Cuenca

My guide took me around Cuenca the next morning. All the standard sights were there, Cathedral, square, government buildings etc. I told him I did not want to see the same old stuff but would rather just see how the people live and work or play. So he drove me around to see the different neighborhoods. Cuenca is a big city with bad traffic so I quickly tired of that tour also. We ate lunch at a place I picked out in an industrial area of town where I saw lots of people hanging around. I enjoyed the simple cheap food at this place. Then we went to a Panama hat company to watch them make Panama hats. Panama hats originated in Ecuador but became known as Panama hats when they were sold to all the workers building the Panama canal back in the day. The name has stuck ever since. Ecuador gets no respect for originating the hats. They are now made in China and Mexico more than any place else but the best quality ones still come from the factory we went through.

The factory had a good display on how the hats are made from the plant they use to the weaving technique used to make the various styles. They even make fancy wedding dresses out of the same material as the Panama hats. They had a photo display of famous people wearing hats made by this company and lots of pics of famous people right at the factory buying their hats. I tried to buy a hat after the tour was over. They had literally thousands of hats there but not one large enough to fit over my melon sized head. They were kind of embarrassed about not having a hat on hand that fit me so they took me out to the factory again, measured my head and made me a hat that fit me perfectly. The guy that made it was amazed at how fat my head was. He had a little pin sized head and I told him to try mine on and it covered his entire head. We laughed about it but I took my custom made hat and wore it around for the rest of the day before storing it in its box to take good care of it. My doctors have been telling me to wear a wide brimmed hat for years because of all the skin cancers I have been having and now I finally had one that fit me well.

After the hat factory we went out and sat at a cafe to watch the people go by. I just did not have the energy to do any more touring around. I only wanted to sit and watch the world go by me. My guide didn't mind the easy day either. We talked at length about his education and family. I quizzed him on his attitude about almost every topic in the news from politics to gay marriage. He was very open and seemingly honest in his answers. He even told me where he diverges from the norm in Ecuador. There was not much divergence as far as I could see. The country seems to be very uniform in its culture.

The next morning we were scheduled to cross over the Andes and drop down to the coast before I flew to the Galapagos Islands for the last leg of my Ecuador trip. I wanted to rest up so I gave my guide the rest of the day off.

Riobamba to Cuenca

After a quiet night recovering from the long drive from Quito my guide picked me up and we were off again. The first stop today was going to be the train ride. The train goes down and then up a very steep gorge by going back and forth on switchbacks first going forward then after switching the tracks revsersing down the next leg and so on. The train perches on the side of the gorge as it crawls along. Some people can't look down because all you see is a long fall to the bottom of the gorge. I enjoyed the ride called the nose of the devil. The views of the surrounding mountains and the gorge were beautiful. The one thing I noticed was the long steep walking trails all over every single mountainside where the people walk up and down all the time. Some of these people do a lot of hard walking every single day. They must have some strong hearts to walk like that at such a high elevation. The train was called Train Andino and was worth the time it took for the ride on it. When I was there the real train engine was broken down so our train was a diesel bus converted to train wheels with a silly looking cowcatcher added to the front of it. I had to laugh at it but it was able to push and pull us up and down all the steep tracks. At one point the train engineer had to slam on the brakes of the train because a pickup truck was stuck on the tracks ahead of us. We stopped in time and a bunch of passengers got off and pushed the truck safely out of the way and we were off again. Several times we were allowed to get off the train to take pictures of the nice scenery. Some of the passengers were riding on top of the train cars so they could have a better view. I am not sure how many fall off doing that and go down the steep drop off on the side of the tracks but some must fall once in a while.

