Agua Blanca

While in Puerto Lopez, we heard about an indigenous community not far away called Agua Blanca. Apparently they found some human remains 30 years or so ago and did a proper archeological dig. They found a thriving community that used a now dried up river to sail downstream to the sea to fish and engage in commerce. They had a tour that we went on and saw some cool stuff.

Below are some burial urns. Their burial traditions were quite interesting. First, they would bury the deceased person behind the house for a year or so, or until all of the quickly deteriorating body parts were gone. They would they excavate the remains, and place one person´s body with a couple of other bodies in one of the urns you can see below. Not sure if this was just space saving techniques, or if the urns were particularly difficult to produce, or what. In the museum, they had one of the urns with some human bones. They also had a plastic bucket with a human skull sitting in it off to the side. Awesome.


















Here is one of the coolest cacti I have ever seen. It has a normal tree trunk on the bottom and then full blown cactus arms protruding from the trunk. Probably one of those cold desert nights when the cactus was getting lonely and the diciduous tree didn´t look so bad after all...




















Here is a pretty neat looking termite nest. Termites are like bees in that they have a queen who breeds like crazy and a bunch of workers who do the rest. This nest is made of a ton of bark, dirt, leaves, etc. The termites eat away little rivulets up and down the trees where they are scavenging for material. They also only work at night, so we didn´t see any.


















Here was the highlight of Agua Blanca. It is a sulphur spring that apparently originates deep within some nearby volcano. Too bad the water doesn´t retain the heat, because it was pretty chilly. This is where the community obtains water for their crops (citrus crops and bananas grow well with sulfuric water), and for washing their clothes. They pipe it down from here to where most of the community lives. Although the water looks blueish green now, we were told that when the water and underlying mud are agitated the water turns white, hence the name.

The pool is cylindrical and was about 12 ft deep in the middle (yes, I touched bottom). The mud on the bottom is supposed to have curative or medicinal properties, if you rub in on your skin. Bentz proved otherwise. On the way home it was getting late and he fell asleep. We bathed the girls, but just left Bentz until morning. We travelled back to Otavalo a couple of days later and noticed that he was getting a rash. The day after we got home, it was pretty bad, and he had red sploches all over his body. He also couldn´t walk very well due to ¨scrotal bruising¨, but we´ll get into that in the next post. Anyway, it was great that the doctors had arrived for the health care trip, and Dr. Jim assured us that there was nothing life threatening wrong with Bentz, just a case of the hives. I guess we should bathe him next time we go swimming in a sulfur pool.