New Year's Celebrations in Zaruma

By midnight on New Year's Eve in Zaruma, it was just too dangerous to be on the street, what with all the staggering drunken men, the liquor bottles being smashed on the boardwalk, and the trucks racing haphazardly through the streets. I plopped my feet up on my balcony railing to watch the show.

A half dozen pick-up trucks filled with drunken revelers raced back and forth and up and down the main street, the guys cheering and screaming as they chucked things on to the road and clung to the sides of the truck. A few almost fell off, and as the night wore on, the trucks grew more crowded, with men clinging on to hoods and windscreens.

Drunken men also staggered up and down the wooden boardwalk, openly guzzling liquor and urinating on to the road as they clung to the light standards. They dumped their booze into plastic cups and smashed the empty bottles on the street, and there was so much glass on the street that I thought it was part of the annual ritual. Out of nowhere, an old woman appeared and stepped into the street and put a small bag down. She almost got run over as she stood there clapping her hands and doing some strange little dance. When she finished her extemporaneous performance, she picked up her bag and moved down the street half a block, and did the same thing all over again.

At the other end of the street, somebody had lit a pile of garbage, and a fireball quickly shot up towards the second floor window. I ran into my room and gathered up my money, my passport and my flashlight and stuffed them into my purse and prepared for evacuation, just in case. But when I flew out to the balcony again to check the fire, the flames had been doused, and the garbage was sizzling and smoking on the pavement. It was 1:30 in the morning, and the party showed no sign of a let-up.

I sat down on the balcony again, and watched as another drunk tottered down the boardwalk. He tried to stay upright, but he tripped and fell backwards, his arms flapping like a seagull as he reached out to grab a lamp standard. Half on the boardwalk and half on the street, he lay there semi-conscious in the dark as trucks screamed by, narrowly missing his head. Nobody realized he was there. Another crowd was staggering up the street, so I was relieved  that they would rescue him. But they just shuffled up the street to where he lay, glanced at him, and mosied on. Two boys then approached him and poked at him with a stick, as if probing a dead fish, before they ran off laughing. 

It seemed that nobody was interested to see if he was even dead or alive, until two men stopped and stooped over him, recognizing their friend. They called a name, slapped his face, yelled at him some more, then pulled on his arms and helped him up. They struggled under his weight but finally, with his arms wrapped around their necks and their arms wrapped around his waist, they staggered off. I noticed more smoke coming from the other end of town, but I said the hell with it and went to bed.

I fell asleep before the revelry was all over, but the next morning when I looked at the debis littering the street, it looked like a bomb had exploded and a building had collapsed. It was going to be one hell of a clean-up. Those few that weren't hungover were out there sweeping up glass and garbage and paper cups and empty whiskey bottles and hosing down storefronts and sidewalks. Some men had already started drinking again. I told the proprietor of my hotel about the man laying on the street and asked if anybody had been killed in town amongst all the fires, bottle-throwing, and drunken driving. He said that nobody had been reported missing or dead, unlike the previous year, so it had been a great success.