The Pure Life of Dreams

We are on a huge military cargo plane going back to the UK when, through the opening in the back where the hatch opens out for the parachute soldiers to jump, I see a beautiful ocean view, with sparkling blue waters and a whale bouncing in an and out the water parallel to a coastline.

I am not usually excited by whale sightings, but this whale continues jumping in and out of the water, and even though it is far down below us, the sparkling water and the sandy coast make for a paradise.

‘Look, a whale!’ I cry out to my fellow passengers.

As the planes rumbles on it appears to descend and the view becomes clearer.

‘Maybe they are dolphins,’ I declare, and sure enough, there are schools of them bouncing in and out of the sparkling waters, swimming north up the coast line, and coming nearer into view as the plane descends,.

Our plane comes to land at an idyllic outcrop – an unexpected break point in our return flight. We file out and walk along a narrow path along a sandy road, with beachfront restaurants to our left, and shop-seller stalls to our right. The place seems foreign to what I have seen before but magical too. Maybe it is Moslem or Caribbean, I cannot tell from the coloured stripes and robes of the shopkeepers.

‘What is this place?’ I ask a tourist in a white bucket hat sitting in a restaurant to my left.

‘I don’t know,’ he says, and I think, How can you not know?! You’re here, aren’t you?

I continue on, and stop at a stall to ask the proprietor. ‘What country am I in?’ I ask.

The woman replies, ‘We’re in Africa.’ But Africa is a continent, I think.

Then I reach down to a small black girl by the woman’s side and ask again, ‘Where are we?’

The girl looks up and says to me, ‘You are in Ecuador,’ and I think how marvellous.

I must tell Siobhan that we have to go to Ecuador proper, and not just for a stopover. Never mind if Quito is high up in altitude, it will surely be good for her if we only stay for a short time.

Then the airline stewards lead us to our restaurant which is on an island off the sandy coast. We step into the water until we are up to our necks, and I pull out my iPhone so it won’t get wet. I lift the phone above my head but too late, I have to shake the water off it.

The phone will be alright, I think. I’ll take it back to the airplane and leave it there, because I don’t need it while we are here, in paradise, on this island.

Photo by Pauchok via GoodFon.com.

Siobhan and I stood in the center of the room and looked around. Behind us there was a woman in a yellow dress. She was a local, an Argentine, and when I looked back at her again, I saw that her pubic area was naked and was covered with thick black cotton balls that hid her vagina. The shape of that cotton ball hair was a little off from a regular isosceles triangle because the right side was slightly longer than the left.

Through the door and along one side of the next room, up on bleacher steps, in a corner, sat two couples, one couple on the next step up from the other. The women were pressed against the wall by their men who sat facing them. The couples were naked, and obese, and their blanched flesh hung loose around them, while the man of each couple buried his head in the folds of flesh on the chest of his partner.

(At first I thought the two people against the wall were women but so obese they were I could not be sure – fat pasty white skin dripped from all four people and disguised the shape of each person’s sex.)

When the man on the top step pulled away from his mate I saw a necklace with a thin gold strap and green pendant hung around her neck. He must have been sucking on the pendant, I thought.

Of course Siobhan wasn’t having any of this.

She wandered off into the next room and I would follow soon after. The woman in the yellow dress, would follow with me. I learnt that her name was Alice.

It became clear to me that we should indulge these locals, pay them a few pesos but with Siobhan around, payment would be unlikely. I lost track of her after the next room and had to use the locator app on my iPhone to find out where she’d gone.

The next area was outdoors, but it seemed that Siobhan had disappeared to the main enclosure where there lay a circle of prehistoric stones. I hurried through to find her but was sidetracked once more by a room off to one side, where there were gathered more prostitutes.

As I walked in I thought that we should be offering money to them too, for their nakedness.

This time I wanted to broach one of the women. I walked along the corridor, and it was lined with bamboo walls and bamboo benches on either side. Couples sat on the benches and wrapped their arms around each others’ naked bodies – men indulging in local women this time, for sure.

I returned to the main room and stepped into the enclosure where the stone circle lay, but Siobhan had already moved along. I hurried under a stone arch at the far end of the enclosure, and went through to the next area, where there were trees covered with black monkeys who sat on the branches and looked mischievously down at me.

At first I wondered whether to put away my phone in case the monkeys would steal it, but instead I took a picture.

To one side of a tree was Siobhan, in a grove to the left of the entrance. She was surrounded by the monkeys. I raised my camera and took a picture which perfectly framed her, and the monkeys around her, and the tree with its snaking branches.

As I turned away from Siobhan, she cried out, “Take a picture of me!”

“I already did.” I replied. “A perfect one.”

Picture by Modigliani uploaded by Benoît Prieur to WikiMedia Commons.

Tag: South America

Paradise by Plane

Argentinian Alice with the Thick Hair