The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (19 page)

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.

At one point, I turned a corner to find the rear of an inflatable castle shaking gelatinously. Elsewhere, I almost strolled right onto a dusty BMX track. The boys lined up there straddled every manner of bicycle, from fat-bottom cruisers to high-end mountain bikes two sizes too big. The
bleachers next to the tennis courts were only half-full, but the crowd cheered wildly after every point, and I thought of the courts back at the Cali country club, with their televised tournament and polite applause. Next to the bleachers were two long concrete pitches of an indeterminate purpose—too long for horseshoes, too short to land a plane on.

“Cariocaaas!”

Kites, model airplanes, a handful of whirring remote-controlled machines—even the air was lively at Parque La Carolina. All throughout the park snaked a concrete channel filled with crazily listing paddleboats, their occupants screaming and spraying
carioca
from boat to boat. A little boy peed off a dock while his mom sat next to him, breastfeeding. Onshore, a single paddleboat leaned upside-down against a eucalyptus tree, looking like the fallout from some perplexing accident. Beneath it, a golden retriever in shorts and a blue tank top was snoozing peacefully.

The pièce de résistance was a full-sized jetliner, painted nose-to-tail with a graffiti mural and parked permanently over a patch of scuffed concrete. The plane was teeming with kids and teenagers, climbing onto the wings via a metal staircase, clinging to the rudder, dangling out the windows, strolling nonchalantly across the fuselage. Everyone was entering via a small tear in a surrounding chain-link fence, but from the stairs and the twisty slide coming out of the cockpit, the airplane seemed to be an official playground component. For several minutes I just stood at the fence, wishing like hell to be a ten-year-old again. Laughter ricocheted off the pavement, and a contingent of moms looked up from the ground, watching like helpless stewardesses during some bizarre passenger rebellion.

Some other day, I might have thought about how a
jaw-dropping park like this is a testament to the kind of lavish civic spending that apparently marks Ecuador as a fearsome socialist dystopia. But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was lost in a reverie of dopey, wholesome camaraderie, too busy kicking soccer balls and licking ice-cream cones to put the scene in any kind of geopolitical context. This is something that travel does, I thought: It allows fun to smooth over all the difficult questions about how to live and be governed and who’s oppressing whom. There are no social theorists standing around a bouncy castle. So maybe all those libertines back at the Secret Garden were on to something.

It occurred to me that Thompson didn’t really
do
a lot of this, this kind of wandering around through the pleasantly pedestrian tableau that’s behind the curtain in all but your most chaotic cities—judging from his letters and articles, anyway, which tend to dwell on the cocktail chatter of expats, the machinations of the political class, and the often turbulent goings-on outside the windows of his downtown hotels. Thompson might have pre-dated the Gringo Trail, but even without a laptop or a hosteling card, he seems to have had a hard time breaking out of his own cultural orbit. Part of this was an occupational hazard, I suppose. You can’t cover the Cold War from a jungle gym in Parque La Carolina. Or maybe it was a conscious choice. Maybe Thompson knew that you can only watch so many laughing toddlers stumble by—conductor overalls covered in
carioca
, grinning parents in hot pursuit—before it affects your ability to take international relations seriously.

That night, I did go out with the hostel crowd, down to a cobblestone pedestrian strip in the Old Town, where hundreds of people were hopping from bar to bar, spraying thousands of bottles of
carioca
. Music floated out the open
café windows, and the street was a melee of locals and tourists alike, gringos and
quiteños
making zero distinction as they gleefully smothered one another in soft white foam.

Forget Gringolandia and the Secret Garden—when it comes to gringo enclaves abroad, there’s really no substitute for the US embassy. My cab pulled up outside the embassy’s nine-foot walls just two days after Carnaval. From the outside, the complex looks like the world headquarters of some colossal association of narcoleptic insurance salesmen. It is massive, boxy, and extremely drab. If not for a small seal with a bored-looking eagle on it, you might walk right past the place and not recognize it. Except that you’re not likely to be walking at all, because the campus is in a rather distant neighborhood on the north edge of town. It was inaugurated in 2008, the newest embassy building on the continent, and both the walls and the remote location are legacies of a State Department construction policy that, until recently, emphasized security over aesthetics, local accessibility, and, apparently, good taste.

Inside the walls, the buildings are a tiny bit sleeker—maybe less like a boring insurance company and more like a boring software company. Following a security shakedown that made the TSA line at La Guardia look like a nice visit to Grandma’s, I found myself in a Spartan marble-and-brick reception area, admiring some landscape paintings and listening to two Spanish-speaking guards discuss how they liked their sushi. I set my water bottle on an American-flag coaster and thought how nice it was to be back on American soil. Only later did I learn that the externality of US embassies is
actually a myth, and that I was, in fact, still quite solidly on Ecuadorian soil, albeit with some special rules.

I was met by Counselor for Public Affairs Wes Carrington, Public Diplomacy Officer Jennifer Lawson, and Cultural Affairs Officer Lisa Swenarski, three of the four heads of the Public Affairs Section of the US diplomatic mission in Quito. The USIS that Thompson profiled in 1962 had been formed by Dwight Eisenhower nine years earlier, a direct response to the Cold War. In 1999, it was broken up and its functions divided. A new, DC-based agency was put in charge of overseas broadcasting, while the State Department’s Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs bureaus took over the promotion of American views and interests on the ground. All but the smallest American embassies have a Public Affairs Section today. Not surprisingly, the largest PAS is at the embassy in Kabul, with an American staff of twenty. That Carrington’s staff in Quito is only a few positions smaller gives some idea of the challenge of public diplomacy in “anti-imperialist” Ecuador.

“How was Carnaval?” Carrington asked, shaking my hand. He was a clean-shaven guy on the cusp of his fifties, with a silver paisley tie that matched his salt-and-pepper hair. He spoke with the easygoing authority of somebody who talks to strangers for a living.

“I think I’m still cleaning the
carioca
out of my ears,” I said. “It’s quite a campus you’ve got here.”

It was nice, they all agreed, not that any of them had been there all that long. Foreign Service officers rotate into new posts every two or three years, a strategy designed to prevent what diplomats refer to as “clientitis,” or an increasing allegiance to one’s host country rather than the United States. Of the three, Carrington was the elder statesman, coming up on the end of his term in Ecuador. He’d been
with the State Department since 1989 and served abroad since 2002, with rotations in Brazil and Portugal. Lawson and Swenarski were newer to both Ecuador and the Foreign Service, but between them, they’d had postings in politically “hot” countries like Serbia, India, and Saudi Arabia.

The four of us headed to the cafeteria, where a few tables of power-suited staffers were watching CNN and quietly munching chicken and rice (Ecuadorian food, I noticed—not burgers and fries). I’d already forwarded Carrington a copy of “How Democracy Is Nudged,” and as soon as we’d sat down with our trays, he apologized that the embassy lacked the romantic chaos of Thompson’s USIS office.