I´M AT: Albergue Churup, see below.
There´s only one, mostly-unpaved road from Huaraz to Willkawain.
Juan, the hostal owner, recommended we hike there, and get the bus back if tired. Mark and I both needed the exercise, to get our strength back, and to acclimatise properly you need to stretch your heart, head and lungs.
At the end of the hike, at Willkawain itself, you can find what is basically a quite impressively-restored, stone-built barn, about 20 metres square, 15 metres high and with three floors. The whole place has been built with great care. The stones in the walls and ceiling varied in size from small pebbles to huge slabs of rock, all of which had been polished a shiny black over time. The first floor was given over to animals and their feed, whilst the second and third were for humans. The guide speculated that this was probably the home of an important local family or families; it was impossible to say for sure, as only miniature ceramics, for burial with the dead, have been excavated. Willkawain was built in 1100AD.
Clearly our faces at breakfast had betrayed a health and stamina which wasn´t yet there, as the hike almost killed me. Countless times, turned corner to find - yet more steeply-sloping dust. One of the many rest breaks brought some sort of curse from a witchlike old woman, haggard in her mountain garb, who, in answer to an amiable ´buenas tardes´, viciously swished a bent cane and muttered darkly at us as we sat at the side of the road.
Anyway, as we sweated I noticed all the houses were painted with numbers - 3+190, 3+200, 3+220 and so on. When I saw the big 4KM sign at the side of the road, I twigged what these were - extremely practical house numbers. The numbers show the distance from the start of the road in Huaraz to the house itself, in kilometres+metres. The road is not a good one, so a gauge of distance is very useful.
It was at 4+630 - a ramshackle concrete block with a dusty lump of garden - that I felt the heat in my belly and was forced to plead for the baño. And what a baño this was. A tramp through the dust to two size-six, foot-shaped carvings on the floor, and a damnation of brown below, accompanied by a barking dog nipping at my lowered jeans. I had to hang on to the unplastered wall to avoid following everything down.
As our bus came back down the road, from the ruin, I tried to make out the hallowed ground, so I could take a picture, but all I could make out was mud, bracken and a set of grinning teeth.
Tuesday 29 August 2006
Monday 28 August 2006
PERU: Tenemos mal salud
I´M AT: Alburgue Churup, Huaraz. $13 in twin room, $6 in dorm. Very relaxed, gentle smell of burnt pines, two common rooms with DVD in one, bit mean on the breakfast.
We turned up in Huaraz in plenty of time for Thursday and Friday night and so, with intentions of hitting the town for a couple of nights - acclimatisation time, you understand, no hiking for 48 hours - we got some quick sleep, after the night bus from Trujillo had given us none. Mark had been feeling a bit shaky for a couple of days and I got a bit achy just before we got on the bus.
For the next 72 hours I didn´t know which part of my body to point at the toilet, but whatever came out, it was the colour of Inca Kola - bright, merciless yellow. The lights and sounds of the weekend tapped on the window but I couldn´t really decide if it was night or day. Aborted attempts to walk into town were followed by a collapse into bed, again.
This has been a right pain, as both of us have lost weight, strength and stamina, and now just walking up to breakfast is difficult. Over the next few days I need to get my appetite back and start walking properly again before finally getting around to the hikes.
Read a couple of good books, though.
We turned up in Huaraz in plenty of time for Thursday and Friday night and so, with intentions of hitting the town for a couple of nights - acclimatisation time, you understand, no hiking for 48 hours - we got some quick sleep, after the night bus from Trujillo had given us none. Mark had been feeling a bit shaky for a couple of days and I got a bit achy just before we got on the bus.
For the next 72 hours I didn´t know which part of my body to point at the toilet, but whatever came out, it was the colour of Inca Kola - bright, merciless yellow. The lights and sounds of the weekend tapped on the window but I couldn´t really decide if it was night or day. Aborted attempts to walk into town were followed by a collapse into bed, again.
This has been a right pain, as both of us have lost weight, strength and stamina, and now just walking up to breakfast is difficult. Over the next few days I need to get my appetite back and start walking properly again before finally getting around to the hikes.
Read a couple of good books, though.
