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Published: June 19th 2010
Crossing into Ecuador it became immediately apparent we had entered a very different country from Peru. For one the people were geniunely helpful, friendly and delighted to talk to anyone who would pass them the time of day. Such a change from Peru where we felt as though we were going to be ripped off, lied to and perved on every five seconds. While we are still on the well-trodden gringo trail in many ways, thankfully we appear to have left behind the hordes of gap yaaars! It was a very welcome change.
The border crossing between Peru and Ecuador was largely uneventful, aside from a few attempts to prize our passports from us, thankfully we were not naive enough to believe in the need to hand over our passports multiple times! We had approached this border with a level of trepidation as our trusty guidebooks and other people had warned us that this is one most dangerous and potentially difficult border crossings in south America - good times! The main danger I could asertain would be from the huge distances between the two borders - a whole town Huaquillas in Ecuador sits before border control. It is a horrible
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baños zip lininggrubby little town, filled with huge amounts of traffic taking up the gaps in the traffic with stalls selling everything and anything. Once at the bus station in this town we were instructed to take another bus to Cuenca, fine we put our luggage on the bus as usual, prepared to enter the bus, but we were informed that we would have to go ahead by taxi to border control in order to save time, so five of us unwittingly jumped into the cab, trusting and crossing everything. Turns out all was fine but it was a very odd and slightly bizarre entry into Ecuador. Our first taste of Ecuadorian buses was that they are hot, hot and uncomfortable, long gone are the semi-cama, cama, and air-con of Peruvian transportation! It was like being back in Bolivia all over again, only with high humidity to add to the fun.
Ecuador uses the US dollar as its currency, a fact of much debate and discussion among us all but something we still don´t really understand! We were, therefore, expecting everything to be highly priced, and our tiny budgets to not stretch very far here. Cuenca emerged as a pleasant surprise
against this theory, it was possible to have a reasonable meal for only a few dollars, and a bed for about the same cost. Unfortunately for us in our planning we had managed to skip the information that everything is closed on Sunday in Cuenca, by everything I mean everything, one restaurant was open at night and a few internet cafes. The food in Ecuador has also been a pleasant surprise, after craving curry for the past few months I discovered a replacement, the local spiced chicken stew Seco de Pollo which is cheap and delicious - brilliant news. Cuenca is a lovely relaxing city filled with cobbled streets, charming squares, and bucket loads of colonial architecture. We spent most of our time there wandering around the city, with its pretty whitewashed buildings reminiscent of sucre. Walked by the river, visited the flower market, some cathedrals standard city fare! On very street there are fruit sellers, selling pieces of tropical fruit from their wheeled carts, pineapple on a stick is my new favourite thing! I will miss all the freshly squeezed juices which are so cheap and so prevalent here. Cuencas claim to fame is that it is the home
of the panama hat, or as the locals call it the monticristi. It would not be a trip to Cuenca without a visit to at least one panama hat shop, endured hours of fun trying on hats of varying styles and colours. The shop we decided to patronise also made the hats so we were able to order hats to our exact specifications. Needless to say we are now wandering around south America complete with a selection of panama hats. Cuenca had felt such a welcoming, and friendly place that we had never once felt in danger or under threat at all, we had become quite blase about security, until our final morning when we witnessed a woman have the earings she was wearing ripped out of ears and stolen. The most bizarre crime but the speed with which it happened shocked us back into the south American reality.
Ecuador was always the country on our travels that we had failed to plan. It purely filled the gap between Peru and Colombia, and knowing we had a few weeks to explore this small country we just sort of decided to plan as we went along, coupled with some very
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limited and hashed plans in Mancora one hungover morning. We had originally invisaged that we would travel the spine of the country up through Riobamba to take the devils nose train ride, onto Baños for some outdoor activities before heading up to Quito. Volcan Tungurahua only 8 km from Baños, one of our planned stops, erupted shortly after we arrived in Ecuador shutting down the towns and roads around it, and rediring travel through that region as impossible. The eruption had two major effects on our trip - firstly we were forced to take a different route, heading to the coast instead, and secondly, the eruption was of a scale so large that it highly effected the weather bringing bucket loads of rain to most of the southern regions, although it took a while to materialise. With these new revised plans we left Cuenca for Guyaquil before getting a connecting bus to take us up the coast to Montanita or another coastal town. The journey from Guayaquil to Santa Elena was ridiculous! Ecuador is famous for its awful public transport, bus drivers are notoriously bad, under paid, over worked and, more often than not, drunk. There are above average numbers
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baños zip lining of crashes even by south american terms, a fact that we frequently tried to put to the back of our minds. This bus journey was one of those moments, he accelerated into every corner, the bus tilting to ridiculous levels, at some moments it felt like the wheels on one side left the ground, how the bus didnt flip I have no idea. In one particularly precarious corner the box of chicks sat in the overhead compartment above our heads came flying off, ensuing madness of people scrambling around the bus trying to catch the free, and escaping chicks. The whole experience was too hilarious. Arriving in Santa Elena a good 40 minutes early due to our invincible bus driver we were then bundled into a mini van by a very helpful local lady.
