In the past 5 years, the area saw several waves of colonizers settling in, Ecuador was placed in the top 5 of ‘best places to retire’ and Vilcabamba acquired the fame of being run over by gringos. They opened cafes, sport bars with baseball themes, yoga and meditation centres, various ‘we save the world (for the future enjoyment of our children)’ associations, restaurants, hostels and new age spas, baked their vile cookies and brewed their insipid coffee. Today you can see them gathered in bunches at the 2 or 3 designated cafes and bars around the main plaza, loud and brash and tribal as you might imagine, holding court, coming back in their jeeps from tennis, debating ineptly the financial crisis backed up by figures memorized from yahoo news, hailing the Ecuadorian waiters in thick accents or straight in American, discussing money, discussing investments, discussing profit, discussing who has one over the other, some wearing cowboy costumes or pseudo-ethnic garbs to drive the point home. Some plan a secessionist coup that would found the ‘Independent Republic of Vilcabamba’.
But this is only the surface. Talking to locals we found out more: the gringo colonizers own most of the land around Vilcambamaba: in classical primitive accumulation spirit, the first ones that came over in search of the simple life bought huge chunks, which they proceeded to chop up and sell at inflated prices to the later arrivals. Most affirm to be disgusted by the USA and be at home in Vilcabamba, while complaining incessantly about the backwardness of the place and people. They bargain for everything: one of them started waving the $15 she was willing to pay for a silver jewellery priced $30 in the shop, a piece she was apparently buying for ‘someone really special’, asking the artisan: “Don’t you need this money? Don’t your children need it?” Another imported Carrara marble for her drive-in; yet another invested the money from land speculation into about 10kg gold just before kicking the bucket; a determinately New Agey one asked a local artist to procure her large, rock-sized pieces of quartz crystal with which she wanted to build a walkway from her fence to her house that would purify all her guests of bad vibes.
And they are paranoid, some with schizophrenic colourings. One thinks the area is invaded by reptilians, CIA mutants that will destroy them all, and rants about it to whoever might listen, scaring the local children. Another is obsessed with conspiracy theories and, while in Lima, planned to hire a helicopter to escape the tsunami wave that was inevitably going to flood the city (the tsunami wave did hit the coast of Peru, 2 hours drive from the capital, in the form of a 45cm wave). Another liquidated all her assets and fled the area before the radioactive cloud from Japan would kill everyone. A group of them allegedly spent $70,000 on food (how many tons of rice?) to be stocked in their underground bunker, as preparation for the 2012 Armageddon; we were told that the local rats are growing fatter by the day. It seems that under the massive villas with incorporated elevators and swimming pools these simplicity-seekers built themselves in the hills there is an impressive number of bunkers. Just before January 2000, a Cuban-American/Real-American couple stocked such a bunker and sealed themselves inside, to await peacefully the predicted end of the civilized world; they emerged in March, pale, half-blind, malnourished, depressed and haggard after the sensorial deprivation, to explore the fuming ruins of humanity. The local expat community billboard proposes holidays in the “Bunker meditation retreat”, “How to Survive Sexual Boredom: A Guide for Survivalists” and “Beyond Scurvy: A Manual for Healthy Eating in the Post-Apocalypse World”.
In the meantime, an Uruguayan old-age researcher left the city in disgust after just one night, claiming that the large numbers of decrepit Americans dragging themselves around the main plaza give a really bad vibe; the travellers in search of a more authentic authenticity started avoiding the place; life expectancy in the area dropped to average standards; and the locals are growing increasingly irritated with the ongoing immigration. We expect a slump in anti-atomic bunker prices to hit the ‘valley of longevity’ sometime during the next fiscal year.
tchuss-tchuss,
la mordue
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