Thursday 24 August 2006
PERU: Some ruins and stuff
I´M AT: Casa Suiza, see below.
Two thousand years ago, in one part of the world, one man founded a religion. In another part, thousands of other men baked mud bricks and made big things out of them in the sand.
Chan Chán is a mud city built by the Chimu indians. It´s the biggest in the world - but this is a similar claim to stating you´ve got the biggest nose in the world, or the smallest cock. It´s located on the coast between Huanchaco and Trujillo.
There´s not much of it left now. One of the palaces has been restored and there you can see carved adobe fish, and diamond-shaped nets, storage huts with reed rooves, faces and shapes in the hard brown mud. I couldn´t quite feel the culture here. Same goes for the Huaca del Dragón which is located right bang in the middle of a ghetto, fumes, dogs, decaying houses and wind-flapped laundry. Dragón´s a big mud brick carved like a sinister wedding cake.
The next day, Tuesday, we got a rickety van to Huaca de la Luna, which was a pyramid built by the Moche. There are two out there in the desert, actually, the other one´s the Huaca del Sol but it´s been reduced, by the Spanish, the weather and the looters, from its palatial past to a mud lump. Anyway the visitable Luna is carved with painted shapes, men, huge crabs, serpents - they´re all faded quite badly and the place is still being restored. Our guide spoke only Spanish, so it was hard to understand the full picture. But what I certainly couldn´t work out is why they spent so long - 600 years - building a pyramid right next to what, to me, looked like a far more impressive mountain, perfectly servicable, a lot bigger, and almost pyramid-shapèd.
Anyone?
Two thousand years ago, in one part of the world, one man founded a religion. In another part, thousands of other men baked mud bricks and made big things out of them in the sand.
Chan Chán is a mud city built by the Chimu indians. It´s the biggest in the world - but this is a similar claim to stating you´ve got the biggest nose in the world, or the smallest cock. It´s located on the coast between Huanchaco and Trujillo.
There´s not much of it left now. One of the palaces has been restored and there you can see carved adobe fish, and diamond-shaped nets, storage huts with reed rooves, faces and shapes in the hard brown mud. I couldn´t quite feel the culture here. Same goes for the Huaca del Dragón which is located right bang in the middle of a ghetto, fumes, dogs, decaying houses and wind-flapped laundry. Dragón´s a big mud brick carved like a sinister wedding cake.
The next day, Tuesday, we got a rickety van to Huaca de la Luna, which was a pyramid built by the Moche. There are two out there in the desert, actually, the other one´s the Huaca del Sol but it´s been reduced, by the Spanish, the weather and the looters, from its palatial past to a mud lump. Anyway the visitable Luna is carved with painted shapes, men, huge crabs, serpents - they´re all faded quite badly and the place is still being restored. Our guide spoke only Spanish, so it was hard to understand the full picture. But what I certainly couldn´t work out is why they spent so long - 600 years - building a pyramid right next to what, to me, looked like a far more impressive mountain, perfectly servicable, a lot bigger, and almost pyramid-shapèd.
Anyone?
PERU: Like Margate, but colder
I´M AT: Casa Suiza, Huanchaco, nr Trujillo. The loo flushes only occasionally,and there´s no breakfast, cos the kitchen´s being redecorated. But it´s near the beach and only $5 a night with private bathroom.
AND LO - here I am in Peru.
First impressions are that it´s an awful lot more dirty, noisy, and chaotic than Ecuador. I feel I´ve been thrust into a tatty blender.
Border crossing was quite a laugh, once we´d stopped batting away the mosquitoes. The Ecuadorian side was fine - all official and pretty quick. But once we´d walked over the dirt road and under the Bienvenidos Peru sign, our days of ease and grace and sweet air were over. The border guard´s concrete outpost was black and empty, and the bus was humming with a waiting engine, so a bunch of locals from the bus walked up and hammered on the door, rang the buzzer, shouted, tapped keys on the window. Nothing happened. Dark and humid, and food for buzzing creatures. Cockroaches and crickets, rolling like dark treacle on the tarmac. Until - by the light of a candle and bleary-eyed, the guy, about 50, crumbling like a digestive, took his place behind the immigration desk, and with rusty stamp imprinted our passports, eyes winking through bottle-bottom glasses, laughed that my name is King, and squattly wallowed in his dirty tracksuit. I could quite easily have handed him a pencil portrait enscribed on a crisp packet and received his blessing.
