Ecuador 2

Overview

In Ecuador we spent an intensive week in Quito, learning Spanish, and living with a local family. We were robbed at the bus station, which involved some excitement with gun carrying special agents.We stayed on in Quito a week longer than planned in an attempt to recover our stuff, and eventually travelled on the rooftop of a train for five hours, south to Ambato. We climbed up a 5023m volcano in Banos and went clothes shopping in the Indian markets in Cuenca.

Getting the train south to Ambato

The train only runs once a week, on Saturdays. For all of the passengers massed at the station, it was an exciting occasion. Teenagers climbed onto the roofs of the cargo wagons at the front. We climbed aboard the first class carriage, an ancient wooden wagon, and secured our packs with coil locks to the overhead rack. Food sellers plied their wares, throwing things up to the kids on the roof. The train left a few minutes late, and jerked it's way through the backstreets of Southern Quito, passing a colourful Indian fruit and veg market which stretched for about a mile alongside the track. We eventually broke free from the outskirts of Quito to the lush valley in the Avenue of Volcanoes.		Seven hours of roof surfing to Ambato!
	Either side of us were towering mountains, their peaks often lost in clouds. This is by no means a fast train. It averaged about 18mph, and took 3 hours to reach Cotopaxi, one of Ecuador's highest mountain, which is visible from Quito. Quite a lot of people got off here, which meant lots more room on the roof, so we clambered up and staked our turf. It was much more fun up there, the views were much better, and there was a festive atmosphere. With the train running so infrequently, it's quite an event. In every town and village people stopped to wave. Kids ran up to the track, dogs chased the train, cars hooted. Katie compared it to being on a carnival float. At times it was uncomfortable, like when it started to rain. Sometimes it was scary, like crossing rickety bridges over gorges, and at times it was dangerous, dodging low branches and telegraph wires. One girl lost her hat - knocked off by a wire - lucky it wasn't her head. The 7-hour journey seemed to pass in no time, and it was sad to finally arrive in Ambato.

Ambato

Ambato is an ugly town, a sprawl of concrete. The old town was completely destroyed in an earthquake in 1949, it looks like they could do with another one. We looked for a bar for hours - couldn't find one and had to drink at a fried chicken joint. We looked for a restaurant. Couldn't find one - ate greasy fried chicken again! We took a room at the Hotel San Ignacio - pleasant enough - apart from the wedding party above us that went on until 5am. We had thought about staying on for the market on Monday, supposedly quite spectacular, but couldn't face it, and caught a bus to Banos.