Bus travel in Ecuador has been pretty amusing, overnight bus journeys are hell due to a combination of speeding and endless corners, making it physically impossible to sleep or stay in the seat. A lesson for all: the back seats of these buses are bad news. Entering bus terminals is also a moment of mayhem, as soon as you walk through the door you are
bombarded by people shouting their destinations as they run towards you and try to grab an arm or part of your luggage the air is filled with a chorus of crazed shouts ´Quito, Quito´Guyuaquil, Tena, Quito, Cuenca´, ´lady where are you going?´ The duration of the bus journey every time we arrived at a small town the same madness would resume, bus conductors from competing companies will literally grab people and/or luggage and force them onto their buses - once they have your luggage on the bus you are hostage to their company! We had been totally used to the shouting out destinations throughout the whole of south America, but the man handling was a totally new experience. When we were in Guyuaquil all three of us were ambushed by competing bus companies literally pulling us in different directions.
Our five days on the coast were a mixture of the brilliant, the hilarious, and the disasterous! Unbeknown to us the Ecuadorian coast is covered in a thin layer of cloud through the summer, rendering the place horrendously humid and not particularly sunny. Nevertheless we had decided that as we had failed to surf in Mancora, due to the fault
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of ourselves and the sea, we were going to do it in Montanita without fail. We were staying at a cute beach house in the quiet end of the beach, full of hammocks, and palm trees it was very pleasant. A guy from the hostel and a local took the three of us out into the surf after a brief lesson on the sand establishing our standing positions, we were out into the surf. Unbelievably I stood up on my second wave, a brilliant yet frustrating fact as I spent the remaining hour trying to repeat this performance with mixed success - sometimes I could stand for a second, sometimes I was on my knees, sometimes I was wiped out by the surf after three seconds, and other times I just sort of forgot to get up and body boarded into the shore - which incidently is great fun and beats a bodyboard hands down! Hanneke turned out to be a bit of genius at it, Harry had more success than I did but took some very painful, if amusing, looking falls. I still have the bruises and grazes now, and I am mighty proud of them! The following day
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isla de la plata having met up with a group of guys we had made friends with at the start of our trip (Jon and Rich for future reference!) we decided to hire boards and give it a go. We were going to take it in turns so I watched the girls get into the water, unfortunately the waves were very choppy and close together, therefore we were never able to repeat the brilliance of the day before. We shall see what Brazil has in store, and I will keep you posted on our progress!
In our infinite wisdom we decided to move into the centre of town with the boys, and what ensued was a hilarious, yet random night. It started off with plenty of rum, maybe too much (if there is such a thing?!) and drinking games - always a bad move if you are me and harry! I managed to hold my own this time, Harry not so much, but then we were playing games she had never played before and it is a vicious circle, once you start loosing you get drunk, and then you cant play properly because you are too drunk! A classic moment for those of you
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isla de la plata who know the game 21s, was when she brilliantly and proudly exclaimed 20, 21 with a broad smile on her face! (Apologies to those of you who don´t know this game, there is not enough space or time to explain it!) After the rum ran out we hit cocktail alley, a dusty street linking the town and beach lined with small stalls selling every cocktail imaginable for the costly price of a few dollars. It´s all pretty basic, you sit in plastic chairs in a circle in front of the tiny stall, and try and block out the competing blaring music from the store next door. Reggaeton is the standard music choice here, if you don´t know it - Google it, surprisingly Harry and I are now a little addicted to it! We then all decided to visit the one and only club in town, a sort of assortment of bars, dance floor in a compound outside, with most importantly a swimming pool. We all sort of noted the swimming pool on arrival but no one said anything, more drink, how I was standing by this point who knows?! Harry and I were then escorted to the dance floor by
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blue footed boobies - isla de la plata our new Colombian friend Juan for an impromptu salsa lessson, before we knew it he had dragged us towards the pool. The whole group, predictably, ended up in the pool in their underwear for the next few hours, us girls being dunked, and thrown across the pool every few seconds....how we didn´t drown is a mystery. After wards we all decided to play the game of ´how many people can you fit in a cubicle shower´ - the answer is seven, although this did involve harry falling out face first getting stuck between the wall and the toilet.