So we moved on and into the night.
The route from Ecuador took us from Loja over the border to Piura, in Northern Peru. Little to detain us there so on, through a very bleak, white-yellow desert, concrete houses without roofs, to Chiclayo, another change of bus and on to Trujillo. Helpfully, the local beer is called Trujillo, so with an advertiser´s handclap we poured ourselves off and into the afternoon, a taxi straight to Huanchaco which the guide called a ´relaxing surfer´s paradise´.
It was like Margate, only colder. A ramshackle pier, chipped surfboards, sweet carts and their owners ambling around on faded pink conrete. Large orange sandwiches of waffle and toffee. Fish restaurants closed for the low season. Glistening grey sky.
Anyway we dropped anchor at the hostal and changed, went out for beer and food, got a taxi back into Trujillo, went to a club (naturally), and came home the worse for wear, a few pennies shorter and with aching backs, to rest our toes in the freezing coast.
AND LO - here I am in Peru.
First impressions are that it´s an awful lot more dirty, noisy, and chaotic than Ecuador. I feel I´ve been thrust into a tatty blender.
Border crossing was quite a laugh, once we´d stopped batting away the mosquitoes. The Ecuadorian side was fine - all official and pretty quick. But once we´d walked over the dirt road and under the Bienvenidos Peru sign, our days of ease and grace and sweet air were over. The border guard´s concrete outpost was black and empty, and the bus was humming with a waiting engine, so a bunch of locals from the bus walked up and hammered on the door, rang the buzzer, shouted, tapped keys on the window. Nothing happened. Dark and humid, and food for buzzing creatures. Cockroaches and crickets, rolling like dark treacle on the tarmac. Until - by the light of a candle and bleary-eyed, the guy, about 50, crumbling like a digestive, took his place behind the immigration desk, and with rusty stamp imprinted our passports, eyes winking through bottle-bottom glasses, laughed that my name is King, and squattly wallowed in his dirty tracksuit. I could quite easily have handed him a pencil portrait enscribed on a crisp packet and received his blessing.
So we moved on and into the night.
The route from Ecuador took us from Loja over the border to Piura, in Northern Peru. Little to detain us there so on, through a very bleak, white-yellow desert, concrete houses without roofs, to Chiclayo, another change of bus and on to Trujillo. Helpfully, the local beer is called Trujillo, so with an advertiser´s handclap we poured ourselves off and into the afternoon, a taxi straight to Huanchaco which the guide called a ´relaxing surfer´s paradise´.
It was like Margate, only colder. A ramshackle pier, chipped surfboards, sweet carts and their owners ambling around on faded pink conrete. Large orange sandwiches of waffle and toffee. Fish restaurants closed for the low season. Glistening grey sky.
Anyway we dropped anchor at the hostal and changed, went out for beer and food, got a taxi back into Trujillo, went to a club (naturally), and came home the worse for wear, a few pennies shorter and with aching backs, to rest our toes in the freezing coast.
Monday 21 August 2006
ECUADOR: Deep South, Man
I´M AT: Hostal Izhcayluma, Vilcabamba. German-run, $8 dorm room including a wonderful breakfast, views over stunning scenery, an incredibly varied and beautiful garden that attracts exotic birdlife, bar, pool table, swimming pool, hammocks - the business.
Vilcabamba seems to have a reputation for attracting the esoteric of mind.
It´s the place where you can supposedly get San Pedro, a hallucinogenic drink made from a local cactus, used by shamans and the like. I didn´t see it on offer or even spoken about, but Vilcabamba did seem to be in the middle of a long trip.
Take the caucasian guy with mocassins who used to traverse the main plaza, veeeeery slowly, bleached dreadlocks tied into a pineapple above his head, sacks for clothes, his mixed-race children and wife walking a few paces behind him. Or Mike, a bloke from Norwich who´d moved here years ago, never to return, who ran a café in town, complete with a display cabinet of mystical ephemera and books on symbolism. Mike was a big drinker and weed smoker, as, it turned out, were most of his mates. His even stranger friend, Gavin, was an emaciated, 50-year-old Kiwi in a cowboy hat, who babbled manically about dark omens in the sky.
