Monday, June 30, 2008

Almost back!

Emseraldas was incredible! We got exclusive interviews with the protagonists of the books of Moritz Thomsen and all the villagers in these crazy small little huts on the coast. At one point we had to wait for low tide, and drive the little SUV over some driftwood out onto the beach and just drive down the coast to interview some guy.

As we traveled around this region we developed a posse of people who were either 1) intrigued by our mission or 2) bored and looking for something to do. Anyway, at one point we had 3 extra strangers in the car with us running around the town hunting down the old people who may have known Moritz.

-By the way Moritz Thomsen's books are GREAT! They describe the whole ecuadorian experience far better than i have been able to here. With crazy, funny, and incredibly sad anecdotes. Check out, "Living Poor," -it's hilarious and intense!

I'll be back in the land of already vulcanized tires and pasturized milk on wednesday!

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Rincon!

Going to esmeraldas at 4 AM tomorrow, but actually managed to complete all 11 of the kids videos and they are slowly being uploaded to youtube as we speak!
 
The should all be up by tomorrow!
 
 
All these videos are based off true events in the kids lives and almost all of them have to deal with incidents or feelings towards their personal work
 
For example, Johan breathes fire for a living, and his story is about a time when he accidently caught himself on fire and no one would help him. Luckily his brother saw him and saved his life.
All the videos are in spanish, but there are 2 english versions of Vicky's and Jorge's. We will have spanish subtitle versions available on the storytelling studio sight whn i get back to the states. We will also update the details and stuff for each video, but for now here is the sneak peek!
 
 
Ill be back in touch in a few days, and in the US in a week!
 
Now i am off to super poor coastal villages for 3 documentary of the summer!
 
 
 

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Ecua-Facts!

Fact Uno: Apparently somewhat recently in ecaudor they had a name crisis (crises apparently being very common in ecuador, for example today the president of the congress decided, "Screw it" and just resigned via email sending the whole political part of the country into confusion and astonishment).
 
Anyway i was being introduced to this former child naming crisis that occured, when Alvaro's daughter was telling me about a delivery man they saw named something like "Poplutoark," which, I will admit sounds odd, but i am surrounded by either people who are either named "Maria" or some sort of crazy thing i had never heard of before like Alvaro's girls' names, Lia and Anahi (or Bubi), so I was not that impressed. But then they started talking about their friend, "Lucy Lane" who apparently is named something else but people call her that.
 
Andy- "Why"
L- Well her dad wanted to name her Lucy Lane, so everyone just calls her that. Isn't that crazy that a guy is allowed to get named, "Poplutoark," but they wouldn't accept "Lucy Lane."
A- What there are rules about what you can name your kids!
L- well yeah otherwise people name their kids all kinds of crazy stuff
a- Is that really a problem in ecuador?
 
The answer is a resounding yes! I guess it got too chic to name your kid crazy or commercial stuff that they had to start passing laws and having birth certificate officers who approved names.
 
Still in disbelief, they gave me examples of names:
 
Zenith, Coca-cola, Scotch Tape, Chair, Ecuador 3- Argentina 0, and Semen of the Gods!
 
See Kitty, Turbo Never Quitmeyer isn't that bad of a name!
 
Fact 2:
Ecuador festivals are AWESOME!
 
Carneval- The whole country turns into a warzone! People hide on buildings and in the back of cars armed with water guns, water balloons, and (in the rich areas) flour and eggs. The goal is to make it through the week without getting wet or attacked. Alvaro was telling me this story of when he was in junior high- He had made it the entire week, dodging enemies on roofs, and being paranoid as hell! Then on the last day he missed his bus or something and had to walk home taking strategic routes and cover behind trees and street signs. He made it all the way to the sidewalk leading up to his house where he encountered an 80 year old lady begging for his help. He went up to her and she began talking to him and going through her purse, when she pulls out a little watergun and just blasts him, point blank!
 
