High Roads and Bad Decisions in Ecuador
The author learns to trust the wisdom of his elders on a wildly jinxed motorcycle-mountaineering trip to Ecuador.
By Owen Clarke
Vagre gunned his motorbike up the jagged, muddy road ahead of me, his legs splayed out to either side as the bike bounced over rock and root and rut. His feet didn’t quite reach the ground, so the image was evocative of a child strapped to a runaway ostrich, or perhaps a giant, mutated chicken.
I followed behind him on my battered Suzuki DR650, my legs longer, my tires knobbier, my clearance higher, and my overall setup much more suited to the terrain.
My skill, however, was vastly inferior to Vagre’s, so it was all I could do to keep up with him, clunking the DR along in first and second gear, riding the clutch and feathering the throttle as we zigzagged up the jungle-choked slopes. Above us, to the south, loomed the 16,480-foot Tungurahua, a belching behemoth of a stratovolcano whose native Quechua name aptly translates to “Throat of Fire.”
We’d climbed to around 10,000 feet on the narrow dirt road, but still Vagre kept firing higher and higher, the road thinning to a 4X4 track, the track thinning to a trail. He wore no gloves or riding pants, and his feet were covered by ankle-cut canvas approach shoes, but he whipped the bike uphill with the confidence of a guy who lived on two wheels. This author, meanwhile, was outfitted in more protective gear than an Imperial stormtrooper, but rode with his buttcheeks perma-clenched, sure at any moment he was going to jackknife his front tire and flip over the handlebars and off the side of the mountain.
I prayed to God that Vagre would stop, or at least slow down, but I clearly hadn’t gone to church enough recently because Vagre only seemed to increase his speed.
I’d come to Ecuador with Roark ambassador Drew Smith to attempt to ride motorcycles to, and then climb, the ten mountains in the country that are taller than 5,000 meters (16,400ft).
It was a rather half-baked endeavor, at least in the sense that I was a middling climber at best and had done next to no research on the concept before enlisting Drew, a guy I barely knew and had only met in person once, for a few minutes, while scrambling to the granite summit block of a 14,000-foot peak in the Sierra Nevada.
My general concept of route finding in the mountains was to do a bit of Googling, park at the bottom, drink a Red Bull, look up at the summit, and start walking up towards it. But in this case, the Googling I did was too little, too late. It was only after landing in Ecuador that I learned that many of the high mountains in Ecuador were inside national parks that banned motorcycles from entering, and at least one of them, Sangay (17,343ft), was actively spewing lava and hadn’t been climbed in more than a decade.
Drew, being older, wiser, more experienced, and at least slightly more grounded, had perhaps realized that the scheme reeked of juvenile botchery, and had enlisted his older brother, Garret, and old friend and mentor Daniel “Vagre” Carrion, the quasi-legendary Ecuadorian climber who now raced his street motorcycle up the mountainside ahead of me.
I’d never understood the provenance of the moniker Vagre, which was a stylized spelling of bagre, the Spanish word for catfish. At one point before our trip, I’d asked Vagre what his name meant in the group chat we were using to “plan” the trip. In response, he had sent a strange, AI-generated image of a fish with legs, followed by a GIF of a commercial airliner flapping its wings like a bird, and then another GIF of a vulture doing an Irish jig.
Somehow this felt like the right explanation, or at least explanation enough.
Our trip had started well. We’d landed in Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, and the next day ran up a dormant volcano west of the city called Rucu Pichincha. The mission was easy, no more than a few hours of hiking up and jogging down. But the peak’s summit, at 15,413 feet, was nearly 1,000 feet higher than any mountain in the contiguous U.S., so from an acclimatization standpoint, it boded well for our prospects on the higher mountains.
Once we’d secured our rides, from a local moto rental outfit, Ecuador Bike Rental, we began firing south, first snaking along the dusty, sun-baked plains north of Cotopaxi (19,347ft), Ecuador’s second-highest mountain, then arcing west towards the Pan-American Highway and south again, to Baños de Agua Santa, the jungle town at the base of Tungurahua, which we hoped would be the first 5,000-meter peak of our trip.
By this point, it was clear to me that Drew and Garret, both veteran international travelers, were incredibly fastidious about avoiding Ecuador’s tap water, or anything it may have touched. They were unsure about fruits and vegetables, leery of brushing their teeth in hotel sinks, and the questions they asked at restaurants reminded me of those posed by a high-maintenance girlfriend on a trendy diet.
