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 temperamental weather. It is the beginning 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 connections (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.

Our time spent in Quito waiting for Cindy’s pannier to be constructed was pretty uneventful. save for a few tourist activities we got in. We spent a day on the bus going north of Quito to Otavalo, a cute little town in the mountains that has a large craft market. The bus ride was pretty horrendous—there was construction on the main highway from Quito to Otavalo, so we had to take a much more sinuous route on a skinny dirt road that turned a 2 hr ride into a 4 hr ride. Both of us were pretty carsick when we arrived in Otavalo. We went mid-week, so we didn’t get to see the market at its most active, but there were still plenty of people hawking their wares. Since we were both feeling a little cold in Quito, we bought a couple of wool sweaters there…we were assured by the person that sold them to us that we were getting a good deal because it was dead and we were the only tourists there. Well, at least the second part (the town being dead) was true. After cruising the market for a bit, we ate lunch and ran into somebody that was on our Galapagos cruise with us. We delayed our bus ride back to Quito as long as we could with a little Internet time, but eventually we had to face up to the fact that we were going to have to take that same crappy bus ride again. Reminiscent of our market experience in Chichicastenango, Guatemala, we ended up on a bus for 8 hrs to spend 3 hrs in Otavalo, of which probably less than 1 hr was actually spent at the market. Cindy ended up getting sick later that night…we weren’t sure if it was the bus or food or both, although I ate pretty much the same thing she had for lunch and I wasn’t nearly as bad off as she was. Anyway, we’re all even now at one puke for each of us on this trip—not bad for almost 9 months on the road!

We spent another day visiting the Mitad del Mundo “city” (also north of Quito), which celebrates the passing of the Equator. This excursion was much closer than Otavalo, but still somewhat of a logistical nightmare, as we had to catch 3 different buses to get there. We didn’t know it at the time, but we happened to go on a very special day—the equinox (I guess you can’t really call it spring or fall equinox when you’re on the equator). The Mitad del Mundo complex consists of a giant monument on the equator that houses a museum, and then a bunch of craft shops and restaurants. They had some groups performing traditional music and dance on the main plaza, and I think we managed to get some pretty good pics we’ll post at some point. Here’s a video of one of the acts. However, the thing is that the Mitad del Mundo isn’t really on the equator—although it was measured as accurately as possible at the time, it’s about 200 m south of the actual equator. So we went to the Intiñan museum up the road where the equator really is (according to GPS; see photo above). There were some interesting aspects to the museum, such as talking about various indigenous groups that used to live in the area, and how they lived and worshipped the sun. But then they throw in a bunch of BS about how the laws of physics are actually different when you are standing on the equator versus when you are standing a few meters away from the equator. Cindy and I just kind of rolled our eyes as our guide ran us through these tests. The museum was good fun nonetheless.

After Cindy’s bags were finished, and my achilles tendon got back to normal, we finally got back on the bikes. It’s been pretty slow going so far…pretty hard to believe how little we’ve ridden in the 3 months since our robbery. The mountains here are not super steep, but the climbs are long. We met some Colombian bikers in Latacunga who started in Popayan and are heading to Punta Arenas, Chile. After chatting with them a bit, we learned that they rode from Quito to Latacunga (about 100 km) in one day, where it took us three days. We said goodbye to each other, and they said “maybe we’ll see you on the road”, but we knew that unless something unexpected happens to them, they are moving too fast for us to run into them again. But we do expect to bus through quite a bit of Peru, so maybe we’ll catch them that way

We have taken one detour from the Panamericana so far to visit the town of Baños. The ride to Baños is pretty spectacular, a 40 km ride east from the Panamericana, dropping about 1000 m of altitude through a beautiful valley to a very cute (but touristy) town. We decided to spend a couple of days relaxing there before continuing south. Our first day there, we didn’t do too much (we had ridden almost 90 km the day before) except visit some of the thermal baths that give Baños its name. It was very relaxing to go between the pools of different temperatures, and then cool off by spending a few seconds underneath some runoff from a waterfall that had been diverted to the pool. Wow, that water was cold!!! One popular activity for tourists visiting Baños is to rent bicycles and continue on the road east (the “avenue of the waterfalls”) to the town of Puyo. It’s a 60 km ride, but mostly downhill, and you can put your bike on the bus to return to Baños. We only made it 20 km to the waterfall called Pailon del Diablo (amazing, but we couldn’t get any good pics because the spray was also amazing), although we did ride back uphill to Baños from there, which was not too horrible considering we weren’t carrying our bags.