Neuvo Ano (may be actually called something else)- This is the best tradition ever (minus the incidental murders), and we really need to instate it in the states. First in the morning everyone constructs some sort of old man effigy known as a Anos veijos (i think it is plural for some reason), that is real ugly and made out of sawdust and sacks and whatever is lying around. Then all of the men in the city get dressed up like sexy ladies in mourning and take to the streets. Here they all take tons of lengths of rope and chain and toss them in a pile across the road to form a road block. Then they flock to the obstructed vehicles screaming and wailing, "OH MY HUSBAND JUST DIED! MY Beautiful HUSBAND! CAN I HAVE SOME MONEY FOR HIS BURIAL!" And it used to be kind of optional whether you gave them money, but i guess now-a-days you better give them something or they won't let you by. All the drag queens pool their money to purchase the perfect combination for any holiday, Alcohol and Gasoline. Then at midnight everyone tosses the Anos Veijos into the street and they pour gas all over and burn all the Anos Veijos. This was the second holiday where alvaro described the city as turning into a warzone, with people screaming and running and fires everywhere.
There is a bad part to the new years celebration in that every so often some poor old drunk passes out in the street and is mistaken for an Anos Viejos, and is accidently burned alive.
 
 
 
 

Logo Fun Time! Posting tomorrow!

Made us a kickass logo yesterday! Its gonna be on the ends of each of the story and it may dance a bit!
 
Going to the Universidad to post tomorrow,
link to follow!

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Editing and Alemanding







The Alemans have a beautiful house, and the time that i am not editing i try to spend hiking around their "back yard" which consists of a beautiful chasm cleaved by the mighty "Rio de Potti-caca."

The only paths that exists around here are those carved out by goats, so like the rest of ecuador you pretty much have to take your welfare entirely into your own hands. Sometimes i was just walking along what seemed like a perfectly fine path only to find myself up to my armpits in a randomly placed hole. Further inspection of the hole led me to notice that, yes, there were gigantic spiders EVERYWHERE! Tons of beautiful plants along this ridge; there were what looked like wild snapdragons (i could make them open their mouths and talk by squeezing them), and huge, 10-12 foot tall agave plants. According to Alvaro, there is a path that traces out a nice simple loop down the chasm and back up to his house, but both times i have tried following/finding this path i have ended up somewhere completely wrong. Not that there really is a wrong direction to go in super fun chasm hiking world, some places just require less mountaineering and spider-removal skills.





Andy y Ondy got grumpy because Alvaro had to change their water and toss them in a couple of glasses for a while. He felt bad so he bought them 12 little fish for snacks. It's been one day since the fish have been introduced and there are only four left, huddled together, scared out of their tiny minds, hidden behind the water filter

For fun, and as a modest attempt to help out and try to repay Alvaro and his family's kindness for having me over for all this time, I went out and got pancake and french toast fixins to make for everyone (Alvaro's kids' cousins came over and spent the night). People seemed to like my chocolatey and plantain-ey pancakes and french toast sticks alot, but the maid-lady knew that deep down, true flavor and nutrition lie in gobs and gobs of butter. Luckily she was able save this potential welfare disaster by dropping in sticks of butter into the pan when wasn't looking. It was pretty amazing- the butter level was actually higher than the cakes themselves so that they were technically being deep-fried in the butter. The pancakes took on bizzarre popcorn-like exploded shapes near the edges and were deliciously (and technically) heart-stopping.


Been here for a while, still have no idea what this says.



Here is a cool little independent media/documentary station that is letting us edit stuff. Back to editing!


TO BE WORDED IN FUTURE


Also check out








For awesome super high res cool shots!

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Rincon Del Relato

Today we miraculously finished up with the kids actually getting to use photoshop and after effects to build pieces of their final animations. It was rough work because we had only managed to get the computers, software, videos, and scanned pictures only hours before we actually needed them. Ecuador is not reknowned for its ability to plan things out in advance. In fact, Alvaro, the professor i worked with taught me the most important spanish word, "Plantillas," which means like the insert in your shoe and refers to people who tell you they will do something and then that thing just never happens.


Like the guy who eagerly said he would take care of photoshopping the pictures for the kids, (which are the main things we need before the kids can really do any kind of animation on the computers) and then just showed up 4 hours late- 3 hours too late to make a difference in the kids' day. But we carried on like troopers and all the kids got to get a lesson in how to use photoshop on top of using After Effects.


One nino, Jhon, was a little pro at this stuff! Always 2-3 steps ahead of me when i was trying to teach the rest of the group- And he had never seen this stuff before in his life!

