One Last Fitting

Spending a year and a half in hotel rooms means you start to find the little details fascinating (I did anyway). Here's the last hotel room shot from the trip, our framed air-conditioner controller in Bali.

For more photos of interesting/depressing/weird room fittings, see here, here, here, here and here.

Trippinvignettes - Number 6

This was less a quote, more a mantra repeated by ‘Dr. Blake’. Whenever someone said something he agreed with, he’d display his concurrence by pulling out his trusty old ‘Makes Sense’ verbal rubber stamp, marking the exchange a success for rationality. He’d even do it to things that he said, sprinkling the stamp about in a way that, in the end, had little meaning, and made no sense at all.


Various locations, Ecuador.

Hotel Rincon de Belen

The curtain and wall.

The view

The TV

This is something I'd never come across until I got to South America. It's an electric shower. Basically, cold water runs into the showerhead, and the showerhead heats it quickly so that by the time it falls out, the water should be nice and warm. Sometimes they work, most of the time all you get is a frustrating dribble of luke-warm water (the more water you try to push through, the less it is heated). Also of interest in this example is the bare electric wire connection providing 220 volts of electricity to the unit.

The lobby.

Onwards and Upwards

Another burn northwards landed us in Otavalo, a town a couple of hours North of Quito, and home to the largest indigenous markets in South America. The largest market in South America, we found out, is very similar to every other South American market except much bigger.

Guardians of the hotel room keys

A nativity scene we found in a bank. Something is missing...

Expecting Trouble

The most convenient border between Ecuador and Peru is also the most dangerous. There are countless stories of travelers being mugged, kidnapped and even stabbed while trying to get from one country to the next. While we were waiting in line to have our passports stamped, we started to talking to an American who had just caught a taxi between the Peru and Ecuador borders, then been apprehended by a policeman, driven to an ATM and forced to withdraw US$200, which the cop then pocketed. It was the second time we'd done that particular crossing, and I'm glad it was also the last (each time we've paid extra money to be taken in an international bus which is the safest possible method of crossing). This thing was parked at one of the border checkpoints, so the potential for big trouble is obviously well known:

Vilcabamba

Vilcabamba is a barely noticable collection of crumbling houses and ostentatious Quiteño mansions in the 'Valley of Longevity'. The main tourist attraction is old people (apparently it's quite common to live past the century mark here). But as you'd expect, the elderly don't really make for a great day of sightseeing, and they all seem to be hidden away anyway (I saw one, maybe two, people who were definitely 'really old', but once someone's over 85, can you really tell? Does it matter with that many years notched?) It's ok that what they see as their main reason for visiting their town is pretty lame, because Vilcabamba'a other main attraction is doing nothing, and the town is perfectly set up for this.

Hotel Dog and the Vilcabamba Valley

We spent a lazy week not clambering any of the hiking trails, not visiting some boring tourist trap and most importantly (after three solid days on bone-jarring buses), not traveling. About the most strenuous activity of our time there was playing an annoying game of cat and mouse with an itinerant Israeli numerologist, who had tricked me into letting him do a reading, which, I assume, he would then expect payment for. Had I realised that the bank had recently disgorged a fake $20 note into my wallet I would have given him that and avoided the need to, literally, hide in darkened bushes like a condemned guinea pig (they eat them up here).

Pastime

Hot and cold

Loja

There was an earthquake and a terrible smell creeping from the sink, but the bathroom had this groovy door.

Quenca

Riobamba

Decor at the fabulous Hotel Tren Dorado

Getting the shopping home

Baños

Party!!!

Chugchilan to Latacunga- Last leg of the Quilotoa Loop

The day started with a round of Happy Birthday by the collection of backpackers at the breakfast table. It was going along nicely until the third line when most of the chorus realised that they either didn't know or had forgotten my name.

