca. There are currently no other volunteers, although Tobi says that he is usually fully booked with 6-8 volunteers. There is also no internet and Tobi has not told us what he is doing and we feel strange about being left alone on our first real evening. We hide in our tent and Miriam shakes with fever.

The next day she feels a bit better luckily, she weakly eats the toast with jam that Tobi served us in the morning. At first, he doesn't tell us where he was last night and only after asking him do we find out that he was out drinking with his buddies. He asks Jakob if he took good care of Miriam and laughs. He is only mildly interested in how she is feeling. Today she is supposed to sand and paint the sugar cane walls with him, while Jakob carries stones. We realize that we are becoming dissatisfied with working for 4 hours for 2 pieces of toast, a camping spot, and a host who shows no real interest in us. The secluded location offers us very few other leisure activities and we miss other volunteers. When we address the situation with Tobi, he only refers to the job description, which we had read before, and says that if it doesn't suit us, we have to leave. Actually, we just wanted to talk about it, but because of his uncompromising attitude, he leaves us no choice but to leave. We have no problem working without money and camping, but at least a shared meal should be provided, or a host who accepts us as friends/family and not as interns. Otherwise, we lack the social basis or at least a concept that is suitable for us: after all, Tobi is not necessarily dependent on our help and the work directly contributes to the realization of his dream, namely to create a kind of mini-hotel resort with a pool for the rich, not a finca for everyone. And so we pack our things again, which hurts a bit after the long journey.

We spend one night in a nice hostel right on the beach in Canoa, unfortunately the mosquitoes eat us alive at night. Miriam is lucky to be healthy again, we are very relieved that it wasn't dengue but probably just food poisoning. Then we continue our journey for another 2 days by bus to Quito. We are disappointed with the circumstances, because we could have used a break from traveling and now the trip we took was practically in vain. But that's also part of everyday travel: things usually turn out differently than expected, we learn to deal with disappointments and constantly have to make decisions. We have made ours, even though we would have liked to wait and see how things developed, in hindsight our gut feeling seems to have been right. We will still follow Tobi on Goodbye Deutschland [TV show].

Since leaving Huanchaco a month ago, we have been traveling very fast. We rarely spend 3 days in the same place and spend a lot of time on buses, which are rarely pleasant with their fast driving style, low temperatures, and loud noise. The time pressure is due to our flight to Cuba in mid-May and our desire to spend some more time in the large and highly praised Colombia. We have been traveling for 7 months now and unnoticed, traveling has become our everyday life: we don't mind the irregular daily rhythm or the small daily budget, we are used to sitting for many hours on the bus and often changing places, quickly reading up on new topics and making decisions, dealing with little comfort and stressful situations, and somehow finding vegetarian food. But we miss the feeling of letting go a bit from the first few months, because the fast pace is taking its toll on us. It took a while to realize this, but now we want to make sure that we cross the border quickly and then slow down. We are very excited about Colombia and until then, it helps to treat ourselves to a good bar of chocolate ;)!