I think the kids really had lots of fun. Even though they did like 4 straight hours of work (with only a few minutes of playing in the Koi pond, and some transcendental meditation in the Japanese pagoda on campus) the kids kept on working and made some really great stuff. We had a big pizza party for them at the end and it was really terrific to get to see them wolfing down the pizza and going nuts in the ball pit.


Oh and Rincon Del Relato is the catchy spanish version we are using for Storytelling Studio. It means kind of Storytelling Corner.

Look at this awesome dragon costume they made!

Jorge, the dragon, cast me as the evil wizard, or Brujo, in his film!

At the Alemans








Well my hostal the Magic Bean decided that one week was enough for them to want my business and magically terminated my acount. I think they knew somehow that it was that night that i was going to try to sneak onto the roof to reclaim the underwear that had become stranded after i tried doing my own laundry in the shower. I had been watching and planning about this fallen comrade/boxers over the past 5 days, trying to decide when was best to launch my assault, but magic bean knew even better and struck first.






Luckily, Alvaro Aleman, the professor i am working with, offered to take me in, and so i am living it up in his basement!



Big couch, down comforter, meals and maids!






I am helping pay my way by fixing all the computers in the place and creating monstrous, frankensteinian, super computers that we are using to edit the kids stuff out of the cadavers of the old.






They have awesome half- albino, lungs-on-the-outside, mexican, cave salamanders called, Axolotls (or as Kitty calls them, Smilemanders, cuz they are cute!) These things are totally neat and very playful! One of them bit me already! Plus their names are Andy y Ondy.

You can't really see it in this picture but they are cute! Here is an example from the web




Salafact!: These weird salamander things live in volcanic pools in mexico. They usually spend their whole lives in this underwater larval kind of state, and never metamorphose into the adult form unless they are exposed to really hot temperatures. So when volcanoes are about to erupt and their water heats up, they all lose their gills, grow real big and hop out onto land. So if you see a herd of adult Axolotls running by you might want to follow!






The Alemans have been helping me with my spanish, introducing me to really terrific ecuadorian and international music, and telling me about all of these AMAZING ecuadorian traditions that i will chat all about in a later post. Tomorrow and Viernes, y sabado, y Domingo i am pretty much going to be holed up here working on editing kids stuff.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Fun Facts!



Hey hey, here are some Andy/Ecuador fun facts!


Andy´s Awesome Name:


There used to be an ecuadorian produced car made for the people (kinda like the Volkswagon and germany) that was called the Andino!


The popular brand of milk that comes in sacs here is called, Andina!


The communications conglomerate is called Andinatel!


All women over 30 think that Andrés y Andrecito y Andino are the best names in the world. " OH! what a good name!... What a sweet name! Oh i hope you are as sweet as your name!" they always tell me.


So apparently Andrés is the best name to have here



Quick Fact!

Andrew James Quitmeyer is believed to be the only individual in Quito possessing Arm hair. This is apparently completeley irresistable to everyone young and old and of both sexes. Men want the arm hair and ladies want to be with the arm hair. (Seriously my arms get stroked by strangers 2-3 times a day)


Fast Facts about Films!


Ecuadorians are able to cut through the haze of our prevaricative media (I am studying for the GRE hence the giganto words) and spell things out how they really are. For example everything remotley resembling anything produced by the Scary Movie franchise has been lumped into the same category, thus they have single DVD´s you can purchase for a buck that contain Scary Movies 1-11.

Ecuador also seems to just love sequels in general, as right now they are showing both El Hombre Incrieblé and Hulk 2 at the same theatre. The movies have two quite different posters and different showtime, but both seem to star edward norton as a big green man.



And they have Both Lion King 3 and Lion King 4! I don´t even know what these could possibly be!


(Point! Further research indicates that Lion King 3 might be equivocal to the US Lion King 1.5, but i still have no idea what Lion King 4 could be!)


A slower fact...

I live on the street in quito where all the cool and happening restraunts bars and nightclubs are in a region of Quito called the Mariscal, but due to its popularity attracts lots of gringos and is colloquially reffered to as "Gringo-landia." Now, usually when you meet ecuadorians and they ask you where you are from and you say "el Mariscal," they give you this knowing and sort of disappointed look as if to say, "oh of course, big giant gringo lives in gringo land." But then if, after you tell them that you are from Mariscal, you jokingly reffer to it as, "gringo-landia," the person´s point of view will switch instantly and they will become super good friends as if you were a double agent in the secret club making fun of gringos.