After Baños, we bussed back up to the Panamericana and started south again. Cindy has been having some problems with her knees that have been due to her seat being too low. Apparently, when we reassembled the bikes after our flight to Colombia, we didn’t get the fit right, and it’s taken us until now to ride enough to see the problem. Note to self: mark the seat position next time you take the seat posts out! We are hoping that now that the seat problem is better that the riding will come easier for us.

Speaking of constitutional reform, I thought I’d post this in conjunction with this post on Daily Kos from Larry Sabato, who says that we need to reform the US Constitution as well, and that the easiest way to make the wholesale changes we need is to call a Constitutional Assembly of our own. It makes sense in a lot of ways; instead of having the Supreme Court take sides trying to better guess what the Founding Fathers had in mind 200+ years ago, just add the things you think should should be in there for our current-day society. I don’t necessarily agree with all of his suggestions (adding senators for example), but things like reforming (or getting rid of) the Electoral College, and somehow taking the power to warmonger out of the hands of the Executive are things we could really use. Good luck getting something like this going in the current political climate, however…

So if you could change something about our Constitution, what you you change or add? You can leave your suggestions in the Comments, and I’m sure the bots from Homeland Security that are “protecting our freedoms” will make sure they are delivered to the President.

UPDATE: I should clarify that when I said I wanted to get rid of our current Congress, I didn’t mean that Bush should then rule forever as dictator…I merely wanted to register my disgust with our current members of Congress (particularly the Democratic ones) for not doing enough to push back against the administration, and suggest that they be replaced by a better Congress.

Rant #2: the price of M&M’s is outrageous in Quito. One of our big snack staples for riding down here has been a modified trail mix made of raisins and peanut M&M’s. We used to do raisins, peanuts and plain M&M’s, but the cost of the peanuts and M&M’s was enough that we decided it would be cheaper to just combine the two. Anyway, a bag that probably isn’t quite 300 g of peanut M&M’s costs just over US$10!!! They were mislabeled on the shelves (I was muttering to myself when I thought the bag only cost $6), and I didn’t realize how much they really cost until I got to the checkout counter and my three bags of M&M’s and three bags of raisins cost over $35!!! The good news is that the amount of trail mix should last us for several weeks (no snacking on trail mix after dinner anymore though). Some South American chocolate company needs to make an M&M substitute…the market is wide-open here!

Now on to the plug. We finally, after several attempts, got our panniers from our friends at Construbicis. We were expecting only one bag, but got a pair of bags that hang over the top of the rack on the back of the bike (much like real saddlebags). They aren’t waterproof, but are definitely well-constructed, and a great value at $40. We decided to sell Cindy’s remaining large Ortleib bag to one of the guys at the shop, and he seemed pretty excited because it is hard to get the bags down here (and we gave him a really good price). We were given little Ecuador charm bracelets (made with used chainlinks) as well to send us on the road. Once we actually do hit the road again, we can post a picture of the new bags in action.

As for when we are leaving…well, we were going to leave Tuesday morning (25th), but it was a little showery, so we decided to put it off until today, when I woke up with a horribly stiff Achilles tendon. I have absolutely no idea how it happened, but I can barely walk today…just getting old, I guess. So we’re in Quito for a few more days while I rest and pop ibuprofen like candy.

Everybody we talked to and everything we read before we decided to go to the Galapagos Islands told us the same thing: you will spend an obscene amount of money and it will be worth every penny. It was truly an amazing experience for the both of us. Originally, our plan had been to meet up with my parents for the cruise, but unfortunately those plans didn’t work out, so we decided to soldier on without them We arrived in Quito in time for us to pick up our travel packet on Friday from the travel agency we booked with. Then we flew out to the islands on Sunday the 9th of Sept for an 8-day cruise. One small issue I have is that the last “day” of the cruise wasn’t really a full day—we made a small landing on North Seymour Island for an hour and were at the airport by 8:30 AM or so.

Anyway, when we arrived at the dock in Baltra, there were several sea lions lounging there waiting for us, totally oblivious to the passengers coming and going around them. And the week would continue for the most part to be like this—the wildlife going about their business with nothing but the slightest concern for the people snapping pictures nearby. We took a dinghy out to our boat, the Aida Maria, and were impressed by the accomodations. We were in a two-person cabin with bunk beds; it was somewhat cramped, but we were on the main deck of the boat, so we had nice big windows. The food was really outstanding for most of the week. We had to make sure we went out on all the snorkeling trips possible to try to keep pace with the amount of yummy food we were putting away.

