On to Ecuador
We got a bus early in the morning from Mancora to Aguas Verde, the border town. At the previous stop, a women had got on and said that she was coming with us to help us cross the border and that this was part of the service included in the price of the bus tickets. As we didn´t have to pay any extra we agreed although we didn´t think it was necessary having managed to cross a lot of borders previously with no problems. Anyway, we got our Peruvian exit stamps then were put in a mototaxi for a few kms. Then we had to walk for about 10 minutes through the town until we finally crossed a bridge and ended up in Ecuador. Here we were forced to go to the tourist information where we were given a lot of useless information and told to wait for something, but we didn´t understand what. Next we were put in a taxi with a policeman and taken out of town to a place quite a distance from the actual border, where we finally got our Ecuadorian entrance stamps. We weren´t able to work out whether we needed the police escort for our safety or because they thought we were going to try and escape into Ecuador without getting our passports stamped. Then the policemen escorted us back into town and came with us to a bus station where we were met again by the women from the 1st bus who gave us the tickets for the next bus. That has to be the strangest border crossing I have done and afterwards we understood why they thought we needed help with it.
We arrived in Cuenca later that evening. The city seemed a really nice place, a lot wealthier than places in Peru, modern cars, clean well maintained streets and parks and the average houses looked a lot nicer. But despite all this for some reason no where in the city seemed to have water between 8am and 8pm. To start this didn´t seem to be much of a problem until in the middle of the day we tried to find a toilet. They were all just closed because of the lack of the water. Luckily we found that our hostel still let you use the toilet and `provided buckets of water for flushing. We spent our first day exploring the city, went to a nice art museum and doing various organizational jobs that we had to get done. The next day we went out to the Cajas National Park for a days walking. The scenery and probably more importantly the weather, really reminded us of home and all the hiking we have done in Scotland. Despite the low cloud and drizzle we had a really good. In the evening we caught the bus a bit further north to Riobamaba.
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