A sexy fact :-0!

The standard pasttime of internet cafe denizens seems to be sharing a computer with your buddy and making as many myspace freinds as possible with millions of identitcal sexy spambots. And getting really excited and yelling everytime you make a new fake myspace friend.

Soccer on the Equator at 9348 Feet.

Had my first day off entirely to myself and went to go play some futbol with the locals. They were very intimidating with their official liga jerseys, matching socks and shoes, and needless to say, much better than the little kids we played with in the Galapagos (who were totally awesome).


But for some reason i was incredibly good! I don´t know what happened but i magically started playing the best soccer that i have ever played in my entire life. I was doing tricks and juggling around phenomenal players and doing diving headers towards the goal and scored one of the 4 goals that were made in the three hours we were playing, and assisted on the other! I am not trying to brag, but am just confused.


Anyway, i was very tired after this feat, went to bed at 6:30 pm and got up at 7 AM kinda confused that the whole night had gone by.


Before i played soccer and fell asleep yesterday though, i went and filmed at the "No More Child Labor" marathon por los Niños. I had figured that i would just get a little footage of the marathon to cut to during the documentary and so i only brought my camera with half its battery. When i got there though, i found out my one freind from working with the kids was organizing the whole thing and got it set up so that i could film from the back of a truck and follow the kids while they were jogging and therefore get some really terrific footage. Of course my camera just totally died THE VERY INSTANT THE STARTING PISTOL WAS FIRED!


I felt so bad and just had to pretend to film the rest of the marathon. I was really sad. It would have been really cool and good for the Doc.



One interesting note: When people see some guy in the back of a truck moving kind of slowly down the road they just hop in. Even while the guy driving the truck kept yelling at them and telling them the truck was just for me to film the marathon, more people just kept hopping on and refusing to leave even though i don´t know of anyway that they could have had any idea of where it was going. At our peak there were 14 men women and children cramped into the back of this little Pickup truck (including me). One lady ran up and just tossed her 3 year old in the back like this was the last spaceship to leave earth before the entire planet blew up. I didn´t stick around the truck at the end to see what happened to all these people who traveled with me.


One other note: Before the race i met a bunch of the kids i had been working with-Apparently i am easy to pick out from a large ecuadorian crowd. The starting point of the race was at the big famous lawn in front of the Basilica church, and every now-and-then some of the kids i knew would run up to me earnestly and drag me to a spot where we could see one of the tons of tour buses unloading, point towards the gringos unloading from the bus and ask, "¿es tu familia?"


My spanish was not nearly good enough to inform the kids that i was probably not related to all of the people coming off the tour busses just because they were otros gringos and this happened 4-5 time as other tour buses pulled into the area.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Look! Ecuador is Fun! Not scary!

Here are some fun pics from fun things we did in the Galapagos!


This is the pretty path that leads to the sadly very oily, tortuga bay, where we snorkled and tried to surf.

Here are non-bloody shots of the horseback ride up Seirra Negra and below is a picture of one of the craters we got to climb around on.



Here are the fun boats we got to take on the island paradise of Isabella to go make fun penguino amigos!


More shots of the idyllic Isabella with its fun dirt roads and driftwood lampposts


Andy made a marine iguana amigo tambien! (Note: one of the last shots of that hat before it was lost to mighty posiedon)


So the best part about ecuador is that if you can think of something and ask, people will let you do it. So, in Santa Cruz, with my simple phrase of ¿Peudo Montar? i was able to ride garbage trucks to restraunts, latch onto moving trucks, and climb up cocunut trees to harvest their fruit!

Here are some niños that i gave a coconut.


And the back of the truck that we got to ride to the airport!



I Would Venture to Say that Quito Can be a Little Dangerous

Here is a picture of Ben to which whose face I had been continually alluding. The face of a cute little guy after his encounters with the harsh reality of ecuador (and after a totally awesome backflip!).

This picture is included in this entry to add a little visual spice to what had been a muy picanté evening last night. Things got a little scary in Quito, but the main thing to remember- and this is for all of those people who are related to me, who due to our familial ties, possess Andino-centric imaginations that can churn up the fear centers of their brains like an Amish PCP-addict when there is a mention of scary and dangerous things happeneing to me, is that i am totally okay! This disclaimer is here just to let you know that, if you fall into the aforementioned group or can be frightened by scary things happening to me, please do not worry! Maybe i will sandwich this entry between another fun Storytelling Studio

So, once again, please take note, family members and friends with easily startled constitutions: I, Andrew James Quitmeyer, am totally, perfectly fine, and uninjured in the slightest. I am even well rested and my belly is full!

