Way back in December, Oksana and I spent some time in Baños de Agua Santa, in Ecuador.  We had just finished up a tour of the Galapagos Islands where we’d gone way over-budget, so we were looking to slow down and save some money for awhile.  Baños was the perfect place for that.

Our friend, Jeff, who’d toured the Galapagos with us, stuck around long enough to take a jungle tour with us, but he was influential in our Baños stay in another way.  While in Quito, he had been trying to assemble a custom chess set made out of carved tagua nuts.  When we arrived in Baños, he stumbled upon a little shop called “Tagua de Wilson.”

While trying to fill in the gaps for his chess set, we got to talking with the eponymous owner.  Jeff asked if he did custom work, then asked how much a full chess set would cost.  $60 USD, but there was a catch.  It was Christmas season and Wilson was busy carving ornaments, nativity scenes, and the like. It would take him up to two weeks to carve a full set.  Oksana and I offered to stay in Baños so that we could FedEx it back to Jeff, in Alaska, when it was completed.

Originally, I thought this video would be the story of how Wilson carved the chess set for Jeff, but while Wilson was happy to talk about his work, he wanted to keep the carving of the figurines a secret.  The theme changed a little in editing, but I’m happy with the way it turned out.

A note on the subtitles: Every conversation with Wilson was necessarily in Spanish.  Not only did that make it difficult for me during the interview sessions we had, but it made editing pretty tough, too.  If you’re bilingual, you’ll notice the translations are not exact. I tried to stay as close as I could to the words he used, but most of the time I translated in service to the story, rather than to the language.  (I probably should have run the final subtitles by a native Spanish-speaking friend, but oh well.  I’m a long way from fluent, but I’m still proud that I was able to do as well as I did!)

And finally, I want to mention how much Oksana helped on this video.  You’ll see me talking with Wilson in most every shot and that’s because Oksana was there to help with the cameras.  A lot of her work has appeared in previous podcast episodes, but this is the first one where she did the bulk of the shooting.  Way to go, Oksana!
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Here’s a little video about my time spent in Baños, Ecuador (and no, before you ask, “Baños” does not refer to a “bathroom,” but rather the thermal baths the area is known for!)

A little bit of background info:

We don’t particularly like the song I edited this video to, mostly because it is way overplayed down here. Seemed appropriate, however, since we heard it approximately 342,000 times while we were in Baños.

Not everything you see in the video happened on this trip. I have a lot of footage from last year when I brought a few UAS students down to Ecuador. I decided to incorporate some of those clips because, well, we didn’t get to do all those things on this trip (mostly because Oksana was busy taking 4 hours of Spanish lessons every day!)

Our last two nights were spent at Luna Runtun, a resort and spa perched on a cliff, directly above Baños.  The first night, I decided to experiment with my DSLR and took one photo of Baños every minute over the course of two hours (it was pretty easy, I was sitting in a volcanic hot tub at the time.)  My hope was that I would be able to use the frames to create a tiny video clip of Baños at sunset.  So that I could pan across the image during the short video, I made sure to move the camera a little bit every fifteen minutes.  By cropping the video, I thought I’d be able to center and move the video frame cleverly enough to hide those camera movements.  Well, because of the minor — but noticeable — shift in perspective with each camera move, that didn’t work out so great.  I tried to finesse it a bit in post, but then realized I was spending way too much time on a video that was supposed to be a quick edit, anyway.  So… I just kind of dropped the clip in, anyway.  I think it still looks kind of cool, even if it is jerky at times.

Today started out like any other day…

Does any story starting with that line ever finish with, “and then it ended just like any other day?” No.  No, of course not.

Today started out like any other day.  Oksana got up early for her four-hour, one-on-one Spanish lesson and left me sleeping in bed.  I woke up an hour or so later and went about my normal routine.  A few pushups, a few sit-ups, I grabbed a quick shower.  I was out the door at 10am.  After a week of classes, I had finally been invited to meet her instructor.

The streets in front of the language institute were crowded because today was a big day for all the local boys and girls.  School after school paraded their children in front of the judging stands set along the parade route.  The girls, no matter how young, were decked out in provocative mini-skirts and cleavage-bearing tops, while the boys were sharply dressed in 3-piece suits.  Hundreds (if not thousands) of drums and xylophones played the same song, mostly in synch, as the boys and girls marched, mostly in step.

I didn’t so much meet Oksana’s instructor as say hello and then stand behind her for 40 minutes.  It was impossible to talk over the marching music.

Afterwards, Oksana and I went back to the hostel to check our email before lunch.  The women that run the rooftop cafe during breakfast were rendering sugarcane syrup on the stove and, like magic, dozens of bees had found their way into the glassed-in room.  While uploading some photos to Facebook, one stung me on the Achilles tendon.  It was a completely unwarranted attack; I was sitting perfectly still!  I flicked the bee off and removed the stinger within five seconds.  It throbbed for 10 minutes or so, but that was about it.

