La Nariz del Diablo

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Ok, so after arriving from Baños we spent one night in Riobamba in a hostel called Los Shyris near the train station. We bumped in to Stuart, an Australian guy that we did the Guagua hike with in a restaurant that night. He was in Riobamba for the same reason as us, to do the Devil's Nose train journey to Alausi - sitting on the roof of the train. This is a train run pretty much solely for tourists and one of the few (maybe only) train routes still in operation in Ecuador. The restaurant that we met Stuart in wasn´t great so we warned him against it (a far from accurate lonely planet recommendation). Next morning he kept us two seats on top of the train, we got there for about 6am, a bit later than him. We had been stopped all along the way from the hostel to the train station by people selling food and renting cushions. We invested in a couple of cushions, definitely a good idea, we ended up sitting on top of the train for about 4 hours in total. We were pretty stiff by the end of it but our bums weren´t as numb as they could have been. It was pretty cold on top of the train but the scenery was beautiful. We had a great view of the snow-capped Chimborazo and a glimpse into peoples lives. We could see farmers out in their fields, they have no tractors or other machinery so it is all really manual. For some reason they all keep their animals tied up in fenced fields, usually by the ears. These animals seem pretty resilient, at one stage we passed a moving bus with a sheep standing on top of it and this is apparently a regular occurence! Lots of children (and adults) waved to us all along the way. We even had police men in their van beep at us and wave. There were lots of people selling food and stuff on top of the train, they kept climbing down from the roof into the carriages to get more stock - on the moving train. James Bond has nothing on these guys! The journey ended at the Devil´s Nose, an almost perpindicular wall of rock that they had to build a zig-zag route and four separate switchbacks on to reach the town of Alausi as part of the train route from Guayaquil to Quito. This route was known as the "most difficult railway in the world" when it was built between 1860 and 1874. Once back in Alausi we hopped on a bus to Cuenca for another few hours. When we arrived in Cuenca we went with a recommendation that one of the other Swiss from Galapagos had emailed us. Claudia was already staying there. When we got there we were met by the crazy Danish lady and her dogs but that´s part of the Cuenca story...

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Photos

La Nariz del diablo
On top of the train