After leaving Olmedo we retraced our steps to San Lorenzo, then took a boat through the mangroves to the fishing village of Tambillo. I had wanted to spend a night in a community of concheras, or cockle collectors. While we were buying waterproof boots in San Lorenzo we bumped into Alfredo, a schoolteacher from just such a community. With a phone call, he had organised it.

At Tambillo’s wharf we were met by health officials collecting visitor information in connection with swine flu. Ecuador had just had its first confirmed case, leading the more sensational newspapers to run melodramatic headlines such as “Pig disease has descended upon us,” as if it were one of the plagues of the apocalypse.

We walked into the village—a grid of mud-and-cockleshell alleys and shanties built on stilts. Julio Valasquez, the director of Tambillo’s fishermen’s cooperative, welcomed us into his home. As he talked I caught the words “manglares bonitos”—beautiful mangroves. There is no question in a place like this about the importance of mangroves: everyone in this community draws sustenance from the rainforests of the sea.

Day’s end is a languid time in the tropics. On a shady veranda women played bingo using dried kernels of corn for counters. Around the corner, men slapped domino tiles onto a weathered table. Children spun tops, flicking them down on the hardened mud of the alleys then scooping them up to spin on their palms.

Is there anywhere in the world where digital cameras have not yet extended their reach? Whenever Elaine and I produced ours, it was moths to a flame. Little ones four and five years old thronged us, begging us to take their picture and then demanding we turn the cameras around so they could point at the images and shriek with laughter.

Seeking a cool breeze and respite from our young entourage, we walked to the end of the pier, where a man was teaching his four-year-old to swim, releasing him time and again to flail and laugh and swallow salt water for a few metres to the concrete steps, from where the boy would launch himself back into his father’s arms. Flocks of grackles streaked across the estuary, flying within splash distance of the water, making for their island roosts. A line of pelicans performed a slow Mexican wave.

After dark, I sat on a veranda listening to schmaltzy Ecuadorian bolero music pouring out of a nearby cantina, with the added percussion of a sheet of loose roofing iron rattling in the wind. The smell of frying fish and plantains drifted on the night air. Packs of scrawny dogs ranged through the streets and under the houses, occasionally erupting in a snarling scrap.

I have a special affection for places like Tambillo. They trigger nostalgia for a life less complex, with fewer demands and gentler rhythms. Reason can counter these sentiments a dozen times over, but I choose to ignore its cold calculus. Wasn’t it Pascal who said, “The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing about”? I’m with Blaise. And I’m loving Tambillo.

Tomorrow I go into the mangroves with the concheras.

Tags: Ecuador

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