Southern Ecuador! Cuenca, Saraguro and Loja

Rachel and I have been sick for a few days now and so our visits to Cuenca, Saraguro and now Loja haven´t been too exciting. Nonetheless, we still managed to have some adventures and funny stories...

We got facials in Baños at a slightly overpriced place on our last morning. Then we took a short hike through the city with our giant backpacks in the hot sun as we tried to find the bus station. We finally got there and discovered that we couldn´t take a direct bus to Cuenca like we´d thought! We had to take a 2 hour bus ride to Riobamba, then catch another 6 hour bus to Cuenca from there. However, once we got to Riobamba, we found out that we´d missed the bus to Cuenca by 20 minutes. Grr. Rather than waiting around to take a night bus, we just found a hotel and spent the night in Riobamba and decided to take the 5:30am bus the next morning. Not the most interesting town. Our guidebook said it was cute, but it wasn´t. Plus it decided to start pouring rain as soon as we got there. We ate dinner at a place called Club Valentin or something, which was kind of like a 50s diner but with a lot of drunk, screaming Ecuadorian teenagers. They were literally screaming the lyrics to songs at the top of their lungs. It was great background music to our dinner. We watched some terrible TV for a while before we went to bed. You haven´t seen bad TV until you´ve visited Ecuador. They continuously play cheesy soap operas, amateur lip synching and dance videos, and cooking shows that feature techno dance breaks and a scary looking muppet.

The next morning we woke up dark and early at 4:45am so we could catch our bus. When we arrived, we discovered we were the only white people there and our bus was entirely filled with indigenous people carrying large sacks filled with food and things to sell at the market. They looked at us like we were aliens. We tried to sleep on our 6 hour journey, but since Rachel was on the asile for the first part of the trip, she had to deal with random women sleeping on top of her. They seem to have different standards here about personal space. I once had a woman leaning on my head on another bus trip, and I tried to jab my sunglasses (which were on my head) up into her arm a few times so she´d realize that she was leaning on me... but she didn´t even flinch. During the bus ride, we stopped at an unknown town for a food break, though nobody told us it was break time and we only figured it out once the bus driver jumped out of the bus and everyone else gradually started filing out and disappearing. We asked a kind woman carrying a puppy if it was our break and she said yes. (I think I mentioned this before, but everyone here carries puppies around in their hands. You don´t need a leash. You just carry your dog like a baby, whether you are taking a stroll in the park, eating lunch, or riding on a bus.) Rachel stopped outside of the bus to blow her nose and I took a really great picture of an indigenous man sticking his head out of the bus window, gawking at her as she blew into the tissue. We tourists are very exciting to watch.

Cuenca is a very cute, old town in the southern sierras. We stayed in the city center, which basically looks the same as Quito´s ¨centro historico¨but minus the pollution and crime. The streets in Cuenca are all cobblestone, there are a bunch of beautiful churches and pretty parks/main squares, the buildings all have cute, flower covered balconies, and there is a gorgeous river on the border of the old town and new town with green tree- and flower-covered banks. Of course the rain followed us to Cuenca as well, but at least it only seemed to rain in the evenings for an hour or so and then it stopped. During our two days here, we visited the Banco Central museum, which is supposedly the best in Cuenca (almost all other cities have their own Banco Central museum). It had sections on paintings, ethanography (about the indigenous communities here), money, and there was also an archeological park behind the museum with some ruins, rescued birds, and a garden re-created in the Inka style with corn, yucca, and other typical plants they cultivated. We also visited the Cathedral in the main square, which kind of looks like Notre Dame from the front, but it is more of a tan color and has two blue tiled domes in back. The inside was very open and simple. We noticed a cartoon on the wall of the church and moved closer to get a good look... and realized that it was an anti-abortion cartoon. It basically said ¨Mama, I am not a tumor! I am your baby boy!¨and then had a bunch of cartoon depictions of really bloody, exaggerated abortions and a baby saying ¨Don´t kill me!¨. In one picture, a baby was getting his head chopped off with a machete with blood was spurting all over. I can understand that the Catholic church is anti-abortion, but this cartoon was a bit too weird to be placed inside on the walls of the church. As we stared at it, an Ecuadorian man came up to us and said, ¨Yeah, it´s a little odd, isn´t it!¨. The abortion cartoon turned into a random conversation starter and we made a new friend.

On our last day in Cuenca, we wanted to send home a package of odds and ends to make our bags a bit lighter. We went to the post office at around 9am with all of our things only to discover that the woman who sold the envelopes wasn´t in yet. Yes, here in Ecuador the post offices never have any envelopes, stamps, boxes, etc... you have to buy them from a different store, usually located nearby. While we waited for the woman to arrive so we could buy an envelope, we asked where we might find a box. We were told to ask the security guard, who for some reason was the keeper of boxes as well. He went into a tiny closet where I saw about 4 old boxes piled up, and selected one for us. We then asked for some cardboard pieces to protect some paintings we had, and once the guard finally understood what we were asking for, he had to search the entire post office before he was able to find 3 pieces for us. By this point, the envelope woman had arrived. I got an envelope and then asked if there was a marker lying around that I could borrow to write my address with. The security guard said I had to walk upstairs and find the secretary´s office and see if she had one. She had the only marker in the post office, apparently. The whole post office is incredibly inefficient and we were there forever trying to mail our stuff even though we were the only people there for most of the time! I still can´t figure out why the security guard was in charge of the boxes, or why they don´t sell boxes in the first place or have more markers. I asked the security guard if most Ecuadorians come to the post office with their own boxes, and he said no. Which confuses me even more... where do they buy their boxes then? Do they use one of the security guard´s 3 boxes? Do they just not send packages? Things here in Ecuador are quite curious.

Anyway, onto our next bus trip! They are oh so fun. After our interesting morning at the post office, we caught a bus to Loja, about 6 hours further south. This was our first really nice bus (inside), though that had nothing to do with the type of driver we got... he was still a bit loco like all the others. We decided we´d had enough of the bus after 4 hours and an unexpected wait while they rebuilt the road or something and our bus driver decided not to tell us anything about what was going on and he just hopped out for a while. So we stopped in Saraguro, a small town where the indigenous community still dresses in their traditional black clothing and brightly colored jewelry. The indigenous community here is descended from the Incas who were forced to move into Ecuador centuries ago. We ate lunch at a restaurant near the main square and the waitress didn´t really understand anything we were saying and took about 20 minutes to realize we were asking for the bill. During our lunch, a cute little 2 year old girl decided it was amusing to stare at us through the window, so we started making faces at her and taking pictures of her and she really enjoyed seeing us act surprised or scared to see her pop up in the window and especially liked seeing herself on the camera!

Hm, must go now, but more to come about Saraguro and Loja later...