Where Are You Going? a Bus Ride Through the Languages of Ecuador

¿Adónde van? Asked the bus-station clerk in the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, yesterday morning.

It’s a reasonable question. Where am I going?

A few moments later from a rear seat I watch the dust and urban squalor along the River Guayas transition to miles of lush banana fields before we reach Puerto Inca, where the change really begins. After a left turn, the bus climbs 14,000 feet in an hour. In that ascent, languages and cultures transform like flora and fauna.

As we approach the 13,959-foot Paso Tres Cruces, the continental divide from which all waters flow east to the Amazon and eventually the Atlantic, I huddle up to my son (who’s awake, surprisingly) and take out his jacket.

Santiago had been in Massachusetts speaking mostly English for several weeks. He seemed primed to get back into Spanish — and had any number of questions that 4-year-old boys ask people near them on buses: “Did you know I am from Puerto Rico? Have you heard Despacito? Are there fast trains in Ecuador? Does this bus have a big engine?”

There’s flash of light as we break the cloud cover. Heads pop up around the bus almost in unison and look about. The landscape from the clouds to the peaks is barren and windswept.

A woman next to us whispers: “Achachay.”

“¿Qué es achachay?” says Santiago.

“Tener frío mijo,” (“to be cold, my son”) says the woman. Some think the Kichwa term achachay is an onomatopoeia for teeth chattering. Kichwa, or Quichua, is the variety of Quechua spoken in much of Ecuador. Quechua is perhaps the most widely spoken pre-Columbian language in the Americas, and has a significant influence on Andean Spanish.

Santiago’s mother (my wife, Joanna, asleep beside us) speaks an Ecuadorian Spanish with many Kichwa influences — like atatay for “dirty”; mashi for “companion”; michi for “kitten”; and ñaña/o for “sister/brother” — but terms for “cold” don’t come up often in Puerto Rico.

The bus goes in and out of clouds again. In the distance are enormous mountains, brown and sparsely shrubbed near the top, dotted at lower altitudes with occasional huts amid a patchwork of tended fields. The graphite-black rivers that twist through the valleys are too far down to see from the road.

After the pass is an hourlong descent to the plateau, a place treasured by empires: the Cañari then Inca and then Spanish occupied the region in the last two millennia, each renaming it in their own language. Now the capital city is called Cuenca and the province Azuay.

Arriving via bus from the coast is a rather peculiar experience.

After flights from Newark to San Salvador to Guayaquil last night, it was 86 F. at 9 a.m. when we left our hotel for the bus station. The docksides of the port were a mile away — but the salt air and smells of fish and garbage dominated the surroundings. Humidity fogged my glasses at the curb as we waited for the taxi. Our cab driver wore a guayabera that would not have been out of place in Mayagüez or La Habana, and spoke a Spanish not unlike that of the Caribbean, with great speed, nearly silent s, and intervocalic d.

He lowered the music as he leaned out the window to speak to me. On the radio was a song in Spanglish by Aventura, a Dominican-Bronx bachata group. I nodded about the five-dollar fare, blocking the sun with my forearm.

Mentally one is still in Guayaquil when the bus stops in Cuenca, 8,400 feet above sea level.

When the door of the bus swings open and you step down, the cool dry air of the mountains hits – and it’s clear you’ve carried the atmosphere of the coast intact with you inside of the bus. Walking those first few paces in Cuenca you’re still in Guayaquil, and stare about as if the surroundings were unexpected.

Grey, drizzly skies and mountains fill the horizon; people idling about the station are reserved, dressed in light jackets with dark tones; there is less noise, no blaring music. The language echoing about the hall has the sing-song tonalities similar to the Spanish in Chile and Argentina, a vocabulary infused by Kichwa, and the occasional voseo for second-person singular.

My sisters-in-law greet us and dote adoringly on Santiago as I get our bags.

“It was cold on the bus,” says Santiago. “¡Achachaty!”

I order an espresso at the station café, munition against the altitude.

Cuenca has a small colonial quarter up on a diminutive meseta surrounded by four rivers. I think of it as a Cañari-Inca-Spanish Nantucket tucked away in mountains that are beyond description. It is beautiful after the rain.

Pre-Columbian farming terraces (some still in use) rise up the banks at the confluence of two rivers, and above those are the cobblestoned streets of the town center, and above those is the cathedral.

The part of town around the market is Kichwa-speaking. Many in this area have relatives in Spain or New York, or have lived there and returned: There’s been a multilingual life here for centuries.

Now we are in a car bumping up and down cobblestones, with two or three conversations occurring simultaneously; laughter erupts every few seconds as Santiago’s cousins tell him new Kichwa words and he tries to pronounce them.

At the corner of Calle Miguel de Santiago and Calle Rafael Salas, streets named for two painters, we get our things from the trunk.

For just under two decades I have been coming to this place. It is the childhood home of Joanna and, by connections both cultural and physical, of our son. It’s where I’ve written two books, watched four World Cup finals, and considered applying to jobs in Puerto Rico.

As much as I would like to inscribe here the character of this unique corner of South America, to me it is a place where my mind is always re-engaged by the question: “where are you going?”

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is an associate professor in the department of humanities at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. His books include After American Studies (Routledge, 2018), In Paris or Paname: Hemingway’s Expatriate Nationalism, and, as editor, Paris in American Literatures.