The snorkeling was both the highlight and lowlight of the trip for me. I have never been snorkeling before, and was a little trepidacious about the whole thing (I have a pretty big swimming/water phobia), but the opportunity to see tropical fish and other critters was able to outweigh my fear in the end. After having seen sea turtles waddling on the beach in Costa Rica, I was really excited to see them in their element. And of course, the chance to swim with sea lions couldn’t be passed on either. We bought a couple of waterproof cameras in Quito hoping to snap a few good pics while we were swimming. Our days usually consisted of a landing in the morning with a walk, return to the boat for lunch and siesta and/or cruise to another location, and then another landing in the afternoon that consisted of a walk and a snorkel for those who were interested. The first snorkel opportunity was as a bit of a dud as overcast skies and murky waters limited visibility. And at this time of year, the water is quite cold…if I were to do it again, I’d definitely hire a wetsuit before going on the cruise. That actually was the lowlight of the snorkeling, as after we got out of the water, I would spend the next hour or so shivering and trying to recover the feeling in my hands. The highlights, of course, were swimming with turtles and sea lions, which we eventually saw on our subsequent snorkel trips. The photos with the disposable cameras don’t really do the whole thing justice, as the colors didn’t really come through well on the film. We were lucky that we ran into a couple of teenage sea lions that came by to check us out—at another landing someone from another boat tried to get close to a mama sea lion and her pup frolicking in the surf and got a nip on the hand for it…a gentle reminder that no matter how close you can get to them, they are still wild animals

I’m not usually a bird person, but the sea birds on the Galapagos were fascinating to watch as well. I now have a favorite bird—the blue-footed booby! Their calls and mating antics on land were entertaining enough, but watching them feed on the coast by diving for fish (often in synchronized groups of 3-4) was a treat as well. And on our last day we got to see the courtship behavior of frigatebirds, where the male puffs up a large red throat sac to impress his partner. Although this time of year isn’t the best weather-wise (the mornings were overcast and often misty), it is breeding season for several Galapagos animals. We saw several very recently born sea lion pups, including one so young that the mom hadn’t completely finished delivering the placenta yet.

In the end, we were sad to go and leave the beauty and communing with nature behind, but on the other hand, we were both getting pretty sick of feeling queasy on the boat (no actual puking ocurred, but the seasick pills didn’t eliminate everything). We got the impression that Ecuador is working very hard to both preserve the natural beauty of the islands while ensuring that visitors can continue to visit and bring their tourism dollars. One unfortunate aspect of the park though seems to be a bit of antagonism between the scientists who come to study there and the locals. Our guide (a 3rd or 4th generation native of the islands) related that apparently it is really difficult for Ecuadorians to do research at the Darwin Research Center on Santa Cruz. This is a sentiment that was echoed by the people living in Parismina, Costa Rica about the people there studying the sea turtles. I’m not sure if this is just a reflection of the relative lack of advanced education in Latin American countries, but one would hope that the foreigner scientists in these places would welcome the opportunity to encourage scientific careers among the people in whose countries they study.

We’ve posted some pictures in the photo gallery and some videos on our YouTube page of the trip for your viewing pleasure. We are hanging out in Quito this week, getting re-acclimated to the altitude and getting a new pannier built for Cindy before we head south to tackle the Ecuadorian Andes.

Our first day in Bogotá was a Sunday, where their weekly event known as Ciclovia meant most of the main streets were severly restricted to car traffic and open instead to bikes. We had hoped to participate, but since my pedals were missing after the flight from Panama, we couldn’t. It turned out to be for the best as there was a huge parade celebrating solidarity through out the country and the roads were too filled with people to be able to bike through them anyway. We had heard about Bogotá’s promotion of bikes for transportation and were excited to ride the numerous cycle paths throughout the city. It wasn’t quite as spectacular as I had imagined as the paths were also open to pedestrians, which limits the usefulness of the trails.

We spent several days in Bogotá, getting the bikes ready to ride and enjoying the city life and museums. We also took a day trip to the town of Zipaquirá to see the Salt Cathedral, an underground cathedral built into a salt mine. We felt right at home in Bogotá, thanks to our wonderful couchsurfing host, the rainy, Seattle-like weather and all the yummy coffee. There were even a couple areas of town that reminded me of Seattle. It was nice to be home

Our original plan was to bike from Bogotá to Cali and then bus to Quito (Ecuador) from there. However, we realized that we were kidding ourselves after looking over our proposed plan consisting of 5 straight days of riding around 100 kms each day with a couple of days of significant climbing thrown in. We have been practically biking-free for almost two months—we thought it prudent to start a bit more slowly. So, we ended up bussing from Bogotá to Armenia which eliminated most of the climbing on the route. We also decided that we would bike from Armenia to Cali, then possibly on to the next big city of Popayan before hopping back on the bus.