Mark and I were once invited back to Mike´s house after a night of drinking in the café, and we passed a carved potato pipe around Mike and his friends, through which we smoked a very baggy spliff. I was told the next day that I´d been listening to Mike eulogise about some guru for hours, nodding my head as best I could, but the memory is not mine. The night ended - as did all four nights in Vilcabamba - walking up the 2km pitch-black slope back to the hostal, fending off the farm dogs.
Another night, on the way down, our German friend Kristine and I bumped into a bunch of drunks who were swigging something from a water bottle. They waved us over for a chat and offered us a drink and, despite thinking this could be San Pedro, we both took a swig from their unmarked bottle. It turned out to be cane liquor, made extremely locally, and was so nice that I bought a bottle to keep me company during the forthcoming nine-hour journey to Peru.
For all that, Vilcabamba is absolutely, outrageously beautiful. Brown, rutted cliffs spill into gentle canyons below, butterflies drift like pollen on the temperate air, birdsong is light and trill, and the nights are warm. One day, before Mark showed up, a group of us borrowed a mountain bike each from the hostal and rode to the start of a three-hour hike to a nearby waterfall, which you had to slide your way through a guy´s near-vertical potato field to get to. I ended up taking the same photograph of the same beautiful view thirty times.
But the place had its teeth into me as well, for not only did I turn down a beer one dinner, I forgot to take up the pool challenge laid by two German girls. Anite, and your silent friend, Vilcabamba has a lot to apologise for.
Vilcabamba seems to have a reputation for attracting the esoteric of mind.
It´s the place where you can supposedly get San Pedro, a hallucinogenic drink made from a local cactus, used by shamans and the like. I didn´t see it on offer or even spoken about, but Vilcabamba did seem to be in the middle of a long trip.
Take the caucasian guy with mocassins who used to traverse the main plaza, veeeeery slowly, bleached dreadlocks tied into a pineapple above his head, sacks for clothes, his mixed-race children and wife walking a few paces behind him. Or Mike, a bloke from Norwich who´d moved here years ago, never to return, who ran a café in town, complete with a display cabinet of mystical ephemera and books on symbolism. Mike was a big drinker and weed smoker, as, it turned out, were most of his mates. His even stranger friend, Gavin, was an emaciated, 50-year-old Kiwi in a cowboy hat, who babbled manically about dark omens in the sky.
Mark and I were once invited back to Mike´s house after a night of drinking in the café, and we passed a carved potato pipe around Mike and his friends, through which we smoked a very baggy spliff. I was told the next day that I´d been listening to Mike eulogise about some guru for hours, nodding my head as best I could, but the memory is not mine. The night ended - as did all four nights in Vilcabamba - walking up the 2km pitch-black slope back to the hostal, fending off the farm dogs.
Another night, on the way down, our German friend Kristine and I bumped into a bunch of drunks who were swigging something from a water bottle. They waved us over for a chat and offered us a drink and, despite thinking this could be San Pedro, we both took a swig from their unmarked bottle. It turned out to be cane liquor, made extremely locally, and was so nice that I bought a bottle to keep me company during the forthcoming nine-hour journey to Peru.
For all that, Vilcabamba is absolutely, outrageously beautiful. Brown, rutted cliffs spill into gentle canyons below, butterflies drift like pollen on the temperate air, birdsong is light and trill, and the nights are warm. One day, before Mark showed up, a group of us borrowed a mountain bike each from the hostal and rode to the start of a three-hour hike to a nearby waterfall, which you had to slide your way through a guy´s near-vertical potato field to get to. I ended up taking the same photograph of the same beautiful view thirty times.
But the place had its teeth into me as well, for not only did I turn down a beer one dinner, I forgot to take up the pool challenge laid by two German girls. Anite, and your silent friend, Vilcabamba has a lot to apologise for.
Sunday 20 August 2006
ECUADOR: Arroz con pollo
A bit about the food and drink in Ecuador.
