So, for the past week I’ve been distracted by some food poisoning, which came hot on the heels of bronchitis. I’ve been a bit of a mess. I’m leaving Lima tomorrow, and I hope to catch up on my blog entries before too long.
Friday, March 18th
When we last left our intrepid heroes, Josh had just left Baños, and Elizabeth had just arrived from Quito. When she checked into her hostel, she discovered that the guy working there was a musician. They got to talking, and he invited her to join him at a local cafe for a gig he had that night. She invited me to come along, and I took some pictures.
They played a decent cover of Wonderwall, La Bamba, and a few Spanish songs.
It started to rain, so after their gig was over I went back to my hostel.
Saturday, March 19th
This was the day where I ran around trying to get an X-Ray and new medicine for my bronchitis.
I finished getting my new medication around noon, and to my surprise it was still bright and sunny. The weather forecast for the day had been for rain, and lots of it. We were scheduled to leave Baños the following day, and it was supposed to be raining all day long.
Since I had originally gotten sick by letting my core temperature drop too much by riding in the rain, I was in no hurry to repeat the experience. I sent a message to Elizabeth and let her know that I was done getting my new medication; was she interested in leaving a day early?
Since Elizabeth has rain gear, riding in the rain isn’t a big problem for her. Because I was sick and trying to get better, she agreed to leave early so we could ride in good weather. We went to our respective hostels to pack. I let the employees at the hostel know about my change of plans, and they were kind enough to give me a refund, since I had pre-paid for Saturday night.
Peanut Butter Jelly Time
Once Elizabeth was packed, she drove her motorcycle over to my hostel while I finished up my own packing preparations. She walked to a convenience store nearby and bought some ingredients for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Elizabeth is a pretty frugal person, and she had been living on PB&J sandwiches for the past couple of weeks in order to reduce costs. She had been more than willing to share, but I never really was desperate enough to take her up on it. She offered me a PB&J sandwich before we hit the road, and due to my adventures that morning, I hadn’t eaten anything. We were planning to head to Cuenca, which was 6 hours away. I knew that I needed some food, so for the first time I accepted her offer of a sandwich.
She ran out of the peanut butter she had been using and opened up a fresh package. It came in a bag, and she extruded some onto my piece of bread. I slathered it onto the bread and kind of grimaced at how gross it looked. I added the jelly on the opposite side, assembled the sandwich and took a bite.
It was terrible. The peanut butter wasn’t smooth, wasn’t sweet, and was awful in every sense of the word. I grimaced at how bad it was. Elizabeth rolled her eyes, thinking that I was just being dramatic.
Then she finished her sandwich and made a second one, this time using the new peanut butter that I had used in my sandwich. After she took a bite, she realized that I was not exaggerating; it was the worst PB&J sandwich she had ever had. Since we knew we needed calories, we forced the sandwiches down anyway.
Alausi
Around 1:30, sandwiches consumed and nary a glass of milk in sight, we hopped on our motorcycles and hit the road. By this time, Josh had gotten in touch with us to let us know about his accident the previous day. He had crashed in the town of Alausi, and he urged us to be careful when going through the town. He had encountered a patch of fog that didn’t let up, and crashed when he ran into a poorly-maintained section of road and tried to slow down.
Elizabeth and I rode without incident for several hours. Around 4pm, we caught a gorgeous glimpse of a cloud straddling a nearby mountain. The sun was shining behind it, and it was absolutely beautiful. What wasn’t so beautiful was when the road took us right into that cloud. Visibility instantly dropped, and mindful of Josh’s experience, we carefully drove through the area. Josh wasn’t clear about where exactly he had crashed, so Elizabeth and I were both on edge until we were well clear of Alausi.
Imagine riding through these curves in really thick fog
We had been making good time until we entered the cloud, and then our speed dropped drastically as we tried to safely navigate the roads. By the time we were clear of the cloud, darkness was quickly approaching. We started looking for any hostels or hotels along the road, but didn’t find anything. At one gas station we stopped at, they told us that there was lodging up ahead in the town of El Tambo.
El Tambo is about an hour away from Cuenca. We didn’t have a place to stay lined up in Cuenca, so stopping an hour earlier was okay. We arrived in El Tambo and started looking for hostels. We found one, but after I went inside to look around, I really wasn’t impressed with the quality of the place. They showed us a room with 4 beds that we could have for $10 each, but I wasn’t sure that they wouldn’t just stuff more people in the room after we had paid. The bathroom was in awful shape, so I didn’t want to stay there. Elizabeth connected her phone to the hotel’s wi-fi, and found a place online about five minutes away.
We arrived at the hotel, driving up a winding path where we were afraid of falling over on our bikes at any given moment. Once we got to the front desk, they told us that a room was going to be $140…much more than either of us were willing to pay. However, in the end we decided to stay there. I really didn’t want to hop on my bike and look for ANOTHER place to spend the night after we had already been looking for a few hours. Our clothes were wet from riding through the cloud, and we needed to dry off as quickly as possible.
So we booked our extravagantly-priced rooms and changed into clean, dry clothes. The employees at the front desk brought us both space heaters, which allowed us to dry our wet clothes overnight.
Sunday, March 20th
I woke up fairly early the next morning, so I took some pictures of the hotel.
I know that I keep saying that the surrounding scenery is amazing, but I cannot come up with enough adjectives for how beautiful everything was. Pictures fail to do it justice.
We hit the road around 9am. Our goal for the day was Mancora, Peru, a six-hour drive away. The fastest route meant a little backtracking through the mountains, but it would allow us to get to the coast sooner and away from the visibility-reducing clouds. The views continued to be breath-taking, and we made sure to stop when there was something we wanted to take a picture of.
Around lunchtime we stopped in this little hole-in-the-wall town to get some gas. We noticed a restaurant nearby so we dropped in for lunch.
It may not look like much, but the chicken is rotisserie-style. It was hot, tender, and really flavorful. Elizabeth said it was the best chicken she had had in Ecuador. It was a really amazing find. I think it was a close second to the rotisserie chicken I had in Quito, but nonetheless it was a pretty great.
This is a pretty good place to stop, because our next obstacle was crossing the Peruvian border. It was even more frustrating than the crossing into Ecuador. I’ll get into that next time.