Circumspencing the Globe

A traditional Ecuadoran meal served by waiters in bowties: $3.50. A clean hotel room in the city center, with private bathroom and cable TV, breakfast included: $9.00. Being the only gringo among 49 non-English speaking strangers stuck together in a bus for 27 hours while en route to a destination that was actually only 4 hours away: priceless.

So I left Mancora, Peru on Friday, February 15, on an overnight bus bound for Ecuador. The bus was supposed to leave at 9:00 p.m. but didn´t leave until about 9:45 p.m. (Peru is on Fiji time.) Then, after we drove a short distance, the bus stopped and remained stationary for some unknown reason. We finally reached the Peru-Ecuador border at something like 12:30 a.m. All of us on board had to file out of the bus, form a line in a Peruvian government outpost, present our passports, and gain permission to leave Peru. It was raining, but I had my raincoat. I didn´t notice anyone else so fortunate.

Maybe about 30 minutes down the road, the bus stopped again at another government building, this one Ecuadoran. The bus emptied and the passengers lined up under a tarp and awaited permission to enter Ecuador. But the government computer crashed at 1:30 a.m.–apparently not an uncommon occurrence–and didn´t begin functioning again until 2:30 a.m.

This delay gave me plenty of time to get to know some fellow blue-eyed gringos on the bus: Tim, a professional glass artist from California, who had the seat beside me; and three delightful women Tim had met earlier who only recently began traveling together (perhaps because they have similar short and sassy hairdoes?)–Ciara from Ireland, Daniela from Sweden and Lauren from Wisconsin.

We all successfully made it into Ecuador, took our seats, drove another 20 or 30 minutes and had to disembark a third time, this time at the Ecuadoran customs building. (I believe we were then in a town near the border called Machala, which you´ll hear about again later.) This stop entailed baby-faced, serious-looking, gun-toting soldiers half-heartedly rummaging through our luggage. Finally, some time after 3:00 a.m., we could recline in our seats and get some sleep, secure in the knowledge that none of us were carrying contraband. We arrived at about 9:30 a.m.–2.5 hours behind schedule–in Ecuador´s most populous city, Guayaquil. This would be the 25th and final country on my global itinerary.

Guayaquil is a port city in Ecuador´s southern lowlands. Ecuador has essentially three primary regions: the lowlands along the western coast, the Andean highlands that run north-south across the middle of the country, and the jungle–or “Oriente”–in the east. The slow-moving, brown Rio Guayas cuts through Guayaquil beside the Malecon 2000 riverfront walkway and empties out into the Pacific Ocean.

Below: Around Guayaquil–some new friends, some boat on the Rio Guayas, some building in the city center, and some nutritious grubs.

My planned route was still evolving–I hadn´t been able to find a guidebook on Ecuador in the English language in Peru but finally met a girl traveling in the opposite direction who traded me hers for my Peru guidebook. I decided I would travel over to the highlands and then head north toward Quito, the capital city, taking an excursion into the Oriente along the way. Time permitting, in Quito I would try to connect with the uncle of my friend Rich.

I joined Tim and the sassy girls for breakfast in the bus terminal in Guayaquil. The terminal itself was quite impressive. It was built into a gleaming, modern shopping mall, and onward travel was made easy by clearly displayed color-coded regional diagrams. I was surprised to discover that Ecuador´s currency is the good ol´ USA dollar. The dollar replaced Ecuador´s “sucre” (named after Jose de Sucre, a national independence hero) in 2000, by which time inflation had skyrocketed out of control–so much so that $1 was then worth 25,000 sucres!

I used familiar currency to buy a surprisingly good latte. In Peru, coming by a good cup of coffee was a challenge. When you ordered cafe con leche–coffee with milk–you found yourself on the receiving end of one of two sets of fluids: either (1) a mug full of boiling water, accompanied by a glass full of milk and another glass (or tiny pitcher) full of black coffee; or (2) a mug full of hot milk, accompanied by a glass (or tiny pitcher) full of black coffee. It was up to you to properly mix the two or three fluids. Lacking a chemist´s skill or a bartender´s finesse, I inevitably concocted weak, cloudy beverages less like coffee and more like cat urine.

