I got up early, had breakfast at my lodging--El Tren Dorado, and crossed the street to the train station to see if I would be able to obtain a ticket for the trip from Riobamba to Palmira. An uncertain boarding of a train that, because of rain-induced slides in its most spectacular section, would only be making a condensed version of its usual route, represented a great disappointment.
I waited outside the station with several others who were in the same boat. Things looked grim until a young couple tired of waiting in the cold for the shortened ride and walked off. Just then a train employee came outside with two unclaimed tickets; since the couple, who had been ahead of me, were not there to claim them, I was able to buy a ticket ($7).
The train was scheduled to depart at 6 a.m. and I knew it would be on time. I had to hurry to board the train. It was then that I realized that there was very little train-like about the conveyance other than the fact that it traveled on rails. On this day, at least, there would be only a single, red, motorized car making the trip, more similar to a trolley than to a train.
Despite the cold--and some frost here and there indicated that the temperature was in the low 30's this morning-- nearly everyone opted to ride on the roof rather than inside the car. We were issued square seat pads as we climbed the ladder. Passengers sat on the pads on the roof, legs squeezed under a bar that ran the length of both sides of the car, each person facing outward left or right of the tracks. The top was packed on both sides, but I managed to squeeze in towards the back before we left the station.
Chimborazo
The morning was clear and cold. The great volcano Chimborazo, more than 20,000 feet high, could be glimpsed at times. The train traveled at about 20 miles per hour. Occasionally, overhanging branches and leaves would brush against us. I lifted my camera overhead from my seated position to try to photograph Chimborazo and the passing scene. That proved to be an extraordinarily bad idea since we frequently encountered electrical wires low enough that we passengers on the roof had to duck our heads to avoid them. I'm sure that some unlucky passengers in the past have had cameras snatched from their outstretched hands by low-lying wires.
The group on top of the car was in good spirits, wrapped in sweaters and windbreakers if they were lucky, blowing on their hands to ward off numbing cold. The passing landscape was mostly agricultural. Men and women were out tending livestock despite the early hour. We approached the town of Laguna de Colta just before 7 a.m., the sun just coming over the hills to the east. The cold air produced fog over the town's namesake lagoon and, in the early morning light, a beautiful and surreal scene.
Fog over the lake, Laguna de Colta
A little further on, perhaps 5 miles, there was sudden chaos and yelling from the front of the car. As quickly as I could turn my head from the passing landscape to see what was going on, I was fending off sizeable branches of a tree that had fallen across the tracks. The train's engineer could only begin to slow down after he saw the obstruction, but the tree swept across the top of the car at 15-to-20 miles per hour. To make matters worse, the tree had pulled down electrical wires that passed by the left side of the car within inches of the passengers' outward-turned legs.
Looking back at the tree across the train tracks
It took several hundred yards for the engineer to stop the train. It was very quiet for a few moments as the passengers took stock of the situation, wondering what had happened, checking to see if they or others were hurt. A train employee climbed up to see if anyone was injured. There were some minor injuries along with a few complaints, people who wondered how such a thing could have happened, who opined that nothing of this sort would have happened in their home country.
Everyone on the trip probably possessed a well-developed sense of adventure, but this was more than anyone expected. I could imagine much worse results: a passenger could have been knocked off the top of the car by the branches sweeping across it, or the pinioned leg of a twisting passenger could easily have been fractured.
Thirty minutes or so after the event, we continued on our way, the train’s passengers and crew shaken. Many of the passengers had chosen to get off the roof and to ride below. We continued on to the town of Guamote (GPS: 01 56.036S / 78 42.684W), arriving there a little before 8 a.m. Arrangements were made to take several passengers, accompanied by the train’s crew, to a clinic in a nearby town for x-rays and evaluations.
An unscheduled stop in Guamote
It felt great to bask in the warmth of the bright sun on top of the car. Five prone bodies lounging on various configurations of 30 seat cushions suggested a 60’s hippie pad. This made a great vantage point for watching and photographing the passing scene in the small town, especially the colorfully attired indigenous people who populated the streets of Guamote.
Indigenous people, streets of Guamote
It didn't take long to realize that we wouldn't be going anywhere soon. Tentatively, one by one, we started to explore the town. With anything of consequence located within a block of where the train car was parked, it was easy to have a look around.
I could see and smell all sorts of foods being prepared by vendors on the streets. I saw some people eating flat, sandwich-sized portions of dough that had been cooked in hot oil. Coarse sugar was sprinkled on the items at the time of their purchase. I had one, and then quickly had another just after it was lifted from the hot oil. They tasted a lot like that old state fair staple, funnel cakes; they may have been called empanadas, but those usually contained a meat or cheese filling.
