La Bamba in Riobamba

After working a 2 hour shift on Saturday morning we have the weekends to ourselves so a group of us from the centre decided to do something touristy. This was how we found out about the Devil´s Nose Train (Nariz del Diablo) Riobamba. We had heard Riobamba was one of Ecuadors liveliest cities with "old colonial charm, with cobbled streets, pastel-colored buildings, stately squares, and an overflowing Saturday market." So armed with a theme tune, cleverly changing the lyrics of La Bamba to Riobamba (we thought it was hilarous at the time) we set off to Riobamba.

We caught a local bus from Tambillo (where the volunteer centre is) to Riobamba and arrived 3 1/2 hours later on a random street and caught another bus to the centre of town.

The train leaves from Riobamba, is roughly a five hour ride and takes you through beautiful Ecuadorian landscapes, riding through hills, valleys and cloud forests. The last part of the trip invoves switchbacks to make it down a 45 degree descent (I´ll pretend to know what that exactly means, Adam, I´m sure you can explain).

However, the one thing about Ecuador is that they make every tourist attraction impossible to work out. We turned up at the train station to buy our tickets for the next morning but found the boleteria (ticket office) closed. Told to come back at 4pm, we turned up at 3.50pm to find that the tickets had sold out. Right! So now what.....

A little man near the boleteria told us that he could pick us up at 5.45am in bus, drive us to Alausi, another town an hour and a half away where you can pick up the train at a different point just to do the switchback bit. So, having already made it halfway we decided to trust him. The next morning at 5.30am we sat shivering waiting for the bus.

A little yellow van drove past and one of the guys Simon jokingly said, "our bus has arrived." Unfortunately, it wasn´t a joke and soon the 10 of us and 10 others were being crammed into this tiny little mini bus. Think white transit van size. It was another slightly scary Ecuadorian experience and a cramped 1 hour and 1/2 with my face squished up to the windscreen but I did get a good view of the landscape.

Arriving at Alausi, we bought our typical tourist woolly hats and ponchos to keep us warm on the train and queued again to buy our tickets for the 9.30am train. Again, nothing is easy here. The guy could only offer us 10 tickets (there were now 11 of us after bumping into someone we knew) and two would be standing. The next option was to wait for the midday train but the man also for some reason couldn´t sell us the tickets for that either. So we spent 3 hours drinking coffee, playing cards, wearing our wolly hats hoping that we could get our tickets at 11.30am for the midday train.

Hurray! Finally, we were sat on the train, nervously awaiting the switchbacks and waiting for the train to derail as it´s often supposed to do. You also used to be able to sit on top of the train but after a few decapitations of Japanese tourists that´s now banned. So the train headed off. Again, we saw some more great views, did the switchbacks and then a quick hour later we arrived back at Alaussi. It was to say, a little disappointing but at least we giggled at how far we had travelled, how long we had spent on a bus and how early we had got up to do Ecuador´s most famous tourist attraction.

Another 6 hours of buses we arrived back at Tambillo for our next week of work.

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