FRUITS AND JUICES - sensational, and such a broad range. Mora (blackberry), papaya, naranjilla (a small, ultra-juicy orange), taxo and grenadilla (a bit like pomegranites in that they´re hard shells full of many seeds, suck from husk, gorgeous), pina (pineapple), naranja, four different types of banana including a red one, watermelon, lima, maracuyá (passion fruit)....all really good, fresh and cheap.
The fruit juices are freshly made, often with added sugar, sometimes with the raw white of an egg to make em frothy. This is a poor country, but the juices are readily available, everyone drinks them, they´re tasty, healthy and cheap. You can also get these as batidos (milkshakes) which are equally good.
SET MEALS - desayunos (breakfasts) and almeurzos (lunches) cost about $1-$1.50 and are, broadly speaking, a cheese sandwich or bun; coffee (usually Nescafe); a fresh fruit juice; and the main dish, rice with fried chicken, or rice with fried ´meat´. It´s not great, but it´s bloody cheap and fills a hole. Sometimes you´ll have a soup dish with lunch as well, I´ve seen plenty of menus offering sopa de patas, chicken-feet soup.
Meriendas (evening meals) could be llapangachas (stuffed potatoes with sausages, or chicken), or cuy (guinea pig), with roast tomate de arbol (a type of sour tomato, much better cooked than raw or juiced). I haven´t eaten many Ecuadorian dinners here so I can´t do this section justice.
SEAFOOD - the best thing to eat here, by some distance, is ceviche, raw fish or cooked shellfish, served in a cold broth of tomatoes, onions, lemon juice, a stinging hot aji (chilli sauce), popcorn and banana chips. I wasn´t looking forward to it but it´s gorgeous. The best one I had was also the cheapest, served up during a Gran Colombia food festival in Quito´s downtown market, at which we ate some figs, cheeses, little fried potato cakes, all fantastic stuff.
STREET FOOD - loads of different stuff, dried banana chips, crisps, really good fresh fruit helados (ice creams), chocolate, empanadas (pasties, with banana, or cheese), loads of corn on the cob. The buses always stop and let food sellers on, and it´s too often far too tempting. These guys charge $0.25 for an ice cream or small snack, $0.50 for something filling.
INTERNATIONAL - there are loads of places offering international food as well, certainly in the big towns. Many hostels have cafés and restaurants and these are the places to eat Italian, German, Mexican, sushi....anything you fancy. The best pizza I´ve had was at New York´s, in Cuenca, where the smallest pizza on the menu was the size of a truck wheel. All fresh and oozing.
FRUITS AND JUICES - sensational, and such a broad range. Mora (blackberry), papaya, naranjilla (a small, ultra-juicy orange), taxo and grenadilla (a bit like pomegranites in that they´re hard shells full of many seeds, suck from husk, gorgeous), pina (pineapple), naranja, four different types of banana including a red one, watermelon, lima, maracuyá (passion fruit)....all really good, fresh and cheap.
The fruit juices are freshly made, often with added sugar, sometimes with the raw white of an egg to make em frothy. This is a poor country, but the juices are readily available, everyone drinks them, they´re tasty, healthy and cheap. You can also get these as batidos (milkshakes) which are equally good.
SET MEALS - desayunos (breakfasts) and almeurzos (lunches) cost about $1-$1.50 and are, broadly speaking, a cheese sandwich or bun; coffee (usually Nescafe); a fresh fruit juice; and the main dish, rice with fried chicken, or rice with fried ´meat´. It´s not great, but it´s bloody cheap and fills a hole. Sometimes you´ll have a soup dish with lunch as well, I´ve seen plenty of menus offering sopa de patas, chicken-feet soup.
Meriendas (evening meals) could be llapangachas (stuffed potatoes with sausages, or chicken), or cuy (guinea pig), with roast tomate de arbol (a type of sour tomato, much better cooked than raw or juiced). I haven´t eaten many Ecuadorian dinners here so I can´t do this section justice.
SEAFOOD - the best thing to eat here, by some distance, is ceviche, raw fish or cooked shellfish, served in a cold broth of tomatoes, onions, lemon juice, a stinging hot aji (chilli sauce), popcorn and banana chips. I wasn´t looking forward to it but it´s gorgeous. The best one I had was also the cheapest, served up during a Gran Colombia food festival in Quito´s downtown market, at which we ate some figs, cheeses, little fried potato cakes, all fantastic stuff.
