Buses and Train

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.

When we left Riobamba and after only a two or three hour taxi ride at an amazingly cheap $30 (£22.50) we pull into Alausi, a very traditional town with more Native South Americans than we’ve seen anywhere else, probably being the majority of people we see.  It’s alternating between heavy rain and pouring here and the local women protect their traditional trilby hats with a plastic bag.  We’re only really here for one thing and that’s a spectacular train ride through the mountains past a rock which for some reason is called the Devil’s Nose.  In the cafe next to the station the TV is showing not just old, but ancient programmes.  These will be completely unknown to most people reading this but we caught the end of Davy Crockett with Fess Parker, and the Three Stooges.

 

It would be reasonable to think that near the Equator, we would be hot, possibly humid with sudden downpours but the altitude mitigates this.  When the sun is out or even behind thin cloud the power of it can be easily felt through a shirt but generally the weather has been more like a temperate region.  A bit like decent English summer days and with coolish evenings although if it rains it does seem to be in the afternoon.  The vegetation is lush and tropical, there’s lots of water around and we’re too high for malaria mossies.  From our one month experience along the Andes, it is a very pleasant climate.  Dip down eastwards into the Amazon basin or westwards, losing altitude towards the sea and it would be a very different story.

Heather had booked our seats on the Devil’s Nose train a couple of days earlier online via a Byzantine bureaucratic nonsense requiring passport numbers (for a train ticket !).  We had to show the passports

Alausi station and the Devil's Nose train 

again when boarding and our names were written onto a list  !  One bit of the booking of tickets that took some working out was finding the country we came from on a list which wasn’t in alphabetical order.  United Kingdom came between Qatar and the Central African Republic, and then the peso dropped.  It was in Spanish alphabetical order and when Heather clicked the button offering English it translated the country name but didn’t then re-order alphabetically.  With me so far ?  So in Spanish, Qatar was followed by Reino Unidos which was followed by Republica Centroafricana.  Simples.

Alausi from the train and the line we'll be on soon below us

The train ride was really something with the line running through some spectacular countryside, all ups and downs around us.  Towards the end of our ride the train runs into a dead end, the brake man nips out to change the points and we zig-zag down the mountainside.  I think there were three zigs or perhaps they were zags and looking out of the window on the drop side we could see the lines we would soon be on below us with a station at the bottom next to a river.  We chugged through the station and eventually stopped on an empty piece of track for fifteen minutes or so for us to get out and photograph stuff and have the rock apparently

the valley we drop into,
photographed from the train

shaped like the Devil’s Nose pointed out to us.  It was a rock.  Then back to the station where there were locals dancing, a café and a man in local gear with a llama for photographing.  All completely spontaneous, of course.  One very sobering point from the commentary was that in the building of the railway which runs to the coast, 2,500 men died in the construction from Yellow Fever, Malaria, rock falls and “dynamite”.    The town really wasn’t anything to write home about but then, here I am writing home about it.

the station and the lines we use to get to it

There are quite a lot of beggars throughout Ecuador who generally shuffle up with a hand

lunch at the desk

out, especially if we’re sitting outside a café having a drink.  Many have something small to sell which naturally we don’t want.  It is difficult to know how to deal with it and we don’t hand over any cash.  Bonnie and Newt had been in Mexico before we met up and something differently entrepreneurial happened there although the people concerned were not begging.  B & N were sitting in a beach restaurant having a meal when someone with no connection to the restaurant wandered through selling desserts.  One other thing I noticed here in Ecuador was that although the literacy rate is claimed to be somewhere in the 90% range, I've seen quite a number of the indigenous population in Banks getting money out by identifying themselves with a thumb print.

I do have to tell a digressionary story here.   B & N and us sometimes talk about various comedy routines from each side of the Atlantic and we’d got them to watch the Monty Python Argument sketch, which they enjoyed.  A few days later it was mentioned, Bonnie said she liked it, I (naturally) said she didn’t, she said I wasn’t there, I said I was and we moved into playing the sketch with Bonnie being the innocent contributor.  Then Heather joined in because we couldn’t believe our luck and I don’t know if we cracked or Bonnie noticed but the penny finally dropped and she realised she’d been caught, hook, line, sinker and rod.  It was very satisfying.  Yes it was !

Leaving Alausi was one of our more interesting manoeuvres though.   We had to get a taxi to the main road where we were going to flag down a half hourly southbound bus for Cuenca.   The taxi dropped us at a hotel on the ‘wrong’ side of the road and the driver told us that the bus pulled in to pick up passengers.  Five minutes later a bus with Cuenca on the front sped past on the other side of the road.  Then someone in the hotel told us we had to stand on the other side of the road opposite the hotel.  So we did and it started to rain gently.   Ten or fifteen minutes went by, a Cuenca bus hove into view and we flagged it down.  The driver’s assistant checked where we were going, loaded our bags underneath and we got in and sat down.  The bus went perhaps ten yards and turned into the hotel where everyone got off for a half hour lunch stop.  Ah, Ecuador !

 

Les and Bonnie and Heather and Newt and that train