Day 8 – Crossing the border we hope! – Pictures to come

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Not knowing what time the bus leaves we decide to sleep until about 8-30. We get up have a fantastic breakfast and then taxi to the Autobus terminale. We dodge or ignore all the spruikers, pushing us to their bus line and find the one photographed in the web page. (I had uploaded the page as a pdf to my iphone, so it was readily available to refer to. We go in but the buss doesn’t leave until 6-30….ok an overnight bus trip across a dangerous border, but carieandjonathon did the same it says so, on their web site. We buy two tickets here as outlined in the web site. We now have 7 hours to kill before the bus leaves. We catch a cab to the Panama hat factory in Cuenca as Renata had said it was good to see if we had time. We got there it was closed…ahhh yes it is Sunday after all. Oh we3ll we’ll use the map we got at the airport and go see the city centre. We got there and there were markets great! All selling xmas hats paper cards, etc etc etc. We went into the awesome church and a service was underway, this was great, the square outside had beautiful birds singing and we sat for a while. We decided to continue walking top another park to see the Planetarium, after walking the streets of Cuenca with all our backpacks we found the park, and a bicycle was being given away to a lucky girls in a competition, we eventually get to the planetarium, it’s closed…ah yes…it is Sunday afte3r all. Ok we rest awhile and decide to go to another park recommended. We get there it’s there soccer field with a 20 foot brick wall around it. We rest. Oh well back to the church and Central Square it was nice there. We walked all the way back to the square had an awesome lunch including amazing ice cream, in this brilliant safe and sat in the park awhile and rested. The clouds were looming so we went to the Autobus Terminales by taxi and waited 2 hours there (Yawn! Very very boring kids Xmas show complete with screeching USA clown man and Screeching Ecuador clown man – 2 HOURS) In hind sight we should have gone back to the hostel at least we could have had music there.

Finally we board the bus and we are on our way to the unknown border. It is an overnight service so we try to get some sleep in the uncomfortable seats. The bus (Pullman Sucre) went down this incredibly winding dirt road with sheer drops on some sides, it was a terrible ride at night, Danika got very bad case of motion sickness…easy to do, she threw up out the window and was not a happy girl. I gave her some Kwells and took one myself as a precaution. The bus dropped us at 11pm in <XX> to meet another bus (CIFA) an international bus that would take us across the border troy Piura in Peru. We unload our gear and sit on some seats in the middle of the night in an unknown part of an unknown city waiting for the connecting bus. After about 45 minutes a guy comes out and says to us in Spanish, that the bus has been delayed and is expected to arrive in 4 hours……you are kidding me.
Oh a word about South American Buses. They rarely leave on time; they continually stop for spruikers, political ADVETISERS, BEGGARS, traders of all description. I was amazed one lady was encouraging people to vote for someone for the presidency, she talked in Spanish for about 20 minutes, I could hear her through my ear plugs. She then gave everyone on the bus (except us-we obviously were not voting) some teeth whitener for Free! Several times people got on to give us their sad stories AD PEOPLE GAVE THEM MONEY AFTER TJHIS. Most often it was people selling refilled soft drink bottles or Chittles (Plantain thinly cut and fried like potato chips….hey they’re nice I like them). But how many chittles can you eat in a day…seemingly pounds of them, we had a constant stream of peddlers peddling many things, even balloons, singing birds, toys, drums souvenirs, etc. etc.

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