Okay now that disclaimers are out of the way here is what happened last night!

The son of the Child Psychologist lady who is working with us at the Storytelling Studio here in Quito, brought me out on the town with him last night. Santiago, his friends, and I hung out together at a weird little bar that had cute little beer taps built right into the table where, if you pay 6 bucks or so, you get 2 full hours of all the beer you want. (like the rest of ecuador) played an endless loop of Micheal Jackson, Madonna, and, of course, Hotel California. This place was interesting also due to the fact that it had video accompainiment with all the music, so Don Henley actually gets to look you in the eye with a smug grin that says, "yeah, i control all of ecuador with this one song." After an hour, some appetizers, and 3-4 Hotel Californias later, the VJ´s decided to toss on some Hombres G. I had never heard of this band, but apparently if you were in middle school in Latin America during the end of the 90´s, it would be hard to fight the ridiculous amounts of hilarity/nostalagia that would arrive from what i would estimate to be on par with Backstreet Boys/N*Sync/Spice Girls/ and maybe like Oasis all getting mashed together in an epic farewell concert.




So whether it was the bittersweet love songs of Hombres G, or the 3 dollar an hour beer taps, the silly little birthday party occuring on the floor below us broke out into a bit a of brawl. The guys running the bar grabbed the offenders and tossed them out, but these drunken morons would have none of that. Over the next hour they kept sneaking back into the bar and fighting even more with the bar managers and each other. By this time the VJ, decided to blast a collection of ripped Guns and Roses videos, so at least the faster tempo the violence seemed a bit more in place, though still not without the sillyness of ecuador´s deeply ingrained musical nostalgia. It got to the point where they managers had to lock the doors to keep them out and call the police while the enraged gentlemen pounded on the glass windows and doors. They fled when the security showed and we had not heard from them in over an hour when we decided to leave the bar.

Around midnight, on our way back to my hostal, the leader of the disgruntled crew, Capt. Drunk, appeared from behind an alley and decided that he really wanted to walk very close and very angrily next to me. For some reason, i think that when grumpy ecuadorians see big old gringo andy they get even grumpier. And when they are intoxicated, the discrepancy between our relative sizes tends to diminish in their minds, and they start really wanting to fight.

So there was a lot of Capt. Drunk getting very angry in my face, but then i managed to pull off a bit of a menacing look myself, and the Captain decided to turn his beligerence towards mi amigo, Santiago. Suddenly i saw Drunky pull out a Snapple bottle and wind up to pitch it directly at Santiago´s head. I managed to punch his arm enough to deflect the bottle so that it only hit Santiago in the arm, and then held back the wannabe pugilist. Captain Drunk´s freinds were about 10 meters behind him and shouting what seemed like pleas for their stupid friend to come back to their group and stop being an asshole. Santiago wanted me to start running with them, but i wanted to hold this idiot under control until his friends could take him. That was until i noticed 3-4 of his friends charging towards me with daggers formed from half broken fifths of whisky, vodka, and tequila.

They chased our group into a bar, and the Captain tried to lead his men through the doors with a bit of a running lunging kick until i caught his leg and threw him back through the doors wild west style, and the bouncers chased them off the rest of the way.

The bar/haven was really nice to us and the bouncers went to pick up one of the girls´ cars so we wouldn´t have to brave the crazy ass streets for the rest of the night.

This is apparently NOT a common thing around Quito, and i think the locals i was hanging out with were even more freaked out than i was.

Interesting note: Tapeworms ARE a common thing in quito, and the locals are just supposed to take some pills every few months to flush them out. So until i take my pills at the end of the trip, i could be the father of a whole zoo of little internal worms.


What a weird place this is.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Storytelling Studio International!

Wow, I feel pretty nervous and scared and excited like a kind of an old timey newsreporter calling into his boss to give him the latest scoop about a weird mix of disturbing and somewhat heartwarming news. The storytelling studio is going SO WELL!