Leaving Chugchillan is not a simple process. There are very few busses and the they leave long before the sun comes up. The transport leaving at the least unGodly hour is the 9am milk truck, a ute which trundles along the loop collecting the cow's morning handiwork, and selling it to those who don't have basic bovine services. The truck also collects backpackers and locals to drop them off in Sigchos, who then await an afternoon bus back to the noise and smell of the 21st century in full swing.

The empty spot on the rear bumper was my 'seat'

We climbed into the truck's tray, which, in typical Ecuadorian style appeared to be holding well over a sensible amount of cargo. But the overcrowding really began soon after, when the payload reached Indian rail proportions. At full capacity, the ute was carrying 19 adults, 1 child, 8 gas cylinders, the milk drum, 6 backpacks and a 7 month old child. I was relegated to perching on the back bumper, while Angie was secured between a couple of elderly Ecuadorian women and a French backpacker.

On a particularly severe right curve, g-force took a viscous hold, and before I understood what was happening, I had been thrown from my foothold in a pirouetting flurry of flailing limbs. I hit the dirt running, but couldn't manage more than two steps before curling into a dusty ball tumbling along the road. I was unharmed, and ran after the truck, which graciously stopped to let me back on. Angie was a little shaken at the sight of me rolling around like that, but the locals thought it was fantastic sport, and kept laughing and looking at me for the rest of the uneventful, nervous, one and half hour journey.

The trip from Sigchos to Latacunga was by more conventional means (bus), but the journey changed form an easy two-hours into a four-hour zigzag marathon when it turned out the main road was closed. We spent lots of nervous time backing and filling around sandy single lane switchbacks, intently listening to every squeak and groan of the brakes; the last defence between us and a couple of hundred vertical metres of pure, clean, empty air. The scenery was again, spectacular, but it is difficult to enjoy when the vantage point is a struggling bus on a goat track.

Publicest Toilet Yet

Quilotoa

We rode to the next town in the back of a camioneta (Spanish for ute). Quilotoa is a village on the shoulder of a volcano that last erupted a couple of centuries ago. The last kaboom rearranged the landscape in a dramatic way, diverting rivers and creating a shiny aqua lake where once was the sulphuric grey clay found in the earth's pressure valves.

The walk to the lake's shore was a pleasant 300 metre descent. The thin air and the steep, sandy ascent made for an exhausting, breathless one and a half hours.

Sheep Transport

One bus can carry many sheep

Zumbahua- 1st Stop on the Quilotoa Loop

Every Saturday Zumbahua hosts a market in vibrating technicolour where farmers from the surrounding mountains buy and sell their weekly supplies. The market is for locals, and thus is filled with the neccesities of everyday life; vegetables, meat, grain and livestock. There's not an 'Ecuador' emblazoned wall hanging or figurine to be found.

Angie says hello to some groceries

It was fascinating to see this little economy at work, and to watch the people who depend on it, but the on-site, open-air slaughterhouse/butcher was rather graphic for those who are not used to seeing the entire, brutal transition from animal to foodstuff. Much more pleasing to the eye was the amount of colour (that wasn't crimson) on display; in the produce, the buildings and the clothes of the locals.

Nervous

Transport home

The Quilotoa Loop

The Quilotoa Loop is a single width of sandy road that slices through rural highland Ecuador. There's very little transport, less communications but an abundance of livestock, farming and pork-pie hats. The landscape is fiercely sculpted, with enormous ravines and huge, sharp mountains having displaced just about all the even ground long ago.

The environment is stunning- and cold. The locals farm almost every available inch of this impossibly steep terrain, resulting in hills covered in the random geometry of corn and potato plantations. Working the sandy earth is largely done without machinery, the incline of most of the plots would be impossible for a tractor to negotiate, and workers can often be seen tending plants which are growing at eye level.

We spent four days travelling around the loop, often feeling like we were the tourist attractions (given the number of stares we found ourselves under- not too many Gringos out there). One of the nicest aspects was the abundance of eucalyptus forests- the smell of the bush on the other side of the planet.