We were a bit nervous starting out riding again, but soon settled into a rhythm and were able to enjoy the beautiful countryside. The end point for the first day was Tuluá, which is a relatively flat 90 km from Armenia. We felt pretty good at first and it felt great to be riding again, but we realized that 90 km for a first ride was a bit ambitious as we were running out of energy about 20 km from town. Luckily, two passing cyclists slowed down to chat, which made the ride go much more quickly. They were mountain bike racers and had ridden to Armenia from Tuluá the day before and were now making the return trip. Despite the increased energy from meeting the cyclists, we were going more and more slowly and eventually were going too slowly for the Colombianos who rode off ahead of us. We perked up again, though, when we saw them waiting for us on the edge of town. They said they would show us some hotels in town then help us find some food. One, Juan David, led us to a hotel, while the other, Jonathan, went to check on another. Crazy as it may sound, there turned out to be no hotel rooms available in Tuluá that night due to a transportation conference in town. So, Juan David brought us back to his house, where his grandma cooked us some lunch and we were able to shower. Jonathan came back later with the news that his mom said it would be okay if we stayed in their spare room for the night, so we headed over there and spent the rest of the afternoon talking to Jonathan and his parents about the wonders of Colombia and answering their questions about the US and our trip. We met up with Juan David later to go to a music festival at the local university where we saw some local music and dancing and also sampled some chicha (yummy!). We slept very well that night after an exhausting day of riding and speaking Spanish.

The next morning, we awoke to breakfast and chilled bottles of sports drink for our bikes! Jonathan and Juan David decided that they would take a recovery ride with us to the town of Buga, 20 km south of Tuluá on the way to Cali. We started the ride off without Jonathan as his girlfriend (a world-class mountain biker training in Italy) called just as we were leaving, but given our slow pace and his claim to regional champion working his way to national champion, we knew he would have no trouble catching up to us before Buga. Our legs were quick to tell us that they had worked hard the day before and weren’t up to another 90 km to Cali that day. So, when we saw lots of hotels lining the streets of Buga, we decided perhaps 20 km was good for the day and we would tackle the rest the next day. After showing us the town’s famous basilica and helping us find a hotel, Juan David and Jonathan set out back to Tuluá with much gratitude from us. Colombian hospitality is talked about a lot on the internets, but we really couldn’t believe how lucky we were to have met Juan David, Jonathan and their families.

The rest day was just what we needed. We felt great on the ride into Cali. Being on the bikes again is invigorating and makes traveling all the more exciting and fun. We found our hostel in Cali without too many problems, that is until we started unloading the bikes and realized that one of my bags was missing! I vaguely remember bumping into a pole on that side of the bike, though I thought I had checked to make sure everything was alright afterwards. Perhaps the bump loosened the bag, which then fell off when I hit a bump later? It seems unlikely that someone could have take the bag off of the bike without me noticing, but who knows? Luckily, the bag didn’t contain anything that can´t be gone without or easily replaced. My bike looks pretty sad these days with one lonely pannier where there used to be four!

Given the difficulties of finding a bus big enough to fit the bikes and the extra hassle of loading them up, we decided we would bus from Cali, where we were certain to find a big bus, all the way to the border town of Ipiales in one long ride, though it meant skipping a couple towns and sites that we would have liked to have seen. We did manage to see the Sanctuary of Las Lajas near Ipiales with our last 16000 pesos ($8) before heading to the border. There are no busses which cross the Colombia/Ecuador border, so we had to ride 2 km from Ipiales to the border then 6 km from the border to Tulcan, Ecuador where we were able to catch a bus to Quito. The border crossing was hassle-free and fee-free as well. At the Ecuador immigration post, I waited with the bikes while Matt went in to get our passports stamped. While I was waiting, a friendly border guard struck up a conversation. I thought I was doing fairly well in Spanish without Matt’s assistance, though the guard had to repeat most of his questions at least once. However, when Matt came back out and understood the first thing the guard said to him with out a problem, the guard exclaimed, “Oh, you understand much better!”

We were sad to leave Colombia and to have missed so much of the country in our rush to get to Quito in time for the Galapagos trip. Everyone we spoke to was so enthusiastic about their country and the great beauty that it holds. We definitely plan to return in the not too far distant future.

Tomorrow we leave for the Galapagos Cruise. The last couple days in Quito were spent picking up the tickets, and buying some last minute items that we will need for the trip (I had to replace yet another pair of shoes from the lost bag!) We also found the South American Explorers Clubhouse where they let members store stuff (our bikes.) They also have a huge wealth of information on South America, free coffee, and a library where we were able to check out some reading material for the cruise. In Quito, we were also lucky to find a bike touring enthusiast who can make me a new pannier (they are impossible to find here otherwise) in just a couple days after we return. We had been thinking we would have to have one shipped from the states and were not looking forward to waiting around for that to happen. All in all, we are doing well—excited for the Galapagos and getting back on the bikes without too many delays when we return.