Good Bye Ecuador... Hello Peru

Hola

I feel like I haven’t done much in the last week except eat food and take buses, but here we go. I absolutely loved Banos - the quiet gringo town in Ecuador. I was hanging out with a very cool girl from South Africa (whose parents own an ostrich farm, yet I am the one who has ridden one, not her), and a slightly high maintenance vegetarian British boy. After another 2 hour Spanish class in the morning, we rented bikes and started on the road to Puyo, mostly downhill but with some major peddling required.

Along the way we say waterfall after waterfall until we reached the “big one”. We walked down a massive hill into the valley and had to pay $1 to get the super close view and crawl behind part of the waterfall. Ya, the guy told us that they have spent 15 years carving part of the wall out so we can go behind, and it was about the size of a manhole but crooked and slippery wet. So unsafe but slightly entertaining.

When we were tired and no longer eager to bike, we stopped one of the buses back to Banos. This guy jumped off the bus, climbed up a ladder, and basically one-handed, threw our bikes on top. I was seriously impressed and it only cost us 75 cents, including the cost of the bike transport.

Back in Banos I found some wonderful treats to enjoy. After a recommendation from Mike in Quito, I found a small cafe that served the most amazing creamy vegetable soups served with garlic bread for $1.50, and then she also made up some amazing apple sugary crepes for the same price. While I was walking around looking for treats for my next bus ride I found a man selling the most moist dulce de leche cake with fruit inside. It blows away any banana bread ever and the guy wouldn’t give me the recipe, said it was a secret. I know have to some serious internet time to find a substitute recipe for the best piece of cake ever!

My last night in Banos I met Eng from London, a cute little Chinese girl who was planning on going to Cuenca the next morning. While a group of us went to the local thermal bath in town, which was amazing, I decided she would become my new travel best friend. We got up for the 7:30 bus, stopped for a fruit juice on the way, and killed some time gabbing during out 8 hour bus ride to Quenca - a beautiful colonial city in southern Ecuador.

Eng might look like she is 80 pounds, but the girl likes to eat so we had a riot walking around town for 2 days, eating pastries from an amazing Dutch bakery, gelato, or from giant roasted pigs in the market. The town was having their 189th celebration of independence which made for loud parties, fun parades, and lots of people. Accommodation was sparse so we had to fork out $21 for a double room, and were happy we got even that.

For Halloween we decided on wearing the only dresses we had, and sporting some masquerade style masks we found at a party store. I then shoved feathers all through my hair and we got to drinking vodka, and lots of it. Our hostel was having a party so we hung out there for awhile, entertained by a bi-sexual guy from Bogota who spent 2 days on his Victoria’s secret angel wings, and had his short shorts undone so that pubic hair was part of his costume. Oh, and he made us all dance with him.

We finally made our way to Zu - where the place was totally packed, and the only people who were dressed up for Halloween were a handful of foreigners. It was so hot in there, so we scoped out a platform above the dance floor with lots of space and spent the next hour there. Best costume of the night goes to some white guy in a guinea pig costume - Guinea pig is a delicacy around here, everyone eats them... it’s on my list of things to try - but man did I laugh. Best Costume Ever!

We downed pizza on the way home and spent the next day poking around and chowing at the local market. Oh - I had oatmeal at a cafe and was in heaven, until the older American man who was sitting with us started up on all his conspiracy theories all over the world, and how I should tell everyone at home not to get the H1N1 vaccine because it is bad for you. He told me that H1N1 was created by humans to control the population -they dug up some fat lady who was the leader of her village in Canada who died of the Spanish Flu, and used that to create it. At least the CIA did. Crazy town... gotta love Americans.

This is how our trip to Peru started. From Cuenca at 1 pm, we took a 5 hour bus to Loja... this was fine. Then we bought our overnight bus tickets for 11pm that night. We decided to splurge on dinner since we wouldn’t be paying for accommodation, so we found a meatatarian/Argentinean style restaurant where I paid $7 for an enormous piece of pork, bbq’d and cooked to perfection. Then some magical little sauces on the table made it taste even better. Eng thought we should have taken a picture, but I said no... I don’t want any proof I could eat all that. Meat sweats kept me up all night and I had a shit time on the bus, although the border crossing was quick and painless, and the pigs running around there were slightly entertaining at 4am.

We arrived in Puira at 7 am, during our hour wait for the 3 hour bus to Chiclayo I checked out the fruit juice scene, there are ladies who make fresh squeezed OJ for about 30 cents Canadian. Yippee! We had turkey sandwiches and papaya juice at our next stop... then 4 hours to Trujillo.

The next day we took the local bus to Huanchaco, a surf town with traditional fishers using reed boats. The weather was crap so we just walked around and had an amazing lunch at a vegetarian restaurant. Vegetables in South America consist of fried potatoes or fried plantains, so to find a place that made pumpkin soup, spinach salad and vegetable quiche for less than 4 dollars, we were in heaven.

I was planning on visiting Chan Chan and the temple of the moon and the sun, but since Eng doesn’t like ruins, and I am still tired, and now cranky because my laptop stopped letting wireless work, I didn’t see any ruins. Sorry Lena and Adrienne, I can always look at your pictures again.

Tonight we have an 8 hour overnight bus to Lima. We got to check out the bus we are going on and it is plush. We have leather seats that recline down, and we were able to pick the front two seats on the upper level, so no one can recline in front of us. We’ve been excited all day for the bus; it is sad what simple things amuse us here. Gotta go get some turkey sandwiches and some churrio thing they have here... deep fried dough sprinkled with sugar and with caramel sauce inside. Yum yum.

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