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Over the Highest Pass and down to Sea Level

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Following the unexpected lunch stop we head south again along some winding mountain roads in rain and thick mist.  It’s OK though because the mist is thick enough for us not to be able to see the bottom.  A bus came off a similar road in Peru a few weeks ago and killed thirty five people but I’m sure you can work out that if I’m writing this, we arrived safely in Cuenca.   Cuenca Cathedral Apparently there’s some rivalry between Cuenca and Quito for which is the most attractive city.  Well, you can’t see any snow-capped volcanoes from it but Cuenca gets my vote.  It’s polluted but perhaps not as badly as Quito and it didn’t seem quite so run down.  However, as my opinion is based on only a handful of days in each it probably isn’t worth much.   Cuenca does have a spectacular Cathedral, seemingly based on the Paris Notre Dame with a rose window based on one in York Minster.  It was pretty busy on a midweek morning with ...
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Buses and Train

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Riobamba Cathedral This is a country which runs on its buses although the amount of black smoke they pump out is disturbing.  There are buses running everywhere and some of the bus stations are truly impressive structures.  The one at Quitumbe (southern Quito) looks more like an airport terminal with incoming and outgoing buses separated by a security barrier.  There are 76 ticket counters here.  At Guayaquil where we intend to finish our trip to Ecuador, the main bus station is serviced by 100 different bus companies !   Driving in any sort of heavy traffic, which is in towns because on the main highways traffic is relatively sparse, is ‘no quarter given or asked for’.  Leave a millimetre or two and someone will push into it and the horn is used very frequently, if someone is seen waiting to cross the road, if a car is in the way or in that tiny fraction of a second between when the lights change and the car in front pulls away. Whe...
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Birds, Swings and Parades

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  Les, Heather, Newt, Bonnie above Banos Time I said something about Ecuador the country.  Straddling the Equator, it’s about 110,000 square miles (England 50,000 square miles) with a population of a little over 16 million, only 6% of whom are white.  The largest ethnic group are Mestizos which are mixed race European and Amerindian.  To the east the land falls away towards the upper Amazon basin while to the west lies the Pacific Ocean where 600 miles away are The Galapagos Islands which are Ecuadorean.  The country is bisected north/south by the Andes which we’re spending most of this trip on.  We’re high, rarely dropping below 7,500 feet which means that it is cool and of course when the sun shines it is loaded with UV radiation.   Mindo is a small place and lying as it does off the main road has an infrequent bus service.   We had about a four to five hour ride via Quito to our next stop at Banos and instead of w...
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Along the Spine of the Andes

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Cotopaxi Most people wouldn’t consider it a plan at all but for us it is, albeit simple.   We’ll just be working our way in a generally southerly direction along part of the Andes, the longest mountain chain on earth at about 4,300 miles (or 5,500 miles on Encyclopaedia Britannica site !).   We had good views of Cotopaxi, a magnificent  classic cone shaped and snow-capped volcano near the equator.  Further south, a volcano called Chimborazo at 6310m (19,500 and a bit feet) is the point of earth furthest from the centre of the planet because of the equatorial bulge (other shapes for the earth are available).   First though, we explore a bit more of Quito with Bonnie and Newt who have been here before.   It looked to be a clear day so we set off for a bus to the cablecar which rises high above the west of the city.  You will have noticed that a map is flat while I can tell you that Quito is not and when we got up...
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