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.