After months of traveling without incidents of any kind, my luck was bound to run out. The way odds and percentages work, I figure the probability of something unpleasant happening was getting higher and higher each day, combated only by my slow but continuously growing knowledge of the streets. Early this morning, though, perhaps because I was still groggy from a less than sufficient amount of sleep, that knowledge did nothing to avail me. A block and a ha...

Its hard to believe that I arrived in Ecuador only yesterday afternoon. At 4 in the morning of that day I dozed numbly in the back of a taxi rolling through the deserted streets of Buenos Aires, and at dusk on the same day I sat in an open air restaurant in Salinas - on Ecuador´s southern coast – staring at the Pacific Ocean and eating seafood with the country´s premier seabird expert. I discovered Ben Haase´s name in a book I pulled off ...