August 15th Our only day in Cuenca. Nothing really exciting to do, just wandering around, but it is a gorgeous town. It is neat, clean, pretty buildings, no sky scrapers, a nice river and fairly safe. We started off at a Panama Hat factory which was one of the original makers of the hat, used by Ecuadorians before being exported to Panama for use during the building of the Panama Canal where they became famous. It was a really interesting tour and the hats can take from less than a day to make up to a year depending on how small the weave is. The longest part of the tour was spent in the hat shop at the end where everyone tried on the hundreds of hats available and many people bought one. For lunch a
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