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.
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