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Published: September 1st 2011
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We took the bus back to Quito with everyone else, and it sucked. But not more than it had before. It's just that, by definition, night buses suck. Nothing new there. Eventually we made it to
Cuenca ready to stay in a decent hostel. A slight problem at the hostel. First, finding it wasn't all together easy, just a small sign on a door plate. The joint was locked up tight, but we spotted a piece of paper lodged in a crack with a phone number on it. We had booked the place on the net earlier so we made the call that we would make the call. First we had to find a phone. In Latin America this can be more difficult than you might imagine.
There were no public phones. If you want to make a call in Ecuador you need to look for a shop with
cabinas on it. In there you can find phones. We found such a shop, a few actually, and they were all shut. We started to get a bit desperate. It was getting dark and we had no where to sleep. A friendly old lady in a shop let us use her
phone, and wouldn't take any money for it.
We called the number on the bit of paper. It rang out. We waited a bit, and tried again. This time it was engaged. It later transpired that while we ringing the number, the woman from the hostel was trying to ring someone else to tell us that she was just up the street, getting dinner or something. Anyway, by the time we got back to the hostel she had returned, and let us all in. The hostel had only a few rooms, and used to be a beautiful old house. A big house with a lovely courtyard, it was quiet – the moment the front door was shut the street noise disappeared. The family that owned the house still lived up stairs; they had simply converted the bottom floor to hostel rooms.
Casa Naranja in case you were wondering – a great place to stay, even if our room was a little poky.
Cuenca was a pretty town with probably the highest per capita owner ship of Suzuki Vitaras this side of what ever town is near the Suzuki factory in Japan. And probably higher than there too because
they'd all have little cars. It's show piece was the slightly erratic cathedral – sandstone walls, big blue
mudejar style domes and twin incomplete steeples. It made a refreshing change from the run of the mill Latin American cathedrals.
Apparently the engineering was off with the steeples . The story was that there was a grand design for the building, which included two massive bell towers at the front. The bases weren't made strong enough, so when weight was added to the top they started to crack, forcing the builders to leave the towers half built. The engineers were blamed, but clearly it was the architects that were found wanting.
Actually, there were a few good examples of architecture around the city, and if you looked closely you could also see that a lot of the places were in fact built from mud brick, only with very nice facing. Plenty of colonial type action, and some solid as a fallout shelter modern stuff for the museum, which was well worth the visit.
And not to forget the bean bag shop – oh, to have a shop just for beanbags.
A stroll by the river revealed a
bridge that went nowhere, a rock garden and a decent Japanese restaurant. So we had lunch. At the restaurant.
Cuenca is also ground zero for the original Panama hat. It was called a Panama hat only because that was the port it was imported to the US from – it was in fact from Ecuador. I think the correct name is
monte cristo. In any event, there's a lot of lot of hat shops, down near Calle Condamine as a matter of fact.
Follow that further down and you end up at the hat museum. Happily, it was gratis, so we had a look. It wasn't bad, and had plenty of stuff for sale. Well, hats. It was a hat museum after all. We bought some and sent them home to their new owners.
The next day we left the hostel at 10.30. It wasn't that we were keen, it was that I made a mistake. It thought checkout was 11, and because everyone trusted me as the Spanish speaker, they deferred to me. Checkout was in fact 1pm. No dramas, it gave us an excuse to check out the city. That's my story anyway.
We
Cuenca's Cathedral Towers
Only the base - the top was never built jumped on the hop on, hop off tourist bus. We really should have done it earlier. It was reasonably priced and gave us great look at the city, showing all the best restaurants, pubs and clubs – something that would have been useful the day before - even if we did almost get our heads taken off at various times by low hanging power lines. We even found a big shopping centre with a go kart track in the carpark. Good god, we need one.
We liked Cuenca. Shops that sell guitars, TVs and motorbikes, all in the one place. Café Austria we went to a couple of times, drank some good coffee, and watched the good folk of Cuenca walk by.
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Pete
non-member comment
Heh, wanting what? Better engineers? Subbies? Stone?...the list goes on. I would have thought that God would be to blame, you know, because of all that pre-determinism stuff and divine will.