STREET FOOD - loads of different stuff, dried banana chips, crisps, really good fresh fruit helados (ice creams), chocolate, empanadas (pasties, with banana, or cheese), loads of corn on the cob. The buses always stop and let food sellers on, and it´s too often far too tempting. These guys charge $0.25 for an ice cream or small snack, $0.50 for something filling.
INTERNATIONAL - there are loads of places offering international food as well, certainly in the big towns. Many hostels have cafés and restaurants and these are the places to eat Italian, German, Mexican, sushi....anything you fancy. The best pizza I´ve had was at New York´s, in Cuenca, where the smallest pizza on the menu was the size of a truck wheel. All fresh and oozing.
Tuesday 15 August 2006
ECUADOR: Salud, Fernandas
I'M AT: The Hotel Pichincha, Cuenca, see below.
My last day in Cuenca, and I got done everything that I wanted to do - sent some stuff home, including about 400 photos on CD, and bought some waterproof clothes - no longer The Most Unprepared Man in South America
So with a couple of hours to kill I walked to Turi.
Turi´s a hamlet with a powder-blue church, overlooking the city of Cuenca. It takes about an hour to get there, mostly uphill. You have to do a chicken run across the Loja-Azaqoes motorway to get there. Midday´s not the time to do it when the sun´s out.
But the view really is great, taking in the whole city, surrounding villages, the Tomebamba and three other rivers, mountains in the distance, little fluffy clouds, the whole deal. The only thing is that there´s really nothing else to do up there. The church was shut and I already had a bottle of water, so I came back down again, and got lost in the suburbs, really wealthy houses with tree ferns on the driveway, high gates, mesh shutters, Alsatians. And eventually, passing the cafe where I bought the water on the way up, I smiled at the señora who´d served me, she called me over, and I met her three giggly daughters and grandson Fernandas. Cute lad with a thick Fifth Beatle of black hair.
When the highlight of your day is a brief, sweaty, fractured conversation with a small, nervous child, it´s time to move on. Salud, Fernandas.
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Monday 14 August 2006
ECUADOR: The Sapphire-Vented Puffleg
I'M AT: Hotel Pichincha, Cuenca. No-frills $4.50 with good central sitting area, angry bars on the windows, friendly and helpful (if bleary-eyed) owner.
Met Handsome Swiss Guy Mark (I should add, NOT my description) in the hotel Pichincha on Wednesday evening and went out and got battered, ended up dancing in a salsa club and then went to an after-hours bar with a load of Ecuadorians. The girls here are quite spectacular.
Got in at 5AM, slept most of Thursday but at night we went to a posh restaurant called the Eucalyptus Cafe, then to Club Roto for the 10 de Agosto celebrations.
Got back at 4.30AM.
Friday, Mark, me and two American girls, Dara and Golden, took in a match between Deportivo Cuenca and Liga de Quito. Finished 1-1, Quito had a man sent off and there were some very impressive fireworks. And cold lagers. So after a quick bite to eat we hit a club called Pop. Danced until the wee hours and got in at 4AM.
And then it was Saturday. Saturday night was surprisingly quiet early doors, but still - we managed to go salsa dancing at the Eucalyptus again until 2, then to a strange deserted club (which I later found out was a strip joint) playing house music and serving $3 cuba libres, did some stupid dancing with some Spanish and French folk, and got in this morning at 4.30AM.
Four nights on the trot, six different clubs, Pilsener and Brahma beers, absolutely wrecked, I´m an old man and I´m finally feeling it, but have the suspicion that tonight´s quiet night may not be as quiet as would be good for me.
Met some cracking characters, though. Hippy Suzy and her mate Betty, who ran the after-hours bar; an artist called Freddie, wheelchair-bound, likes a whisky and supports both Rangers and Celtic; DJ Gustavo, a guy we saw play both Roto and Pop, loads of different music and a good bald grinning madman; Sili, from Venezuela, who was always trying to get into Mark's pants; and a cast of three from El Cafecito hostal, including sad-faced Arriana from Quito, who never quite joined in.