Does this fruit juice contain ice?
Was the ice that this fruit juice contains frozen from tap water?
Was this fruit juice made from fruit that had skin on it which may have been washed by tap water?
Was tap water anywhere within a 50-yard radius of my food?
I’d done my fair share of traveling, but at age 28, I still reckoned I had at least another decade before I needed to emasculate myself by asking these sorts of questions to waiters in public. Sure, I’d been nuked by traveler’s bugs before. I once spent three days wiping brown liquid out of my ass with sand—no toilet paper—while on a camel trip through the Moroccan Sahara, and the better part of two weeks shivering and shitting in a hostel in Huaraz after eating a chunk of poorly cooked goat meat. I’d been felled by airport tap water in Mumbai, beef rendang in Medan, and sushi in Guatemala (in hindsight, Guatemala is a ridiculous country to sample roadside sushi in). But my memory of how heinous these experiences had been, for whatever reason, was quite bad. That said, my memory of just about anything is bad these days. Perhaps it’s from spending too much time on Instagram Reels.
In any case, it was my suggestion that we stop on the drive south to Baños to scarf down plates of boiled chicken, soggy rice, and lukewarm soup at a gas station.
It took less than 24 hours for the chicken, or perhaps the tap water the soup was made from, to fight back.
“Not feeling too good, hombre,” Garret said, rubbing his stomach, when I saw him the next morning in the lobby of our hotel in Baños. Drew, he said, was feeling equally vile, and had already wandered off to a nearby pharmacy to find some Imodium.
This was bad, but not awful, news. The trip had only just begun. It was January 5th, and I didn’t have to be back in the United States until early April, when the Internal Revenue Service wanted its annual chunk of my meager freelance writer’s income. Besides, yours truly still felt hale, and I’d been drinking the juice, sucking on the ice, and stuffing down fruits and vegetables like a human compost bin.
Drew and Garret were both more skilled, experienced moto riders than I was, and although we hadn't climbed anything together yet, on the run down from Rucu Pichincha, both had left me in the dust. They almost certainly had me outclassed in every discipline, except perhaps writing (which can now be done by artificial intelligence anyways).
But at least I had them beat out in the gastric arena.
Hah, I thought. Stomach bugs already? What a couple of prima donnas!
To give them time to recover, I had set out with Vagre—of course unaffected by the local cuisine—on this dusk reconnaissance mission up Tungurahua’s northern slopes with our motorbikes.
There wasn’t much to reconnoiter. The mountain was there. We could see it. But Vagre didn’t like to sit still, and I was hoping to impress him with my moto-riding skills, so off we went, barreling up the mudtracks to see how high we could get. And finally, after much white-knuckling and one or two more prayers, Vagre pulled over on a grassy rise looking out over the mist-shrouded Baños, nestled in a valley thousands of feet below. He vaulted off his bike like an acrobat. We were stopping.
Thank you, God.
I pulled my DR up alongside him and got off myself, trying to look smooth and suave and collected, but the heel of my mountaineering boot clipped the rear rack and the bike toppled over. I grabbed for it, but the slant of the hill and the size of my biceps weren’t in my favor, and I instead was forced to ignominiously lower the motorcycle into the sucking mud, grunting as I slid my ankle out of the way so that it wasn’t ground into a pulp.
Vagre turned and glanced down at me.
“Uuhhoopps,” I said, half-chuckling, half-coughing as a bug flew down my throat.
Vagre did not respond, but pursed his lips and glanced away, as if slightly embarrassed to be seen next to me. Luckily, the only other witness to this humiliation was a mud-spattered cow tied to a tree branch with a length of hemp rope.
As Vagre tried to pretend like he wasn’t witnessing this foolishness, I squatted, grabbed the handlebar and the rear rack, and, channeling the energy of the cow, deadlifted the DR650 back up onto two wheels. Then, I slapped the tank affectionately, as though this was no big deal, or perhaps something I’d done on purpose. Vagre muttered that it was getting dark, and that maybe it was time to ride home.
“Right,” I said. “Good idea.”
We returned to our hotel to find Drew sitting in the lobby next to the water cooler with his head in his hands.
“I shit my pants,” he said.
Garret came down the stairs in a squeaky pair of white knockoff Crocs, his face green.
