From Cuenca to Guayaquil, September 14, 2018

A minibus hurls itself up the slopes by the trombone-slide road, through the scorched mountains, capped with crowns of notched rock. Foaming rills tumble down the steeps. Peoples of pines huddle under the north faces. Waters gather in the stoups. Silvered plants, as if powdered with lime, exude their canary flowers. On the hillsides lean giddy cows: their heads spin and tip the world over. They graze the grasses in the sky, roll in the clouds, breathe the earth and sniff the roots.

On the road the machines play leapfrog: the big diesel buses, the Galápagos-tortoise trucks roll side by side on the climbs, overtake one another in turn in slow-motion sprints. More nimble our minibus, which glues itself to the mastodons’ bumpers, surprises them in the curves, narrowly avoids collisions, risks the lives it lugs around – while on the seat beside me, a guy plays a video game, explodes the balloons coming down the screen of his phone.

The bus hurtles down, the chasms deepen. The cows have disappeared now: nothing holds anymore on these verticals. One leans to the window, vapors swirl over the abyss. A few metres away is death, on the other side of the guardrail. The road is only a notch in the fall. Everything aspires to slide and to drop: one slides, one drops, the heart skips a beat, fright.

But no, look, already the road calms, the air grows heavy. Look at the banana plantations, the burn-offs, the sugar cane like a giant couch grass. At the crossroads men carry trays of pineapples. There are tuk-tuks like stagecoaches, benches face to face under a canvas. There are houses on concrete stilts, fish factories and cocoa factories.

Near is the coast. Near is the city.