Banos

The bus journey to Banos goes through the colourful and affluent Indian village of Salasaca, renowned for it's fine rugs. Here, even the men wear traditional costume, a black poncho over white trousers and a cream hat.
Cuy - roasting in a Banos restaurant	The next village, Pelilio is the jeans capital of Ecuador. It's here that all the fake Levis and Wranglers are made. Everyone with so much as a garden fence to spare was selling jeans. Cuy, or guinea pig is a local speciality here, and we passed several restaurants with gruesome looking spits with guinea pigs roasting over hot coals, heads still on! Banos is a lovely town at the bottom of a steep valley. It attracts a lot of tourists for the amazing climbing, trekking and horse-riding on offer. It also has a selection of hot baths fed from natural mineral rich spring water. We found lodgings at the Hotel Orquideas, which has clean rooms, own bathroom and a beautiful garden for just $11 a night. We explored the town and went into the Basilica to see the shrine to the Virgen Rosario of Banos, a local women who reportedly was seen in the street with a straw ht on, performing miracles. Outside the Basilica, stalls were hawking all manner of tacky religious paraphernalia. Katie bought a £0.50 pendant, and I bought a plastic gear knob with an image of the virgin embedded in it.
Banos sits at the bottom of a spectacularly steep sided valley high up in the Andes. On one side is the 5023m volcanic peak, Tungurahua. It's a formidable climb, so we engaged the services of a guide to take us up it on a two day expedition starting the following day. We spent the morning getting our supplies together, and built our own mini mountain of chocolate bars. In the afternoon we thought we'd better get our legs used to the idea of severe exercise and took in a four hour hike up the side of the valley, climbing over 800m up to the 'eagle's nest' village of Runtun behind the town and across to the statue of the virgin of Banos. On the way back down, we stopped in at an upmarket hotel perched behind the town, called the Luna Resort, where we had a couple of very welcome Irish Coffees. I doubted we'd get such luxuries in our mountain refuge 3800m up Tunguruhua tomorrow.		Peasant farm above Banos
Mate de Coca Tea Bags A must have at 4000m	I was right. There is no Irish coffee up Tungurahua, but there is coca tea. At 9am sharp, we hefted our pack containing sleeping backs, spare clothes, 12 bars o chocolate and 8 litres of water along to the Amazonias expeditions office, where we'd booked the trip. Here we picked up an awesome array of climbing stuff, balaclavas, mittens, rope, waterproofs, wellies and crampons. This was going to get quite serious. "These er crampons, they're just a precaution aren't they?" Katie asked nervously "No, you must wear them to grip in the ice" was the straight reply. I think Katie thought she was going for a Sunday afternoon stroll - wrong! We bundled ourselves and our expanding bag into the back of a camionetta - essentially a pickup truck with bench seats and pretensions of becoming a bus when it grows up. It was a rough journey of over an hour up bendy mountain dirt tracks. We were starting at an altitude of 2800m, and already, the views were superb though somewhat ominous with clouds swirling up the valley below us.
Our guide, Miguel Rodriguez Sanchez, was an ox of a man with legs like telegraph poles and a barrel chest. He was a nice man, a bit of a joker and one of the most experienced guides in the town. Though only 25 years old, he's been guiding for 10 years. His father was the first guide in the region. We were to ascend to a mountain refuge at 3800m where we would rest for several hours to become acclimatised to the altitude before making a push for the summit at 2am. The path up to the refuge used to be an old logging trail.
The whole mountain used to be swathed in tropical cloud forest, but it's all gone now, chopped down for fuel or construction. Ox trains used to drag the logs down the trail we were walking on, which accounted for the fact that it was like a giant rut with 8ft high mud walls for much of the way, and unfortunately it was very muddy. This made it tough going, especially with the altitude, we found ourselves gasping for breath. It meant that the views weren't too great either. We did see a mule in a small paddock at one point with an erection as big as a parking meter, which was quite a laugh, but otherwise it was just slog slog slog, gasp, rest and more of the same. It's important to pace yourself carefully in the thin air, since overexertion comes on fast and can lead to serious respiratory and circulatory problems such as odaema requiring a hasty return and hospitalisation. We took a long three and a half hours to reach the refuge a basic hut impossibly balanced on a muddy ledge 3800m high.		View from Tungurahua refuge hut, High above the clouds
I hoped the foundations were good. I was stunned at how anybody could have managed to construct such a house in this remote inhospitable place. There was no heating however, and it was bitterly cold. Clouds crowded around below us, occasionally clearing to provide tantalizing glimpses of the towns and hamlets far below, as if viewed from an aeroplane window. Miguel prepared us some rolls and some coca leaf tea. The coca leaf helps the metabolism to adjust o the altitude, slowing the heart rate down. We went for a snooze upstairs, wrapped in seven layers of clothing, and inside our multi-season sleeping bags we were still cold. We had to hang around for eight hours minimum to acclimatise before making the final 1200m push to the summit. Miguel woke us at nine, and we ate more food, a delicious supper of thick vegetable and chicken soup.
Mountain madness syndrome - at 4100m up Tunguruhua - just before we decided to give up.	We played some cards drank tea and rested some more. At 2am we arose and carefully checked our gear into the pack. Katie was very nervous about carrying on. She'd struggled getting up to the refuge, and that was in daylight. Now it was very cold, very dark and the weather had closed in. An icy cold drizzle was falling outside and the wind was now upto a force five. After considerable discussion, she decided to join us, so we donned head lamps and crept out into the dark hell outside. The incline went from steep to ridiculously steep. It was murderous. The only way to handle it was to count out the steps one to ten, and rest at ten. We were now well above the treeline and the wind was whipping across the gravelly slopes unhindered. Katie groaned "I just wish we could go back". Shortly, her wish came true. After climbing just a few hundred metres Miguel advised us that it would be stupid to go on. "If the weather is like this here, it will be much worse on the summit - too dangerous." I was gutted, "Chucha Madre!" I swore, "Que verga, que mal suerte", but I had to accept the decision. Katie on the contrary was deliriously happy. We turned back, and recovered the ground in about a fifth the time it had taken to climb up.
It was 4.45am by the time we got back soaked through, cold and dejected. "More tea vicar?" "Yes please." We grabbed a bit more sleep then at 8am we packed up the gear and started the rest of the descent. The overnight rain had turned the trail into even more of a mud slick, a foot deep in parts. It was like a bobsleigh run in mud - you just had to resign yourself to getting plastered in the stuff. It only took an hour and a half to get down and annoyingly we had to wait for two hou rs for the camionetta to leave, along with a group of campesinos; a man who looked like Fidel Castro, another chap with a pot belly and no teeth, and Papi, a watery eyed old man in a busted trilby hat with trousers held up by string and a 4ft long machete. We shared our remaining chocolates with them - after all you don't want to make enemies of a bloke with a 4ft machete.		Hanging around with Fidel Castro's brother

