Riding down the ‘Devil’s Nose’, a “death-defying stretch of track”

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Actually folks, I just wanted to get your attention, as the last couple of blogs might have been somewhat lacking in adrenalin! The quote above was from Lonely Planet (and who would question such an authority), and while this train ride certainly had its moments, I think the bus ride later more fitted that description. But more on that later.

As expected, Riobamba, a city of some 120,000 people, had little special to offer. Like all South American cities, it has more than its fair share of (Catholic) churches, but the general cityscape are not that attractive and it does not particularly cater for the tourist. Given that you can spend just so much time walking the streets of Ecuadorian cities, and we have covered a fair bit of that ground already, we decided to move on pretty quickly.

However prior to taking off, we decided to take a day trip to the base of Mt Chimborazo, an extinct volcano, and at 6,300 metres, a pretty damn high one. For the statistically inclined, it is the highest mountain in Ecuador and higher than anything in North America. Also, given the fact that it sits on the equator, due to the earth’s equatorial bulge, its peak is in fact further from the centre of the earth than Mt Everest. So there! For us less technical types, it was just a very attractive mountain, standing all on its ‘pat malone’ (see pic) rather than nestled amongst other tall mountains like Mts Everest, Cook etc, and we were lucky enough to get to view it on a clear day.

Just to show we weren’t complete couch potatoes, we decided to climb from the base station to the first hut. Easier said than done! The base station was situated at 4,700m, and while the hut was only 300m higher, it took us over an hour to get there. The previous highest altitude I think I had ever been at was 3,200m in Lijiang (near Tibet), and Flash, you might remember we were occasionally gasping for breath there. So climbing at this higher altitude was incredibly tiring, with a stop every 50m or so, each passage of which probably only took us about 5m higher up! I now have a much greater admiration for serious mountaineers.

The following day was our “death-defying” train trip. Nothing like getting up at 5am to make sure you are at the station early to get good seats on the 7am train, but as it turns out, it was a good ploy as, of the 5 carriages, the quality of ours far exceeded the others, so that was at least a bonus. The first part of the trip, was just a plain train trip (about 2 hrs) from Riobamba to Alausi (no, not the guy that kicked the penalty to get the Aussies into the soccer world cup!), which was pleasant enough and saw us travel through mountainous, but quite fertile, green countryside. The second part of the ride was through the famed La Nariz del Diablo, which involved a steady climb up a very barren set of mountains, until we were at around 4,000m, before we came down the mountain via a series of switchbacks, which is another name for zig-zagging down, constantly changing direction, till you reach the bottom and return once again to Alausi. I had in fact done this before (in Japan of all places) but it was an interesting trip, although not your cup of tea if you aren’t keen on heights, although hardly had us biting our fingernails.

The real fun was in the 4 hour bus ride from Alausi through to Cuenca on a local bus. Imagine, if you will, a fantasy scenario, where an old bus is travelling at high speed along windy, dusty, pot-holed, dirt roads, overtaking everything in sight, including buses and trucks, and even on corners. Now imagine, in this fantasy, that the roads had no barriers, and as you approached the edge, as you did repeatedly, and looked down, you could see houses the size of pinheads way below, or rivers that looked like trickles far below where you were travelling. And if you looked up, at times you couldn’t even see the peaks of the mountains through the clouds. Well, this was no fantasy, folks - this was our 4 hour fun trip to Cuenca. I tried to take some photos to reflect the situation, but they are hard to take when you are hanging on for your life. I’ve had a similar experience many years ago in northern India, and I know there are the odd other similar locations where trips like this occur, but somehow that doesn’t ease the anxiety. For those of you who know Joan well, and are wondering (worrying?) how she handled all of this, well the bad news is you’ll have to ask her yourself ….

Plenty of European company on these trips, young and old. At various stages, we got into conversation with couples from each of Germany, France, Denmark, Italy, Switzerland and Holland, so not much rugby conversation but interesting small talk to while away the time. Speaking of football, I note that Manly have just got through to the League grand final. That must be a thrill for all you Broncos supporters!

Apart from these trips, just another couple of snippets hopefully of interest. We continue to be amazed at the number of houses built of besser block, that still have quantities of reinforcing and formwork still left in place, and its almost as though they build their home in instalments, and each time they can pull together a few bucks, they get a bit more constructed. I’m sure that’s not the case, but it sure looks like this.

On the people side, you will have gathered from my photos that I get a lot of enjoyment trying to get good photos of (especially) the very old, and the very young, preferably in native costume. The reason for the proliferation of women in my photos is that virtually all of them wear the traditional colourful costumes all the time, with their hair in pigtails and either felt or canvas hats, but the men rarely wear anything vaguely colourful and the kids tend not to also. The young ones all wear the trendy western clothes, which makes one wonder if there are going to be the same people sights to view when this generation gets to adulthood. So its certainly not a case of their just dressing up for the postcards, as even those that appear very poor are still colourful. However, it is hard to get good photos without feeling as though you are invading their privacy, which we have been reluctant to do. Thus most of those photos shown in my various blogs have been taken at some distance, and later magnified and cropped, which is why some are not that sharp.
So we have arrived in Cuenca, Ecuador’s third largest city, and once again quoted by that great authority, the Lonely Planet, as “the colonial jewel of the south, which takes the cake when it comes to beauty”. Given we are intending to take a few days R&R there, we will test that theory.

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Photos

The famed 'Devil's Nose'
We came in at the top, and left at the bottom

On our way back from #1 hut
You can just see the hut top left