Food vendors, Guamote
At another stand I tried one more of these fried dough treats, this one filled with cheese (empanada con queso). The vendor was also cooking a large kettle of milky liquid, and a hot drink on this chilly morning sounded pretty good. I was told the drink—thickened and flavored with a tapioca-like substance—was called maroche. Bueno!
An old woman a half-block away enlisted some men to help her hoist a huge boar hog onto a sturdy table right by the railroad tracks, its belly on the table and its feet splayed straight out. She went to work on the carcass, but I never knew if the hog was cooked or not. Perhaps she simply ran an outdoor butcher shop.
Vendor selling fresh--really fresh--pork, Guamote
A little farther off, there was an active food and produce market. I bargained for some dark purple, almost black, grapes (uvas), buying a half-kilogram (about one pound) bag for 50 cents. I wavered between hoping the grapes had been washed, then thinking that unwashed produce might be less risky than produce rinsed in the local water. Whatever, I ate them, enjoyed them, and suffered no adverse consequences.
I found a clean bano (bathroom) on the other side of a park that was adjacent to the tracks. Often, a small charge of five or ten cents is collected to use banos, as it was here, providing a livelihood for someone maintaining the facility and a service to those in need.
It was nearly two hours before the train's crew returned from the clinic. During the interim, nearly all of the original passengers—tired of waiting, chastened by our brush with danger, still chilled from the morning ride--had elected to proceed onward via bus or van. The crew finally arrived back in Guamote at 10:15 a.m. When we departed shortly after that, the original manifest had been trimmed to a total of seven passengers--five on top and two below.
The route from Guamote took us past more men and women wearing the colorful dress of the region working in the fields or tending livestock. Some of the women had small babies tightly secured to their backs, almost hidden. At 10,000 feet, the land was high and dry; some hillsides were cleared for agricultural use, others were covered with pines. A stream paralleled the tracks on our right. The sky, vivid blue, was filled with bright white cumulus clouds. Unlike the cold ride from Riobamba to Guamote, the air was pleasantly cool.
We passed by a few building, and a few settlements. Then, 30-45 minutes after leaving Guamote, the train stopped at a little community of perhaps 25 buildings. What was up?
Get your bags and get off the train, that's what was up. We had arrived at Palmira (GPS: 02 37.175S / 75 38.357W), the end of the line for train service until slides that had closed the tracks were cleared some days or weeks from now. All that was missing was a scorching sun and some swirling dust devils and you'd have thought we were on the set of an old spaghetti western.
Palmira, the end of the line
Only seven travelers had even made it this far on the train. Two of the seven were returning on the train to Riobamba, which left five of us who disembarked in Palmira.
One of the train employees pointed us towards the highway where we could catch a bus. When we started in the wrong direction, he called us back and personally took us to the highway and showed us exactly where to stand to stop a bus going in our direction.
There we were: three French travelers who spoke neither Spanish nor English, a young woman who sported a ring through her lower lip and spoke a little English, and myself. We stood where the tracks crossed the highway. We looked right and left and saw only the empty road. Not a vehicle of any kind, nor a person, nor any habitation. To take the movie allusions one step further, the vista evoked Easy Rider and its scenes of empty highways in the American west.
Looking for a bus near Palmira
What are the odds that a bus would appear going in our direction? Not just in our direction, but to our destination of Cuenca? Within five minutes? Well, better recalculate those odds: at 11 a.m. the five of us boarded a southbound bus to Cuenca. The fare? $5.
The bus climbed and descended steep terrain on the well maintained Highway 35. At 11:40 the bus pulled into the town of Alausi. This is where the classic train ride through La Nariz del Diablo (the Devil's Nose) really begins, but not for us, not today. Don't bet against a future trip to complete this bit of unfinished business.
The road out of Alausi switchbacked up a mountainside 2,000 feet or more. The slopes were green with lush vegetation, but there were only small stands of trees spotted here and there where we would expect to encounter forests in similar high mountain terrain back home. Fallen rocks were commonly seen on the highway.
Highway 35, which, with the exception of the train ride, I had been on since leaving Quito nearly 24 hours ago, became rough in spots beyond Alausi. It showed evidence of repairs following recent rains and slides. Brilliant red poppies and yellow composites adorned the road cuts and hillsides. Off to my left I could see a waterfall, and to my right the terrain fell off thousands of feet down to the river.
