Ephemerica

There are no good maps of Ecuador. No matter what the map claims the distance between destinations will be, add 20 km to get the real distance. The road signs are additionally misleading, giving distance varying by 20 km in the space of 5 km or less! This problem resulted in more than a couple days being much longer than expected. It also resulted in me taking a speed bump at full speed because I was too busy gaping at the distance predicted by the sign on the road to notice the bump—I definitely caught some air on that one!

We also have also met with some tempramental weather. It is the begining of the rainy season again, so we biked through fog and rain in the afternoons. Our descent into the town of Alausi (which other blogs have told us has fantastic views) was through dense fog. We had to stop to put on all our clothes to protect us from the misty, cold cloud. It was a slow descent as we could only see about 20 feet ahead of us. Alausi was a pretty city that is the start of the famous train ride down the devil’s nose. There weren’t any trains departing while we were there, so we weren’t able to partake, though the road out of town follows the train tracks for part of the ascent, so we got a part of the experience.

Out of Alausi, our next destination was Cañar. We knew that it was a lot of climbing (around 2000 m) over only about 80 km. There were a couple places where we might find a hotel along the way, but there was nothing confirmed. Immediately starting out of Alausi we were climbing. At one point not too far from town, I looked ahead and saw a pickup truck stopped on the side of the road and a couple of men standing next to it. This made me a bit nervous until I noticed one of them had a fancy looking camera. I assumed that they had stopped to take some pictures of the amazing scenery, until I noticed that the camera was actually aimed at us. Then I notice another person with a camera, and another and another. We rode by and smiled and waved for the cameras, wondering what was going on. When we passed the truck, it all made sense—the truck had an emblem for the Ecuador Ministry of Tourism on it. A couple minutes later, the truck passed us with two of the people in the truck bed taking more pictures! Matt called for them to stop and requested that they send us the pictures. They gave us some Ecuador pens, pins and pamphlets and promised to send along pictures, but it has been a couple weeks now and we haven’t heard anything. If you are in Ecuador be on the look out for tourist brochures with pictures of bikers!

Around 10 km after leaving Alausi, the road deteriorated pretty badly and we were riding on rough gravel or dirt for most of the day. This really slowed our progress as there were many ups and downs and the gravel made the descents especially slow. So when we found a hotel in Chunchi, we decided to stop. The next day, the road was mostly good, but we hit a pretty heavy rain storm. We were able to take refuge under the porch of a church, but we were already drenched and cold at that point. We tried to continue on to Cañar, but the descents proved to be too chilling on our already cold, wet bodies. So we hitched a bus the remainder of the way.

We took a bus from Cañar to visit the Inca ruins of Ingapirca, the most important Inca site in Ecuador. The ruins were a fairly small site with much beautiful stonework. I was pretty excited to be visiting an archeological site again, though it was just a glimpse of what is to come in Peru. In the town of Ingapirca, we happened upon a festival with a couple different parades, first the school kids in marching bands, then people on slightly unruly horses. It was crazy to see all the women in indigenous clothing videotaping the parades on their fancy cameras!

From Cañar, we had a long, but not too difficult day to Cuenca. At this point, we started looking at the calendar and calculating just how much time we had left to get to Boliva before the new entry requirements begin on Dec 1. Since we want to enter Bolivia well before the new requirements in order to avoid any hassles, we realized that we had less than a month or so to make it through the rest of Ecuador and all of Peru. We wanted to dedicate at least a week of that time to Cusco and Machu Picchu. Clearly it was time to hop a bus!

We made a mad dash by bus to the town of Trujillo in northern Peru. The bus ride was pretty uneventful and the scenery, especially in northern Peru, was pretty bland. Vast deserts with lots of low shrubs and tons of garbage strewn everywhere. We weren’t too sad to have missed out on biking this part. The reason for heading to Trujillo was that there is a famous ‘casa de ciclistas’ there run by Lucho and his family. We were cyclists number 883 and 884—they have been hosting touring bikers since 1985. We felt a little sheepish arriving and departing by means other than bikes, but other cyclists assured us that Lucho regularly picks up bikers from the bus station and it wouldn’t be a problem.

We spent four nights in the casa arranging for transport to Cusco (we splurged on airline tickets rather than spend 30 hours or more on the bus—I’ve been having problems with motion sickness on the busses lately), taking part in the Peruvian census, exploring the area and getting to know Lucho, his family and the other cyclist at the house.  

The census was Sept 21 and the entire country was shut down. No businesses were allowed to open and no one was allowed out on the streets—not even tourists (luckily we had a nice place to wait it out!) When the census people came to the house, we also had to answer questions and be counted.

We also found out about many more casas de ciclistas in Bolivia, Argentina and Chile. Most exciting is that the other cyclist staying with Lucho has conections (his fiance) with a casa in Salta, Argentina which is where we had hoped to be around Christmas time. When we told him this, he said we would be welcome to spend the holidays at their house! We are also having some new tires and other parts shipped to us at his place, so we will even have some gifts.

We are in Cusco now, we and all our stuff arrived on the plane at the same time and safely! We are hoping to be able to ride the rest of the way from here—no more busses! We still have a long way to go though, almost 8000 km, so we will need to put in some long days if we want to finish before winter hits Patagonia.

Posted by cindy on October 26th, 2007 | Filed under: Ecuador, Peru