The following morning we decided that we had had enough of sunless skies, and too much alcohol so moved on up the coast to Puerto Lopez in the heart of national park Machallila. It was not quite whale spotting season but we were told there was a chance we would see some, so in our enthusiasm we booked a trip to Isla de la Plata. Puerto Lopez was a really nice change from the touristic towns we had visited previously, normally just a quiet fishing town it opens its doors to tourism between June and August for whale watching season.
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montanita As a consequence it is bit of a tumbledown place, full of character, like many of the towns and villages we pass on our bus journey but never have reason to visit. Filled with dirty, grimy local bars consisting of a shack with earth floor, a selection of plastic chairs, and the customary bleary music, we discovered that while Sunday is a day of rest over most of south America in Puerto Lopez it is the day that every male in town gets blind drunk. By the end of the day we were passing men slumped in the street over their bottles of peach flavoured spirits that they seem to favour here. Along the seafront there were huge numbers of eateries (I cant really call them restaurants as they were purely benches and tables lined up underneath an overhanging) serving the freshest and most amazing seafood, which was delicious and the first time I have been able to eat fish in years, all good news.
Our day trip to Isla de la Plata was not the most successful as we failed to see any humpback whales. We did, however, get to wander round the island, to see blue footed
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snorkelling isla de la plata boobies - big birds with bright blue feet - nesting in the cliffs below and to walk among the big white Nazca boobies who were surprisingly friendly and curious. It was a pretty stunning coastline but would have been significantly more beautiful if the sun had been shining, we did get to see a tortoise and snorkled among some brightly coloured fish, the names of which I have forgotten, before returning to the mainland. We returned to pouring rain, monsoon style, which turned all of the dusty streets into a mud bath, this was shortly followed by an 18 hour power cut. As amusing as it was when it all started, it soon got very tiresome, we huddled in one of the few places that had generators in town before using it as an excuse to have an early night. With Baños reopened we booked our tickets out of Puerto Lopez as soon as we could and headed there via Quito. In all our time in Ecuador we have only had a few days with no rain whatsoever, even if it started off sunny you could guarantee rain in the day at some point, the locals had varying causes from
the volcanic eruption to the moon being to blame, either way we were getting very fed up with rain with reports of beautiful weather back home not helping the matter!
Our frustration with getting ripped off and tourist rates came to a head in our transits through Quito. We have all been in South America long enough now to know how much cabs should cost, however getting ripped off becomes an impossibility no matter how many times you say that it is "muy caro!" it is to not avail. Bus stations are a prime location for such an occurance - one taxi driver will approach you with a totally unreasonable fare, and if you go to any other taxi driver they instantly ask the initial taxi driver how much he was charging, it then become impossible to leave the station for less no matter how long you stand there or how annoyed you get! It does get frustrating having to pay to do everything, from using the toilet to, the most bizarre, paying to leave bus stations and it is normally the smallest, most pathetic amount of money that no one has change for. I don´t need to have
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nazca boobie isla de la plata the no change rant again, but it is definitely a very south American phemominum.
There are two approaches to Baños - it is famous for both its relaxing spas and natural hot springs, and also for its adreneline filled activities in the mountains, volcanoes and valleys that surround it. We opted for the latter - with the ideas that we would go both zip lining, and bdige jumping in the following days. Our plans kept getting changed because of the continuing downpours, it was not until our last day there that we actually got to see the mountains and volcanos that surround Baños as they were previously bathed in cloud. It is a beautiful place nestled among green covered mountains and hills, with the Rio Pastaza cutting through it and extending down into the jungle. One of Ecuador´s most famed and beautiful road routes follows the river down to a town called Puyo, passing cascading waterfalls and steep cliffs. It was here that we did our ziplining. As beautiful as it this road is it is also pretty dangerous, the day we went two tourists and their go-kat went missing, our friends Richella and Saskia were unfortunate to discover
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one of the bodies while white water rafting a few days later. Absolutely horrific and terribly sad. We were completely unaware we had to walk through the jungle being bitten alive without mosquito repellent, it was all worth it though, as the zip lining was incredibly good fun speeding ontop of the jungle canopy 250 metres above the Rio Pastza valley below. The following morning we had decided we would go and throw ourselves off San Francisco bridge high above the river attached to rope swing. You free fall the first twenty metres before swinging the remaining 80 metres. I have to admit I chickened out of it at the last minute, having been put in my harness and on top of the bridge. I´m not sure why, I am not particularly scared of heights but I had definitely freaked myself out watching Hanneke and Harry do it. Kudos to Harry though she is very scared and succeeded in jumping off the bridge with a small push.