At 12:15 our bus was stopped for road construction; it was an hour before we were finally led through a one-lane section of the highway and allowed to continue towards Cuenca. The first mile beyond the stop was in very bad shape. Some bumps had me wondering what would happen if the bus dropped its transmission or broke an axle. Then we were past the worst of the road repairs.
I looked out the bus windows at clouds that were at eye level. At 1:30 we arrived at Chunchi, a beautiful town in a beautiful setting. It reminded me of Coroico, Bolivia, the dreamlike town in the junga at the end of the bike ride down The World's Most Dangerous Road. Numerous passengers boarded the bus in Chunchi: every seat was filled and a dozen riders packed the aisle.
Beyond Chunchi the terrain was beautiful and nearly vertical, the highway clinging to one side of an impressive valley. The bus went in-and-out of clouds. Frequent waterfalls graced the views out the bus windows, as did many plants flaunting purple, yellow and pink flowers.
It was difficult to keep track of exactly where the bus was on my map. I could not really see ahead on the highway where town names were posted. I only knew that the old bus kept grinding onward.
When I thought that we might be getting close to the town of Azogues, which was perhaps 20 km north of Cuenca, I was dismayed to see a sign that read "Cuenca 68 km." That meant at least two more hours at the pace we had been going.
The two-hour delay at Guamote on the train, a one-hour delay for road construction, and this lengthy bus trip (it had already been four hours since I'd boarded the bus) were conspiring to cut short my visit to Cuenca. And then some marvelous interactions with Ecuadorans--indigenous and not--made for a memorable afternoon.
I had been riding for hours in an aisle seat with diminished ability to see outside and no ability to determine our position with my GPS. When a passenger got off in one of the towns along the way and a window seat became available, I shot over to it.
Soon afterwards, at another stop, an indigenous woman in full native dress, including a baby swaddled to her back and just barely visible, boarded the bus with her two older children. She spoke Spanish and we talked a little. We learned a little bit about each other; I learned her older children's ages. She asked what the English word was for the age of her girl (nine) and boy (twelve). The woman with the baby on her back was hardly bigger than my nine year-old granddaughter Miranda, and her daughter appeared closer to six years old than her actual nine years.
I had not offered to vacate my long awaited window seat, so three of them--all but the son--were clustered on or in front of the single aisle seat, their faces not a foot away from mine. I tried to engage the nine year old girl, but mostly she just stared at me wide-eyed. I traded hand pats with the baby whose chubby face and arms were just visible above his perch on his mother's back.
The family exited the bus within an hour of boarding it, the little girl sort of backing up as she moved down the aisle, her eyes always on me.
I had attempted to get my MP3 player out to show the family some pictures, but its battery was depleted, and so I pulled out my camera and started to show them some pictures. I had hardly started when they had gotten up to exit the bus.
In the row ahead, though, a young man in his early 20's had taken an interest in the photos. And a middle-aged man across the aisle was craning his head to get a look at them. So, for each picture, I would point the display first one way, then another, so each could see. After awhile I simply showed the young man in the seat ahead of mine how to advance the pictures, then let him have the camera until he'd either seen all the photos or tired of the novelty. I think he was shocked that some gringo would allow him to actually hold such a prized possession.
When the indigenous woman got off the bus with her family, a well-dressed professional man sat down next to me. His card read 'Dr. Timoleon Carrera C., Gerente Comercializacion.' He was an officer, the director of marketing, in a large company based in Cuenca. He had been out making sales pitches today in one or more of the small towns north and west of Cuenca.
Bus rides in Ecuador can be very interesting: part transportation, part naked entrepreneurship, part entertainment. Enterprising sorts simply board the buses at a stop and begin selling their wares. They walk up and down the aisles with drinks or snacks. Their bags of papitas (potato chips) were my favorite--crisp, hand cut, cooked and packaged at home. Papitas are the greatest chips you can buy. Frozen items and candy are sometimes available.
The greatest fun, though, are the entrepreneurs who stand at the front of the bus spouting an unbroken line of patter, making eye contact with everyone up and down the rows of seats, pointing their finger to emphasize a point. Wanted or not, they had likely distributed a sample of their product--bracelets, say, or cologne--to everyone on the bus. Then, following their presentation, they would re-trace their steps, hopefully to collect money for purchases, but just as often to retrieve their unsold products.
Some of these sellers reminded me of cookware salesmen at a state fair. Close your eyes and you could almost hear Dan Akroyd breathlessly selling the Bass-O-Matic blender on the classic Saturday Night Live bit.