Riobamba

We slept very well last night, and didn't manage to crawl out of bed until ten - this is one of the undoubted joys of travelling. We had breakfast at an arty farty place called the café cultura. The muesli had the consistency of vomit. It tasted like it too!. It was raining quite persistently in Banos, so we mooched around looking for postcards as we waited for the mid day bus to our next destination Riobamba.

The bus took a circuitous route around impossibly steep mountains. The bus was full of locals travelling back from the market. Buses are used as a means of goods transportation by the poor. An indian man in a trilby tried flagged us down and tried to load up twenty crates of onions, but the driver wasn't having it, In several places the road had been washed completely away by recent rains, and the bus had to edge precariously around a makeshift muddy ledge.

Riobamba is a much larger town than Banos, slightly slummy. The best time to come here is on a Saturday for the weekly market, supposedly one of the best in the country. Today was a Thursday, and there wasn't much happening. There are surprisingly few places to eat and drink here. In fact the only restaurants in town are rather nasty greasy fried chicken joints with plastic seating and bright striplighting. We opted for an establishment called 'Chicken Dog' which amazingly is recommended by the South American handbook. We watched the telly as we munched our chips.

Did you ever wonder what ex Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson is up to these days. Well she's an Ecuadorian TV star, compering a programme called Sorpresa Sorpresa. Well we were so surprised we didn't stop laughing for about fifteen minutes.

We had more luck finding a good restaurant for breakfast the following day. There were some places outside the back of the bus station that do a mean breakfast. Local indians were tucking in to enormous plates of rice and stew. I opted for a fried egg and steaming cup of coffee. We were off south to Cuenca, a five and a half hour trip through fantastic Andean scenery. There are reckoned to be over 45 separate indian tribes in Ecuador, and we spotted subtle variations in clothing and facial features. In the village of Canar, they wear minute bowler hats, like party hats, adorned with ribbons. As usual the bus was used by locals as a goods transport. One family was moving house, and loaded several items of furniture onto the roof, including a chest of drawers.

Cuenca

Cuenca is Ecuador's third largest city. What it lacks in sophistication it more than makes up for with its colonial charm. There are many markets, but to our disappointment, the locals seem to me more interested in 'ropas americana' - cheap jeans and t-shirts than traditional alpaca jumpers. I eventually found a stall selling great wool jackets, and haggled with the owner a while before buying one. It's very itchy, but Katie assures me it looks very 'cool' - so that's all right then. The local speciality for breakfast is a curious mixture of popped maize with scrambled eggs. I decided to give it a go - but found it to be pretty revolting. It was raining in the streets and we spent the morning trudging through puddles on errands, developing photos, changing money, collecting laundry.
We had a flight booked the following day from Tumbes in Northern Peru to Cusco. We had to think about leaving Ecuador. We felt a bit cheated here - spent too long in Quito chasing after robbers. It was an arduous bus journey out of the Andes. We descended for a full five hours - a massive 2800m drop to the coast. The temperature and humidity rose spectacularly as we dropped. The road had seen better days and was heavily pot-holed. Unfortunately, the bus had no suspension and it was very uncomfortable, so much so that the bus conductor had to rush up and down the bus with bags for people to be sick in. As usual, we were the only gringos on the bus, and people stared at us like we were from the planet zog. A scrawny old man sat had a sack with him which he placed on the floor. I nearly jumped out of my skin when it started moving down the aisle. It was full of chickens, who were very lucky to survive the trip given the crush of people on board. The bus stopped briefly in a mountain town called Santa Isobella, where market traders were basting whole pig carcasses in large streetside braziers and hawking pork crackling and deliciously tender meat. I bought some coconut from a negro with no fingers. As you get closer to the coastal plains, the negro population increases. These are the garifuna, descendants of slaves brought here by the first white settlers. After four solid hours of descent we reached the muggy coastal city of Machala where we had to change buses to take us to the Peruvian border.

You are reading the story of Adrian and Katie's travels through the Americas between May and August 1998.
Adrian and Katie put the rat race on hold for a year to travel the world.

                           

Adrian & Katie's World Tour News - Ecuador 2                                             Last Updated: 29 August 2002
Web Page by Adrian Ball  (email: adrian.ball@virgin.net)