We decided to leave the beehive and go get some lunch.  We walked the four blocks to Cafe Pan Rico and sat down in the empty cafe.  I had a banana batido (basically a warm, banana-flavored milkshake) and a nice fruit bowl, covered in yogurt and granola.  Oksana opted for just a blackberry batido. We stopped by the market on the way back and bought a couple of deep-fried banana and cheese empanadas, too.

I was feeling sleepy, so I convinced Oksana to take a nap with me.  She agreed, so we stretched out in bed and tried to ignore all the street noises coming from beyond our window.  The maid hadn’t cleaned our room yet, so we knew that we’d be woken up by a knock at the door before too long.

And, an hour or so later, that’s exactly what happened.  There was a knock at the door and I jumped up to get it before she had a chance to barge in on us.  Oksana stayed in bed, awake, but feigning sleep.

I answered the door; there were two cute maids looking up at me (I stand a full head taller than most women around here.)

“Would you like your room cleaned?” she asked.  Or at least it was something very similar to that, just in Spanish.

“No, not today, I don’t think.”  I reached around to the hooks on the wall and put my hand on two wet towels. “But maybe we can just change the…”

I guess that’s when I passed out.

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When we finished our boat excursion in the Galapagos, we had to plan out the rest of our time there.  Our friend, Jeff, only had a week or so left with us, so we deferred to him.  What would he like to do?  See more of the Galapagos or, perhaps, something else in Ecuador?  He wanted to see the Amazon jungle.

This was an interesting video to put together.  Because of the rain, for most of the day trip we only ever hauled out Oksana’s tiny little point-and-shoot camera (a Panasonic Lumix TZ5.)  It doesn’t even compare to the other cameras we had tucked away under our raincoats, but I was surprised to discover its 720p HD video mode and marginal microphone were more than capable of telling that day’s story.

The day before Jeff left (Dec 6), we sorted through our footage, pounded out a rough outline, and shot our voice-overs on the roof of Plantas y Blanco, our hostel — which accounts for much of the background noise in the final edit — all in about 3 hours.  While not perfect, I do like how most of the video turned out.

What do you think?  Does the image quality stack up to some of the previous episodes we’ve done?

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I spent quite a bit of time at the recent NASA Tweetup looking through my camera’s viewfinder.  Although I didn’t come away with any decent photos of the launch itself (I focused on the video this time, instead), I figured this week’s photo would still come from last weekend.

Then I found myself playing with Oksana’s new iPad, installing the Dropbox app.  I tapped into my account and started to play with what could and couldn’t open on the tablet.  That’s when I came across a folder full of Ecuador photos and realized that, even though I hadn’t taken my DSLR along on the trip, I still managed to come away with some decent shots.

This is Baños.  I love this little town tucked in the middle of the mountains.  There are trails everywhere up the steep hillsides and it only takes around 40 minutes to hike to the top (even if you do have to huff and puff through the altitude).

On one such hike, we found ourselves at the surprisingly popular Café del Cielo.  It was one of the few places we encountered in Baños that had unrestricted wi-fi, plus the packed house was a good indication that the food wasn’t bad, either.  They were too busy to even put us on the waiting list, though, so we resolved to come back later.

Later turned out to be New Year’s Eve.  We wanted to be reunited with the rest of the group before midnight, so hiking up and down the trail in the dark wasn’t an option.  We took an expensive cab ride up the meandering roads behind the mountain instead and, what with all the costumed kids stopping us for New Year’s cash donations, it probably took just as long to get there.  Our driver, knowing that we were at his mercy, arranged for an even higher fare for a scheduled ride back down.

But it was all worth it.  Café del Cielo was practically deserted and the very friendly and attentive waiter put us right up against the plate glass windows.  While Robert, Ana, Alicia, and I enjoyed our small meals (everything cost $5 or less; fairly expensive for Baños) and fantastic fancy coffees, I leaned my wife’s point-and-shoot against the window and took many long-exposure pictures.  Oksana’s little Panasonic doesn’t give you any manual controls, but at least its Starlight preset allows you to dial in 15, 30, or 60 second exposures.  This shot was my favorite of the evening; no reflections in the glass and neither over- nor under-exposed.  Sort of the Goldilocks photo of the set.  You know, just right.

Panasonic DMC-TZ5
Date: 8:54pm, 26 June 2008
Focal Length: 29mm
Shutter: 30 seconds
Aperture: F/4.8
ISO: 100
Photoshop: Unaltered

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There was a wall of rock on one side, a 300-foot cliff down to a dry riverbed on the other.  Alicia and I were sandwiched into the back of a pickup truck with our rented bikes, gripping its sides as a car battery and broken glass slid around our feet.  Our driver seemed to be chatting with the three other men in the cab while he raced up the Andean mountain road.  Our tires literally squealed on the pavement as he drove us, more often than not, into the oncoming lane.  It occurred to me, while rounding another blind curve, that going over the cliff was the least of our worries.  At that speed, sitting in the back of a pickup, any accident was likely to be fatal.  I thought: This may be the scariest ride of my life.

And that was before they pulled out their guns.

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