After breakfast, Tim had to leave, so I rode with the girls to their hostel in Guayaquil, then we wandered around a bit and had lunch. Daniela ordered a cafe con leche and found herself with a mug of hot milk and a glass full of black coffee. Maybe things in Ecuador aren´t so different from Peru afterall.

I returned to the bus depot after lunch. I had a ticket to a city called Cuenca, which lies in Ecuador´s southern highlands, southeast from Guayaquil. The key point to remember, people, is that the journey from Guayaquil to Cuenca is four hours long. Four hours.

The bus departed on time at 3:10 in the afternoon. We would arrive in Cuenca at about 7:10 in the evening. Or so we thought…

The beginning of the journey involved driving past flat agricultural areas, many supporting banana trees for as far as the eye could see. Some of the villages we passed were flooded. It had rained hard recently, and it continued to rain that afternoon. Then we began to head uphill, ascending windy roads, with steep mountains to our left and a steep drop-off to our right. Sitting on the lefthand side, I was able to observe numerous patches of hillside erosion, chocolatey waterfalls and piles of rocks and boulders collecting on the road´s edge. I had to consciously snap myself out of visualizing a rocky avalanche plummeting toward us and crushing the bus.

But I took comfort in my neighbor´s attitude. Earlier in the ride, she, an older woman, had taken out her Bible to read. When she saw me looking, she told me in Spanish how important the Word is. I agreed and she recognized me as a “hermano,” or brother. I don´t believe in coincidence; I believe she was handpicked to be in the seat next to me, and I next to her.

Almost exactly halfway through our journey, the bus came to a standstill behind a row of stopped vehicles. In front of the first one, a wide, brown mudslide raged into the road and over an embankment, completely blocking traffic. A guy with a tractor appeared on the scene, but he wasn´t using it. From what I could gather with my limited Spanish, he didn´t have any diesel. After a few hours, our bus driver executed a daredevil U-turn and began to head back in the direction from which we came. We weren´t in motion very long before we encountered another, new mudslide obstructing our descent. After some time, the bus driver decided to turn the bus around again–with window passengers gasping and rear seat passengers yelling to the driver during back-ups. The lady next to me prayed audibly. She would do this often in the hours to come.

We pulled onto a shoulder where a tiny, isolated restaurant somehow managed to stay in business. As far as I knew at the time, the restaurant was not serving food. By now it was nightfall. Most of the men watched soccer on the restaurant TV and most of the women and children tried to keep warm inside the bus. I seemed to be one of the few who had brought much luggage, so I lent one lady a fleece jacket and a guy a fleece vest and gave my rain poncho to someone. I had a few granola bars and shared them. Upon receiving one, a lady removed half a cooked chicken and some biscuits from a plastic bag and insisted I take them. That was dinner. (I later learned that the restaurant was serving a small portion of food during the soccer game, one plate at a time.)

Below: Scenes from the muddy, rocky road.

Later, the bus driver and his assistant called everyone into the bus, and we proceeded to drive downhill again. On the way, the bus stopped several times, and each time a group of men disembarked. Ultimately, one of them took up a collection for the purpose of paying the tractor driver to clear the mudslide roadblock below us. It seemed the tractor driver, an employee of Cuenca, sought to exploit a desperate situation for personal gain. I resented paying the guy anything, but the request was for a mere quarter from each of us, and since everyone else was paying, I wasn´t going to be the lone hold-out standing on principle.

The profiteer cleared the road and we finally began moving downhill again. Along the way, we encountered other hazardous piles of rocks and mud, but the driver was able to maneuver around and over them. But eventually, we came upon another impenetrable rocky roadblock. The bus stopped. And there the bus remained. For hours and hours. Until morning.

I discovered the assistant spoke some English. I asked him why the tractor driver wasn´t clearing this part of the road. He said he had probably gone home and gone to sleep. This infuriated me. If he wouldn´t work his tractor as part of his paid government job, why on earth wasn´t he doing it in light of the bonus he extracted from a busful of innocent people. It was wrong; this guy is a criminal.

The bus driver chuckled at my protestations, which I tried to translate into Spanish as well. He and the assistant told me I just didn´t understand how things worked in Ecuador. The man was paid to work and his workday had ended. If we wanted him to do more, we had to pay him. We, in fact, paid him, and he, in fact, did more. Now he wouldn´t do even more still until he had had a good night´s sleep. No one could fault him for that. This spin on the situation struck me as unreasonably charitable. The profiteer was looking out for himself and couldn´t care less about all of us.

