Cuenca, A Flying Visit

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Cuenca is a lovely, well preserved colonial city in the south of Ecuador. We only stopped off there for a day on our way to the Peruvian border.

After our night of no sleep and silent resentment, we went out to explore the city. I proved definitively that I am turning into my parents by spending the morning looking round a market, commenting on the size of the fish and how interesting the potatoes are here. The rest of the day I wandered the city snapping pictures of the pretty colonial arcitecture and suffering severe hat anxiety. I was supposed to buy Panama hats for various relatives (yes, they are in fact from Ecuador not Panama, surely some sort of trading standards violation) but I have no idea how to tell between good ones and crap ones. So no hats were purchased.

Kit said Cuenca is exactly like a Spanish city, but up a mountain and full of crazy people. I wouldn´t know since I have spent only two days in Spain, most of them in a police station (if you don´t know, don´t ask).

We discovered that now we are outside of the beachy tourist areas we can get a three course meal and drink for 2 USD. Ok so two of the three courses turned out to be entirely tripe based, but now we have learned an important new word and won´t be making that mistake again.

After our breif visit to Cuenca we returned relectuantly to the Terminal Terreste for another epic bus journey, this time to Vilcabamba. Kit was hassled pretty much the whole way by a cheerfully shitfaced local man who kept having the exact same conversation with him over and over, forgetting what had been said and then starting the whole tedious process again. I pretended to be asleep. We arrived at about 1am and spent a good while wandering around looking for a hostel that definitely didn´t exist. Eventually, with the help of a 12 year old boy in a tuxedo who was inexplicably wandering the streets at night, we found a hostel with a vacancy for the night. It proved to be a poor choice. More on that later.

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