After the train ride we headed down the road to Ingapirca which is an old Inca ruin. It is the largest ruin other than Machu Picchu in the area. I was not feeling very well and could not walk much at all so I kind of skipped the ruin. We sat in the car and my guide gave me his talk about the place but all I got was a quick glance of it then we were off again for Cuenca. The drive was very nice. My driver was the best driver I had been in a car with so far in Ecuador. I complimented him many times to try to encourage him to continue to drive safely. We did witness some accidents and saw some really dangerous passing on the mountain roads. Even if you drive totally safely you can be killed by the other bad drivers coming around any curve on the road right at you when there is no escape path to get out of their way. Drivers education would pay for itself all over Central and South America.

We arrived in Cuenca earlier than we had planned because of me not spending time at Ingapirca. We took the extra time to drive around Cuenca for a while. Cuenca was a big city with all the associated big city traffic and things. We had enough time to stop in at a museum in town. I enjoyed the museum. My guide walked around with me and demonstrated his thorough knowledge of the history and current events of Ecuador and Central and South America. I liked the real shrunken heads on display. My favorite display in the entire museum though was a six hundred year old skull that had a fancy decorative gold grill on its front teeth. The kids today think they invented grill work but the Incas were centuries ahead of them.

After the museum we had a nice leisurely dinner at a restaurant near the town square. I had some grilled guinea pig, tasted like chicken. I was feeling a little better now but I still had an early night in my hotel. My guide offered to take me out on the town but I told him to go have fun on his own. I should have booked a slower paced trip. This trip was pretty hard on me physically with not enough rest stops along the way.

Quito to Riobamba

I was finally ready to leave Quito. The Plan was to go by car over the Andes to the coast stopping off along the way to see things on the route. I got a new guide for the drive my first male guide so far. He turned out to be very good as well. I have been very happy with all my guides so far. I have never traveled like this before. I have traveled through about a hundred countries on my own without a guide. My travel agent in Quepos talked me into the guided tour and it cost me less than renting a car to get around.

We left Quito early in the morning after a good breakfast. The drive out of town was a bit slow due to some construction on the highway but we managed to get through the congestion eventually. The roads in Ecuador are generally very good roads. This one was a main artery and it was concrete 2 to 4 lanes with just a thin yellow line separating the different directions. The drivers are the weakest link in the system. Some of them are terrible drivers. I saw lots of accidents. We climbed up in elevation as we went along. Our first stop was going to be Los Banos a small town that had a mostly indigenous population but also was a popular location for American expats to live. We made it to Los Banos by lunchtime. I enjoyed sitting at a sidewalk table watching all the people walk by while we ate. I was seeing flags all around that looked like the international gay flag so I asked my guide about them. They were an original flag for Ecuador not the gay flag.

We did a walking tour around town and my guide gave me a good run down on all the history and sites to see. There was the usual Cathedral and square then we went on a car tour to see the local scenery which was very nice. We stopped and watched people riding across a wide gorge on cable cars suspended over the deep gorge. There was a large crowd watching for some reason, maybe just not much excitement around town or something. Then we watched some people bungee jumping off of one of the numerous suspension bridges along the gorge. The crowd roared when the first well endowed woman popped out of her top as she hit the end of the bungee. I had to laugh at the reaction of the crowd. It almost looked like a planned accident to me. They had a nice new power plant that was on the tour also. I crack up sometimes when I do tours that include things like this. I actually love to see how the infrastructure works but I think I am an exception to the rule. We hit the road again. We stopped a few times to talk to locals that we saw along the roads. They were all very friendly to us. We gave a couple of them lifts for short distances. I encouraged my guide to give them rides but he told me he wasn't allowed to or he could get in trouble. He did anyway.

We drove past lots of volcanoes and other mountains of the Andes on the drive. Overall it was a beautiful drive through the mountains. As we pulled into Riobamba the sun was just about to set and we got some great views of the setting sun and the mountains. My guide was from Riobamba so he gave me a short personalized tour of the town. We checked into a nice little hotel and after a good dinner we called it an early night. The next day was going to be a train ride, then a ride to Ingapirica which was an Inca ruin, then on to Cuenca in the afternoon. These were some long days for me with my health problems.