Our arrival in Quito signalled the end of our wet and rainy days, but a return to altitude, I have no missed the breathlessness, the struggling purely to walk up stairs and
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isla de la plata small inclines. We had heard all sorts of bad rumours about Quito about it being horrendously dangerous, an ugly place, a dump and full an extaordinarily large number of strange people. We have been pleasantly suprised since being here, the ´old town´which is the historical centre of Quito is very beautiful full of colonial buildings, elegant plazas and steep streets. Very reminiscent of the many other colonial cities we have visited. Admitedly at night everything aside from a few asados, and corner shops close but so far it seems this city has a very unfair reputation. Away from the central areas, old town is full of twisting, winding, cobbled streets, filled with tiny shops selling all manner of goods, on every corner their is an asado selling barbequed meat with potatoes or plantain and the plethera of fried chicken stalls and cafes which people all over south america seem to adore. It has a sort of faded charm, it is clear this is not a wealthy area but everyone is as friendly as we have come to expect Ecuadorians. We have well and truly donned our tourist boots here, leaving in the morning full of enthusiasm to tackle the sights
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of the old town - a largely unheard of phenemonum in our travels, sightseeing is a purely afternoon activity. Anyway, we headed for the Plaza Grande the central hub of politics and religion in Quito, it is a picture perfect square, all whitewashed buildings, arranged around a central statue ringed with palm trees. On one edge sits the impossing presidential palace, which we discovered was free to visit. If you{ve visited Buckingham Palace it is somewhat of a let down, but it fun all the same to play the standard games of attempting to distract the guards, blowing kisses at them much to the locals amusement. Perhaps the highlight of our little sightseeing was the La Compañia de Jesus an incredibly extravagant Jesuit church. It took 163 years to construct with seven tons of gold to cover the interior from top to bottom. It is an awe-inspiring sight, and definitely the most beautiful church or cathedral we have seen in south america, however it does border on the obscene and opulence gone made in some respects.
Our last day in Quito we ventured across the city through new town, not without stopping in a massive shopping centre. Shopping centres
have become our little piece of home which we have come to love for brief periods of sanity and familiarity among the mahem. Navigating many of Quito´s transport systems we made it to the Equator, which is not as simple or straighforward as it seems. In the days before GPS a monument was built on what was thought to be the Equator, years later a group of US scientists turned up, as they do, a noted that the monument was in the incorrect position. There are still areas that are considered the Equator - only in south america. We visited both, stood with a foot in each hemisphere, walked along the Equator and took the standard photos. We also played the various experiments to prove we were on the Equator such as balancing an egg on nail, watching how water pours straight out of plug, how you loose your strength on the Equator and how some people cant walk on the Equator line without being pulled off, myself and harry not included!
On the way up north to the Colombian border we stopped in the town of Otavalo for our final taste of andean culture. On the journey here
I was sat next to an indigenous lady, who stank of body odour and urine, one thing I won´t miss! Hopefully they have discovered deoderant in Colombia. Our reason for coming here was to visit the Saturday market, for girls who love to shop a trip to south America without visiting its biggest market would be a travesty. It is huge, stalls, upon stalls, filling the sizeable square and its side streets. Everything was for sale; jewellery, clothing, material, artworks, bags, hats, cooked food, vegetables, ornaments, the odd tat-stall...you name it you could probably find it. The stalls were tightly packed, into weaving corridors, once you were inside it was like a maze. People would come bustling through carrying everything on there back as they do everywhere here, including chickens! We spent all our remaining dollars and some on a lot of souvenirs, needless to say our houses are probably going to look like dens from south America when we get back! It was fun to haggle but we were mindful to the fact that the odd dollar meant a lot more to the sellers than to us. This was also the day of the first England game in the
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jungle to zip lining baños World Cup, and all fired up to watch it we scouted the town for a place to see it. To our dismay everyone here was supporting the opposing team USA, so we snuck off to watch it by ourselves. Damn American imperialism!
Apologies for the long blog, it´s been a busy few weeks!
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Gary
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Great blog. We are travelling to Ecuador in October and reading all about your adventures in Banos, Quito and Otavalo, all places we are visiting, makes me want to pack up now and head right over there. Enjoy the rest of your trip.