Cuenca, Ecuador

Saturday, December 4, 2004:

At 11 PM on Friday (Dec. 3), Laura and I caught the bus from the mountain-enclosed spa-town of Baños to the small but impressively modern-looking city of Ambato, approximately one hour to the west and south. Upon our midnight arrival in Ambato, we scrambled aboard an overnight bus to Cuenca, which was just set to depart before we reached the bus terminal.

The bus was nearly packed and Laura and I sat in different rows in the back. My seatmate was a hairy, dissheveled man in his mid or late 30s and, when I politely asked him if he would mind switching his aisle seat with an otherwise identical aisle seat two rows back (where Laura was), he nodded slightly from side to side and looked away without a word. One hour into the bus ride he yawned, spread his knees out so that his left knee touched my right and then stretched out his elbows expansively so that the left one also touched my right. His eyes were closed. Tired and not a fan of my fellow passenger, I nudged my right knee against his left and my right arm against his offending left. They were over the neutral zone that was the centimeter or so between our two chairs. They had to be expelled from my territory and so began an on-and-off struggle of principled immaturity that lasted in full for nearly 7 hours. It was called off briefly when the bus stopped somewhere in the middle of nowhere at 3 AM for a pit-stop and my rival for space briefly disembarked. A small child began to bawl murder at this time, a steady, top-of-the-lungs, ear-splitting chorus of "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH... WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH... WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH... WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH..." repeated over and over and over again. Whoever was sitting with the child did NOTHING whatsoever and the bus was deadly silent but for the steady tortured wailings over the course of a good (but really very bad) 5 minutes.

Shortly before 7 AM, the bus rolled into an indeterminable part of Cuenca. Having read of the city´s "Colonial splendor" in various books and pamphlets, the part we were in looked quite disappointingly un-Colonial and quite a bit more un-splendid. Fortunately, however, a three minute taxi ride to the hostal "El Cafecito" brought us into the city center and, though groggy from a fitful sleep broken up by rounds of semi-lucid (but fully annoyed) elbow-wars, I was convincingly impressed with what I saw. Cobblestone streets and 16th century Spanish architecture? Check. Towering cathedral domes, weather-beaten old opera houses and as many ornate (yet for the most part tasteful and many simply beautiful) churches as there are weeks in the year? Check. And the promise of a bed and even some breakfast before that? Not quite Check.

The door to enter El Cafecito was locked. After knocking on the large and ornate door (the building looked very old and grand, as if it were once something far more important than a $4 per night set of dorm rooms) several times, a groggy young man let us in. There was no way we could check into a room until 10, possibly even 12, he told us. Furthermore, the cafe would not open for at least another hour. We were welcome to sit in the cafe with our luggage until such and such times if we wanted. Too tired to want to bother trying our luck elsewhere, we settled in and made ourselves as comfortable as was possible. The roof covering the cafe did not so much "connect" to the four walls of the room so much as form a canopy over it. In other words, there were open gaps letting the cold morning air in. I shivered and started dreaming of hot coffee. Laura smoked and thumbed through her Lonely Planet. In this way, we passed more than an hour until we were able to get breakfast. The coffee didn´t taste that great, but at least it was filtered rather than "Nescafe." I woke up a bit.

We left our things in a small storage room and left El Cafecito (agreeing to return at noon to check into the availability of rooms) to explore the town and make some arrangements for the next few days. Laura, very experienced with riding horses, had heard that the riding in the mountains around Cuenca was excellent and wanted to book a two or three-day trip. I´d already been riding with her twice before, once in the rainforest near Tena and again in the mountains around Baños. While I´d never had any great desire to learn how to ride horses, I´d enjoyed the experience so far and was looking forward to trying a bit more.

Thus, we walked around the city, both taking in the sites (churches, veneral buildings in yellows, greens and pale blues, indigenous street markets) and looking for tour operators who could book us a riding trip. A company called TerraDiversa had a two day trip but wanted a relatively outrageous $164 per person for it. Having paid between $25 and $30 per day for the last two outings, this seemed far too much. We looked for other operators. Several hours later, tired and unsuccessful (most other companies were closed on Saturday, it seemed), we returned to TerraDiversa and tried to haggle our way down. The agent was helpful and tried to arrange us a similar tour at a discount but couldn´t. What he could do, however, was book us two separate one-day trips at $38 a day each. The trips would be along different paths, he assured us. Eliminating the overnight stay in what he made out to be a quite luxurious mountaintop hacienda was the key factor in bringing us back to a reasonable rate.

We stopped for coffee (or ---ugh --- tea) and snacks at an Austrian-themed cafe. The coffee was good, the food was good, the ambience even approximated a Viennese coffee house. Only the cloying and kitscy repetition of Flight of the Valkyeries on the soundsystem destroyed the ability to mentally remove oneself to central Europe for an hour.

The rest of the day was limited to the bare essentials: napping, eating and having maybe a few too many drinks at El Cafecito´s bar that night. In between, we managed to see a bit more of the city on foot, the domes and buildings lit up with yellow lights and the telephone poles and street signs decked out in bright red and green Christmas lights.

Cuenca, its population roughly 275,000 (including surrounding vicinity), did not have any roads connecting it with the rest of the country until sometime in the 1960s. Nevertheless, a brief exploration revealed a city that was anything but a provincial, bucolic backwater. Though it wasn´t on a scale on par with Quito, there was little you could not find here if you looked. Moreover, it was much quieter, friendlier and easier to navigate than Quito (a friendly and easy to navigate city itself) and more visually attractive at that. My point being simply this: If you are in Ecuador and have an opportunity to visit Cuenca for several days, you should.