Somewhere along the line we managed to fit in a trip to Parque Nacional Cajas, which was stunningly beautiful, verdant and eerie, rivalling Quilotoa for the most spectacular countryside. It really was incredible, lakes, spikily-leaved plants, giant lichen and jagged mountains, which the golden sun made holy with its beam.
And I shouldn´t leave this bit about the park without mentioning some of the varieties of hummingbird that we COULD have seen, which Mark has picked out in luminous yellow in his guidebook, and which I´d write in the sky in enormous letters for all time, if I could:
- the Rainbow-bearded Thornbill;
- the Purple-throated Sunangel; and:
- ......the Sapphire-Vented Puffleg.
How good is that??
Saturday 12 August 2006
ECUADOR: Bananas, elections and landslides
I'M AT: El Tren Dorado, Riobamba, but wishing I was in Cuenca.
I tried to leave Riobamba on Monday, a six-hour journey to Cuenca, but, much like the train, the bus turned back after four hours and came back to Riobamba, as a landslide had blocked the main road.
You´d imagine that big cities would be amply connected but no, the landscape here is so mountainous that the ´main´ road is pretty much a dirt track in the sky, so when the mountain crumbles, so do everyone´s travel plans.
Anyway, back in Riobamba I met a surprised Katy, who I´d left that morning, and we had a cracking Chinese, so the day wasn´t all wasted. She did level the scores at cribbage though.
So the next day I left Riobamba again, half the man I used to be, and this time via Guayaquil. And believe me, ten hours is a long time to keep waving away the fried banana salesmen.
The journey contained very many sparkling white herons and their miniature bookend offspring, huge fields of bananas, all bagged for harvest, moped taxis, enormous stalls selling enormous melons, and the first touch of 30 degree heat since I landed.
And everywhere you go, every available space has been painted red, yellow and blue with the name and affiliation of one of the twenty-odd Presidentail candidates in the forthcoming election. Quite simple but no less impressive for it. VOTE CYNTHIA. And they will. Saatchi and Saatchi could learn from this.
ECUADOR: Derailed on the Devil´s Nose
I'M AT: El Tren Dorado, Riobamba. Good rooms bang on top of station, with star signs for room numbers (stayed in Taurus) and richly embroidered animal throws.
Riobamba is a bigger city than I´d expected, and really nice and buzzy. It sits in a valley surrounded by the Chimborazo and Tungurahua volcanioes, and as the bus comes into town you´re greeted with a hazy patchwork background of snow, rock and cloud. Nice.
The tourists in Riobamba are here for one thing only, and it´s not the reggaeton. We ride a stretch of railway they called the Nariz del Diablo, or Devil´s Nose. The railway used to connect Riobamba to Guayaquil, many hundreds of miles away, but lack of investment, landslides and successive tropical storms have destroyed much of it. It now goes precisely nowhere, and is nigh-on useless for getting around, but it passes through some spectacular countryside, and some marketing genius has been employed to ensure that the roof is always full of tourists paying $11 for the ride and $1 for a cushion.
The train leaves at 7AM but you need to be there early to secure a good spot on the roof. So, after a 5AM breakfast, we bundled on fleeces and hats to sit on a rusty expanse and wonder at what was next.
The train rolled through town with much drama, horn blasting, cars and trucks and people waving us off. And then, for the next two hours, the romantic visions died, we found ourselves sitting on top of an old train in the cold, and only the ocassional shower of rain broke the monotony. I was the only one to put up an umbrella and hunched out of the way of the drips.
The train pulled into Alausi and we hopped off for a piss. I say hopped off - we clambered down a metal ladder on the side of the truck - these are very high carriages and I ripped my jeans on the way. Some bought hats, some ate banana pasties.
And then all back on board for the Devil´s Nose, a very steep descent into a dusty canyon.
Now, the guidebooks will have you believe that this is a miracle of engineering, but I would imagine that most, like me, with my scant knowledge of track engineering, would fail to grasp the endeavour. So what you´re basically left with is a ride down the side of a mountain, spectacular though it is.
And then our carriage derailed at the side of a sheer drop, and the roof felt a little bit higher than it had before, and the woman who´d been standing up taking videos for the entire journey decided to quietly sit down.