“Not doing too good, hermanos,” he offered, rubbing his bristly reddish-brown beard. “Not doing too good.”
In the morning we’d hoped to push up to Tungurahua’s hut, at 12,500 feet, and climb the mountain the following day. With Garret and Drew still feeling ill, the plan felt overambitious, but possible, so we postponed a decision until the morning, to see how we felt.
As Vagre tried to pretend like he wasn’t witnessing this foolishness, I squatted, grabbed the handlebar and the rear rack, and, channeling the energy of the cow, deadlifted the DR650 back up onto two wheels. Then, I slapped the tank affectionately, as though this was no big deal, or perhaps something I’d done on purpose. Vagre muttered that it was getting dark, and that maybe it was time to ride home.
“Right,” I said. “Good idea.”
We returned to our hotel to find Drew sitting in the lobby next to the water cooler with his head in his hands.
“I shit my pants,” he said.
Garret came down the stairs in a squeaky pair of white knockoff Crocs, his face green.
“Not doing too good, hermanos,” he offered, rubbing his bristly reddish-brown beard. “Not doing too good.”
In the morning we’d hoped to push up to Tungurahua’s hut, at 12,500 feet, and climb the mountain the following day. With Garret and Drew still feeling ill, the plan felt overambitious, but possible, so we postponed a decision until the morning, to see how we felt.
The morning dawned hot and humid, sunbeams lasering through my window accompanied by the squawking voice of a hawker, who was standing on the street outside trying to entice people to eat our hotel’s $2.50 breakfast.
¡Desayuno, desayuno! he yelled. ¡Dos cincuenta desayuno! ¡Desayuno! ¡Dos cincuenta!
I was feverish, and my body throbbed like a TOOL bassline. My bedsheets were soaked with sweat and something far fouler, and it was then that I realized that I, too, had shit my pants.
To add tragedy to the indignity, the soiled pants were the Roark Layover Pro Traveler Pants that Drew had given me, which were, at the time of their acquisition, the most comfortable pants I owned, by a significant margin. When I went downstairs, I learned that Drew and Garret felt slightly better, but during the night, they’d learned that their cousin had died, and they needed to fly home to Montana for her funeral.
The mood was somber.
I spent the next two days chugging water and electrolytes, trying to recover from the food poisoning that wracked me and trying to avoid soiling any more of the nice Roark clothes that I had been granted for the trip, while Drew and Garret and Vagre rode motorbikes around and brought me takeout food. Their flight home wasn't for another few days, leaving us a strange, purgatorial window to salvage what we could of the expedition.
It took me over a week, far longer than Drew and Garret, to fully recover from the fever and chills—I ultimately wondered if perhaps they had gotten sick from something milder than me, the fool who had drunk the water—but when I felt halfway decent we decided we had enough time to take a stab at the jewel of the mission, El Altar (17,451ft), Ecuador’s hardest high peak.
After riding for a couple of hours south to the Quimiag region, we snaked our bikes up into the mountains, along muddy roads and through clouds of mist, to a hut at around 10,000 feet. Here we ditched the bikes. The next morning, we strapped our gear to mules and slogged uphill, into a sea of storm clouds and mist, through a constant drizzle, to set up a camp on the ridge at 15,000 feet.
That was as far as we got. Warm temperatures meant that the snow route leading to the technical rock higher on the mountain hadn’t formed. There was no way up. We spent a few days spooning in a tent and eating dehydrated food before heading down, in defeat.
After Drew and Garret flew home, I stayed in Ecuador for another two months alone, and embarked on eight more trips to 5,000-meter peaks, succeeding on six. But my trip with Drew, Garret, and Vagre was a wash. The only mountain we summited together was Pichincha, a walk-up peak that is routinely demolished by 12-year-old girls in Dora the Explorer Tevas. We’d failed spectacularly on almost every metric we set out to achieve. I’d hoped to learn some things simply by being in the orbit of folks like Garret, a veteran adventure filmmaker and rider, Vagre, a world-class climber, and Drew, all of the above. In the end, the trip capped off before it even got started.
But I do recall one crucial piece of hard-won wisdom. Never, under any circumstances, drink the water, and if you can help it, avoid the gas station chicken, too. And if you shit yourself in the Layover Pro Traveler Pants, don’t worry too much. It washes out.
