A Rant About Ayampe

We left Ayampe after two and a half months. I can’t really say that it was terrible, and I can’t really say it was great. It was a strange place.

Let me just start by saying that I loved the locals.

Every morning I would take a stroll down to the beach to check the surf, and would invariably run across several locals doing their early morning preparations for the day. We would pass in the dusty or rain-muddied street and end up chatting in my broken Spanish about the day. Always, every time, without fail, at the very minimum would be a warm smile and a “Buenos Dias! Como Estas?” or some version of that. They loved that I made the effort to speak in their language, and they were always happy to take a few moments and have a conversation.

I had many of these interactions with locals every day.

For me, interaction with people is one of the most important things in my life, and is one of the driving factors in why I travel. It is these people that I meet, with different viewpoints and ideas that widen my worldview and improve me as a human being.

A big part of human interaction (for me) is eye contact. It tells a lot about a person, like: am I supposed to fear this person, or should I engage with them? I feel that with no eye contact there is no insight.

Having said that, I was completely baffled by the tourists and expats in Ayampe.

Particularly the expats.

If not just about eye contact, it was about approachability.

Or just about regular human decency of offering a greeting to a fellow human being.

The majority of the expats in Ayampe were simply standoffish. You could be the only two people in sight walking towards each other on the street and they wouldn’t even raise their eyes or acknowledge your presence. It was so strange to offer up a “Buenos Dias” in a cheerful way and be completely ignored (I even checked, and they did not have earbuds in). I am pretty unwilling to accept this sort of interaction and kept forcing my cheerful greetings on people whether they were reciprocated or not, and after a month or two a few people may have started to grunt some sort of response .

Again, these are not the locals.

This wasn’t just the expats, as many of the tourists were quite distant or standoffish, and kept together in their small groups.

I found this difficult. We were there for two and half months, and we really only had pleasant social interactions with two or three of the tourist surfers that we met. Anyone who has met Tam knows that she is a super social person. Even she didn’t have any meaningful interactions while we were there.

Everywhere else we have been around the world we have come home with contacts for friends that we just met, and many of them end up visiting us in other places around the planet. Quite a few of them have become lifelong friends.

But not here in Ayampe.

So we had to wonder why…

First off, in the first few weeks, we noticed that the place is inundated with zombie-types. Without any exaggeration, they are folks who wander, seemingly aimlessly, around the streets with blank stares and a shuffling gait. There is no glimmer of recognition or acknowledgment of your fellow-humanness. They are, quite frankly, impossible to interact with.

We also noticed that there are a group of expats there that simply appear suspicious. This territorialism was prevalent with many of the longer-term tourists as well. Their suspicious (or openly hostile) scrutiny on the streets led me to believe that these folks must think they have found Nirvana and hope that nobody else will discover it.

They don’t want you there.

Problem is, it’s not Nirvana.

It is, however a haven for the pretentious, white, suburban, self-proclaimed shamans and gurus, touting their ayahuasca and peyote rituals to a bunch of lost, white, suburban, self-proclaimed spiritual influencers.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with experimenting with psychedelics for the occasional spiritual slap in the face, but I do believe there is a limit to what the human psyche can take without some proper guidance and a sense of direction with these practices.

There are two problems with all this in Ayampe:

First, most of these rituals and ceremonies are not being led by a proper shaman (curandero or paje) as they should be: by those native to the plants and rituals and bestowed with the honored title of shaman by their community after years of apprenticeship and training. Nope. They are being led by those aforementioned guru-types and divorced midwestern housewives.

And, second, they seem to be doing it a lot.

We saw flyers and announcements all over town for a different ceremony at least four days a week. I had a few conversations with some of the more lucid zombie-types who claimed were attending and partaking in these ceremonies several times a week.

That is just too much. Maybe some peyote microdosing, but a full, meet-your-demons, vomitous, pants-shitting dose of ayahuasca four times a week?

No thank you.

And, not to worry, but come Monday morning after a Sunday ceremony I am not going to be fighting you for your seat in the next one on Tuesday.

I am not a threat to you here. Relax.

Yes, Ayampe is a weird little place. At least once or twice a week, everyone seems to lose their mind over one of the resident expats doing a “DJ set” for some party. Then the entire town gets to stay awake until four in the morning, laying in bed listening to some divorced midwestern housewife’s over-amplified and distorted idea of art (if she isn’t busy running an ayahuasca ceremony), whether they like it or not.

Honestly, I did not. It was never very good.

The tourists and expats would flock to these events en masse, but you could go and listen to local music at a restaurant, performed by some very talented Ecuadorians, and there would be four people there. I don’t get it.

Again, I loved every interaction that we had with the locals, but with the impediment of my poor Spanish-speaking skills it was difficult to have meaningful conversations about life, the universe, and everything. That is on me. I am aware of how hypocritical this sounds, saying that I couldn’t communicate when I am in another country, but I genuinely do try. I have been working on my Spanish for a long time, and it turns out that I am just really bad at learning languages, so sometimes I would need to turn to an English speaker for those more in-depth chats.

Sadly, there were too few.

Perhaps I am just getting old, or out of touch with the life of the modern gen Z and millennial travelers, but I really, really missed the positive human interaction that we normally find in our travels. Unfortunately, I felt surrounded by exclusivity, pretension, and the cultural appropriation practice of “going to Ecuador to do the drugs, find myself, and monetize my amazing spiritualism on my vlog”.

Having said all this, I am grateful for the genuine smiles and welcoming interactions I was treated to every day by the Ayampe locals (as with everywhere else we have been in Ecuador). My morning walks were the highlight of many of my days, and I owe that to the lovely, human interactions I had with them in those early, sunrise strolls through this dusty, sometimes muddy, weird little town.