I'll always remember the somewhat overweight woman of 30 or so who began her presentation by distributing three wrapped pieces of candy to every passenger on the bus. She never stopped talking or laughing and she never stopped smiling. This could have been a Vegas lounge act. She did a number of rope tricks and other magic. She called up one of the French travelers who had been on the train from Riobamba to Palmira earlier today and who spoke no Spanish. The Frenchman stood beside the woman, clueless, while she entertained her Spanish-speaking captive audience. Suddenly she reached somewhere, I couldn't see from where I sat, and pulled a piece of lingerie out of one of the Frenchman's pockets. He was good-natured throughout. Who would not be in the presence of such a dynamic, positive force as this woman?
Then she went into her real pitch. Her son was ill with cancer. This was how she raised money for his treatment. Please, she asked, give what you can for the candy she had distributed earlier, the money would go for her son's care. She opened a worn photo album and showed pictures of her son and, I presumed, the rest of her family.
Her upbeat and outgoing demeanor never changed during any of this. I asked the man sitting next to me, the marketing director heading home after a day of sales of his own, if the woman's pitch was valid in his opinion. Yes, he told me, yes it was. I reached for some money, and had to reach deep: by this time I had less than $4 in my possession.
Dr. Timoleon pointed out on my map exactly where we were as we proceeded southward in the late afternoon shadows, along a mountain stream caught between two escarpments: now we were in Biblian, then Azogues, and finally on the outskirts of Cuenca. Dr. Timoleon got off the bus in a northern barrio of Cuenca after bidding me goodbye.
It was 5 p.m. when the bus pulled into Cuenca's Terminal Terrestre, six hours since I had boarded it in Palmira. I wasted no time in getting a taxi to take me to Hostal Macondo which I had selected from my guidebook. My driver, Eddie, had recently returned to Cuenca after living for seven years on 163rd Street in Queens, New York, where he had worked for a commercial roofer.
Eddie and his wife are both Ecuadorans, but they had three children born in New York, each of the three now a U.S. citizen. When their oldest child reaches her majority, she will return to the United States and sponsor her parents' emigration. That's another 14 years off, but it's understood in the family that that's the way it's going to be.
Eddie was a nice 'kid' of 29, a good worker I think, who left the States on good terms with his boss in New York. His wages as a taxi driver must be only a slight fraction of what he earned roofing in New York, but he and his family probably live alright by local standards.
Hostal Macondo represented a great lodging experience. I was shown a small, spotless room with a shared bathroom and shower a couple of doors away. The cost was $13.39 a night. The facility had been a colonial villa at one time. Enter from the street and you'll find a front desk that shares a corner of a spacious, open room with a large skylight. This lobby, festooned with plants and flowers, serves more as a living room for hostal residents, a pleasant place to sit, read, talk or otherwise relax.
Most of the rooms opened onto a large courtyard encircled by the main building and a couple of single-story wings containing the majority of the hostal's living quarters. The courtyard was green with plants and lawn, manicured, decorated, furnished with seating and a table, and was almost cloister-like in its peacefulness. A traveler with more time than I had might well choose to simply spend a day inside Hostal Macondo, enjoying the ambience.
Inside Hostal Macondo
As for me, I had less than 24 hours to spend in Cuenca and, after settling into my room, I set out in the twilight to see a bit of the city, get a bite to eat, find an Internet site, and not incidentally, to find an ATM and replenish my cash supply.
I ate at Raymipampa (Benigno Malo 8-59), a recommended restaurant located adjacent to the 'new' cathedral (begun in 1885) and across the street from the main plaza, Parque Abdon Calderon (GPS: 02 53.860S / 79 00.240W). The restaurant is one of those venerable institutions that was likely in business at the same location 30 years ago and will probably be there 30 years from now. And for good reason...
I chose an entree called Pegucha a la plancha (grilled chicken breast) for $5.50. It came with papas fritas (french fries), arroz (rice), verduras (vegetables: lightly dressed fresh tomato, avocado, cauliflower, green beans, onion, lima beans, carrots, peas), pan (bread), and the ever-present dish of aji (chile sauce). I added a humita (a corn cake with a hint of anise steamed in a leaf, similar to a tamale) which seemed to be a house specialty. Add a beer, and follow the meal up with ice cream from one of the shops that can seemingly be found on every block in Cuenca, and this was a fitting end to a long day in Ecuador. In fact, only my meal at Lima's L'Eau Vive exceeded this one as an event in its own right.
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October, 2007