So, after we´d stopped, with bits of wood and cigarettes in mouths, the brakemen got her up and running again, and we arrived safely back in Alausi, from where we got the bus back to Riobamba.
And there it is. The Devil´s Nose train ride. Six hours on a hot tin roof only to arrive right back to where you´d started. Nice mountains though.
Friday 4 August 2006
ECUADOR: Quilotoa, Chugchilán & Siquisili
I'M AT: Cabanas Quilotoa, Quilotoa. A cold, ramshackle converted barn... AND The Black Sheep Inn, Chugchilán. A hyper-ecofriendly hostal but with ridiculously high prices. Good food though.
For the past three days and nights I´ve travelled from Quito > Quilotoa > Chugchilán > Siquisli, and am now in Baños, there´s a partially exploded volcano over my shoulder, and it´s just started raining.
Quilotoa is a long-extinct volcano that last exploded in the late 1700s. The eruption created an enormous crater which filled with beautiful green freshwater, and its ripples dive like drakes amongst the surrounding countryside.
The bus from Latacunga to Quilotoa was quite ridiculous, perched on the edge of foaming gorges, patchwork mountains. Hard to believe that cultivation is possible at that sort of elevation. Approached from the bus, we checked out and subsequently stayed in a really cold place called Cabañas Quilotoa, owned by Humberto Latacunga (no inbreeding there, then).
The tap water was recycled piss, I think - but they served up some nice hot grub and put on a show of dancing boys and girls, and we drank beer and played poker. I met a nice couple called Steve and Suzanne from Worcester whom I´m meeting up with in about an hour.
That first afternoon we walked to the bottom of the crater and back up again, about half an hour down but a good hour back up. I tumbled over loose sand on the way back, red faced with exertion, and was widely mocked by some lava-faced French who suggested that, haha, had I not seen it?, haha, I should use, the, the, the solid route to my left, which a small mountain girl was breezily ascending.
Thanks.
Made it back up but vowed not to do the hike from the crater to Chugchilán, the next stop (about 22km from Quilotoa). So got the truck the next morning instead. We arrived at the Black Sheep Inn for two nights and on that same morning hiked to the bottom of the canyon below, and then upstream, Steve and Suzanne shared their lunch with me (I´d been pounding my clothes on an old fashioned stone and had neglected to sort out a pack-up). The river forked right, we took a smaller river, jumping across to save our feet from drowning, and then I - or Steve, I´m still not sure - lost the map.
So we kind of made it up from there, and some of the ledges were ridiculous, a small sideways step to the death below.
We climbed up a pounding steep loose bank to negotiate a waterfall, found ourselves on a plateau overlooking the canyon with only a lonely goatherd for company, asked him for directions, then decided against taking them, got chased by a snarling farmdog, before finally climbing the steep paths between farmed fields to emerge caked in blood and vomit, reeling from the agony.
And then collapsed back at the hostal - about which, in summary, a hippy dream of sorts, but a thriving business, a permaculture, completely vegetarian, sauna, honours system for the banana bread and other organic snacks, composting loos, llamas and dogs and cats and swans gadding about. It was great, but I also was quite glad to leave in the end - it was expensive, and I felt like a walking swearbox, afraid to frown.
Wednesday morning we hired horses and a group of seven or eight of us rode to the Cheese Factory (a bit small and nondescript and the buggers left immediately after we rode off), then higher up to the Cloud Forest, had lunch, a small tour of medicinal plants, before a gallop back down the hills, a real race between the horses. I´d been kicked in the knee in the morning, by a mule in front, but finished the day only with a really sore arse.
It was my first time on a horse and I absolutely loved it.
So I travelled here, to Baños, today, via a crazy market with a REAL snake oil salesman, and where you could buy a small cute puppy for $0.50, with Katy from Utah, who is only six days younger than me. She´s an outdoors type and her enthusiasm scares me slightly. Our paths diverged in Ambato, and she´s gone to Guaranda but is meeting Steve, Suzanne and me on Saturday to do the Devil´s Nose train ride in Riobamba.
We´re meeting at Simon Bolivar´s old house. He probably pissed into his own drinking water as well.
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