Meanwhile, the 47 passengers–including small children and a baby and some old folks–had contorted into sleep positions in their seats and on the aisle floor. I had no illusions about falling asleep myself. So I stayed up front with the driver and the assistant.

As the hours wore on, we got to know each other. At times, the rain stopped or fell lightly, and we took the conversation outside. When Luis, the driver, learned I was single, he found this unacceptable at my age and took it upon himself to find me a mate from among the women in the bus. Osvaldo, the assistant, egged him on. At one point, a small group stood outside chatting. The conversation circle included one woman. Luis kept motioning to me to do something. I shook my head. The other men present caught on and joined Luis in goading me on. Luis turned up the radio, blaring salsa music. They wanted me to ask her to dance. They told me she wanted to dance with me, which I doubted but then began to believe. I told them–and the woman, who was now listening–I didn´t know salsa. “She´ll teach you, she´ll teach you.”

I held my ground for quite a while–literally hours. But as time passed, I became weak. And I relented. And there on a muddy mountain road in the highlands of Ecuador, in the wee hours of a rainy night, I found myself dancing salsa with Isabel, an infinitely patient math teacher from Guayaquil. The men who surrounded us laughed uncontrollably at my feeble attempts at the hip-swerving moves. The bus was dark, but from time to time I saw a hand inside swipe the fog off a window for a better view of the clumsy gringo. Unwittingly, I became the night´s entertainment, a source of levity in this miserable predicament.

During breaks, Luis, Osvaldo, Isabel and I fantasized out loud about the inevitable wedding and the ceremony that would have to take place inside the bus itself, given that it felt like we would be up there on that mountain forever. Luis would officiate, Osvaldo would be the best man and the children could lead the procession down the aisle–the bus aisle–tossing, not rice, which we did not have, but rocks, which we had in abundance. We agreed the rocks would have to be thrown with considerable care.

Eventually the sun came up. The tractor driver never showed. A second bus drove all the way up from the other direction and stopped on the other side of the obstruction. In clusters, we traversed through the mud to that bus. My boots and pants were filthy brown.

At the bottom of the hill, I had lunch with Isabel, her sister and two guys, one of whom had borrowed my vest. (The lady who had borrowed my jacket disappeared with it. My poncho met with the same fate.) Fortunately, those two guys were heading to Cuenca as well, so they showed me which other buses we´d have to take to get there. I said adios to my dance maestra/esposa and her sister. It was now about noon.

We had to take two more buses. The first took us to Machala, the border town I had stopped in the night before. I´d gone without much sleep now for two nights, and once that first bus began moving, I was out. The second bus arrived in Cuenca shortly past six p.m. A trip that should have taken 4 hours took 27 hours.

I found a nice hotel and went to bed early. Before falling asleep, I saw images of mudslides obstructing mountain roads on TV. The next morning, I saw the same sort of images in the newspaper. Osvaldo had told me that in all his years of working for the bus agency, he had never before been stuck in the bus overnight. This was a first.

As for the city of Cuenca, it´s really quite attractive. Ecuador´s third largest city, it was built on the ruins of an ancient city called Tomebomba, inhabited by a civilization ultimately conquered by the Incas in one of their northern campaigns. It´s bisected by the Rio Tomebamba. Parque Calderon sits in the heart of the colonial city and is flanked by two impressive churches. One of them, and several others in town, date back to the 16th century. Many museums, hotels, shops and restaurants line the cobblestone streets.

I´ve been here now two nights and plan to stay a third. I’m dallying because I want to make sure the route from here to my next destination, Baños, is clear. That route, like the one I found myself trapped on, is also a mountain route. If I hear a negative report when I check in the morning, I´ll have to come up with a Plan B. So, stay tuned!

Finally, I want to follow up on a promise I made last time. As I mentioned, there had been a request for more pictures of me. Well, you asked for it, so here you go. This is what I now look like. Not wanting to be stingy, I give you four–not one, not two, not three, but four–photos of me. And I think you´re gonna, well, flip!

Tags: 1, Cuenca, Ecuador, Guayaquil, Machala, South America

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 4:18 pm and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.