It was hard to leave Ecuador. All across the country, we found ourselves impressed with the people, the infrastructure, and the progressive mindset legible in all of the government propaganda. As you drive through the country, you see signs equating health care with freedom, technology with progress, patria with equality, water and forests with life. Ecuador is also one of the most bike-friendly countries we’ve visited, with bike lanes pretty much all across the country. Our three weeks in Quito were not quite planned, but we ended up lucking out with our supremely wonderful hosts, who managed to make us feel completely at home with ease and grace, the true marks of hospitality. In our Quito downtime, I got a lot of knitting and reading done, caught up on some exercise, and basically wrote an entire novel, all of which was very exciting. I also neglected to take photos, and when I did, I accidentally set the ISO on something like 1000, which, in a city as sunny (sometimes) as Quito, made all of my photos look like this:
We also got to catch up with a fellow overlander Doug, whom along with his wife Marcia, we’d met back in the Yucatán what feels like a lifetime ago. I used this opportunity to take complete advantage of having a kitchen, making a Chinese-style meal. I am really looking forward to eating some Chinese food when we get to Lima (as well as ceviche)!
From Quito, we headed back through the lovely canyon drive in Tungarahua to drop off the prints we’d made for the campesinos who’d allowed us to camp on their land. We had told them we would be back Wednesday or Thursday, and we did arrive late Thursday, although a week later than we’d expected. They ambled down from the hillside all the same, happy to see us, and we spent another peaceful night by the river. The next day, we drove out to Salinas de Guaranda, the town best known for El Salinerito products. I have bought both cheese and wool by this brand. The town was nothing special, but a nice drive nonetheless. We spent the night in Alausí, a pretty cool little town that I didn’t want to stop in, and that I took my vengeance on by breaking my laptop there.
An important side note here is that we are supposed to be in Buenos Aires in exactly two months to meet my older brother and his lovely wife for Christmas. It is also important to note that even after the past week of driving many, many more hours than usual, we are 5,000 kilometers away, with lots of amazing things to see–including Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, and the Atacama Desert, each of which could be tremendous week-long excursions in themselves. We are also aching to spend a quality week with a mechanic in La Paz, so we suddenly feel this rush to get moving, something that we are trying to balance with all the normal demands of tourism. So, without visiting the Ecuadorean coastline, we beelined to Cuenca, where our GPS randomly found this campsite filled with overlanders–and I mean, filled: there were four French couples and one Belgian couple.
It was quite a strange run-in after so many months of not seeing any overlanders at all, except for the handful who had shipped over the Darien Gap with us (by the way, we hear that the ferry is now actually open?–but tremendously expensive). It was nice to talk to some fellow travelers again, and to be inspired by their journeys. Check out this one route map!
The members of this group do their travels in mostly 3-months loops, leaving their vehicle wherever and returning home to see family. That’s a great way to do it.
In Cuenca, we were able to accomplish a very important task: filling up propane for our little kitchen. This was not an easy task. We had been told by many VW people that it was impossible to get propane filled in the entire country of Ecuador, and Juan had even gone through the trouble of making a hose and an attachment so that we could fill up (illegally and dangerously) from stand-alone canisters. But this proved to be difficult and inefficient (our propane only lasted a few days) and so we finally got the low-down that we could go to the AustroGas plant on the northern edge of Cuenca. There, after waiting for two hours, we were finally filled straight from a truck.
Traveling without propane is a big bummer because it means no coffee in the morning, no hot soup, no cooking, no tea, no nothing. It means that I really feel deprived, especially in the morning. Juan had so wanted to make things right that he invested money in a JetBoil, which is fine for getting me my morning coffee, but not extremely useful for cooking anything except for soup. Getting propane was a big deal. However, as soon as we crossed into Peru (the next day) we found that we could get GLP (gasolina liquido petroleo) in pretty much every gas station. Still. We then headed to Loja, where we camped for free in the parking lot of the Parque Recreacional Jipiro, an awesome park where we found still more overlanders (and ice-cold showers for the price of pool entry, $1.50). From there, we headed to the Peruvian border at Macará, the easiest border crossing we’ve encountered since Tijuana. It took ten minutes to exit on the Ecuadorian side and twenty minutes on the Peruvian side, including the dog. Ta-da! Peru: Milo’s tenth country.
Unfortunately, crossing through Macará is not the most picturesque way. I took no photos. It was desolate desert, made un-beautiful by trash and very sad, poor towns. We drove deep into the night because we couldn’t find a place to stay. Finally, we met the town of Sullana, and pulled up just off the town square, next to the church. Even though we had dropped more than 2000m since Loja, the night was cool and relatively peaceful until 6 a.m., when the church starting announcing the hour. From Sullana, we drove through more uninspiring desert. The drive made me think of this pilot we met when having dinner at Louis’ Basque Corner in Reno one night, who said described the stretch of I-80 to the next town as so boring and so straight that you could put a rock on the gas, jam a stick in the steering, and take a nap. This desert was like that. It was a good thing we drove out of Sullana with a full tank, because there was nothing for hours. (Gas is also something like $6 a gallon here, a rude awakening after paying $1.50 a gallon in Ecuador!) We were finally able to find a place to stop for lunch in the town of Morrope at three p.m. before finally arriving in Pimentel for the night. We had expected to find a bustling beach town, but instead we found a ghost town, since the high season doesn’t start until December. Luckily, there was one family who had arrived early to start setting up, and they invited us to park next to their shelter.
The owner assured us it would be completely safe, but then as soon as the sun set, he literally barricaded his family inside by nailing large boards over the entryway. The police also rolled by several times to check on us. It was nice to sleep with the sound of the ocean. And in the morning, we got to see these brave souls take their tiny boats out into the Pacific.
Also, Milo made a new friend.
We have landed for the night in a random RV park in the town Huanchaco, also filled with overlanders–and, for the first time in days, hot showers and Internet. I still miss Ecuador and I feel like we are moving too fast right now, but it’s better to move fast when we can afford to and preparing to give ourselves downtime. After all, you never know when you might need to stop for a few weeks…