In case you are out of the loop, i have been making kid´s workshops, where we teach children from about 5-13 how to create their own stories and develop them across multiple media formats, eventually resulting in their own personal animated video that they get to act in. Check out :

http://www.storytellingstudio.org/

for more info about past projects.

Anyway, back in March i began negotiations to implement this kind of program in Quito, and so now i am here working with Literature professor, Alvaro Aleman. We have only had two real days with the kids so far, but they were amazing. They are so into it. They actually showed up with their preliminary packets done, and their stories are so good and incredibly interesting!




All the kids come from this kind of squatter settlement that united a few years back and got kind legalized, but it is up on the side of the volcano overlooking the city, and is incredibly poor.

So one big aspect of all the kids´ stories comes from the fact that all the kids in this area have to work: either begging, selling things on the street, or performing on the street (or stealing).

For example, two of the kids are brothers and breathe fire on the street as performers and their story is about them being dragons and chasing away evil wizards.

Other examples of some of the really interesting/scary/neat stories they are doing based on weird real life experiences:


One kid has to get up at like 5 every morning to gather and recycle cardboard before he gets to go to school and so his story is about a time that the cardboard wants to go to school with him so he brings it and they all learn stuff together.

One girl wrote about her brother who i guess makes fires on the mountainside, but one time the fire got out of control, and the animals and the sun brought him to like nature court, with a bear lawyer, and like a Jaguar DA and all kinds of stuff

One girl´s mom makes meals everyday for a neighboring construction crew, and has to chop up vegetables all day. So one day the knife rebels and won´t go back to work until the mom apologizes for working the knife so hard.

One kid´s dad wanted to be a bullfighter, so one time his mom had him practice when he was little trying to bullfight the family pig, but the pig just got angry and threw him up in the air.

One is about a group of pigs they decide to be entreprenuerial and open up a Bacon shop, because they don´t know what bacon is, but then people come in and just eat them. (one interesting thing is that nearly half of all the stories involve a pig since all the kids houses have pigs)

One girl´s friend was a singer i think, and i guess one time she got really drunk and thrown into jail but then she sang and the cops let her go.

The most incredible thing is how engaged these kids are, they are the hardest working kids i have ever seen! And i guess it is because this is so much easier and actually fun than the rest of their poor little lives.

Here is a shot of alvaro teaching the kids about settings and characters.

I think these videos are going to be really terrifc, and we are going to visit the kids´works and get some footage of them breathing fire etc...

The whole community is really involved too, we got one volunteer per kid! And today we got a novelist to help teach writing the stories, and a graphic designer to help the kids with their drawings.


On top of this, I am compiling footage of what we are doing that we will combine with interviews with professionals and footage of the kids actual jobs on the street to form a documentary to send out to the government and stuff in order to strive for some sort of Child Labor reform.


One of the main ladies is a child psychologist who has been working with kids like this for 10 years and she is super excited about trying to get their stories out.

She made some interesting notes about how sad it was that we were trying to get the kids to come up with fantastic stories about anyplace and time but the kids weren´t able to think outside of the confines of their horrible jobs they have to work. Some of the older kids are able to dress it up in fantasy a bit, but the younger ones cannot and are stuck in the reality of what they do.


So, for example, there are 2 hermanos who both breathe fire on the street, and the older one made his story about him being a dragon and chasing away evil wizards, but the younger one just made his story about a time when he accidently lit his whole chest on fire, and no people would help him in the street and he had to just run around on fire until his brother got him and saved him. Really intense stuff like that.


Anyway these kids are incredibly smart and really fun to work with, I hope the documentary can be good enough to help them out. This whole project is getting way more incredible than i could have expected.






Monday, June 9, 2008

Even More Pictures! (Older Pictures, Crazy!)

Here is a nice shot of Azim crouching on the ground and trying to hide after he found out that the large open windows in the showers at Tucanopy afforded spectacular views from both sides.



Here is the 98 butterfly, which are sometimes called 89 butterflies. ¿Can you tell why?

Here is a shot of our awesome, marathoning, zimbaweian, coconut cracking, biology professor, Rod Mackie, hiking through the lush cloudforest at Maquipucuna.





Intense shots of ziplining through canopy at Tucanopy.



Here i am in the process of losing an entire dollar, 2 cents at a time at the local Gambleteria in Quito.


All from Yost´s Camera! Go Yost!ªª