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August 12, 2005
The Equator, Baños, and the Gringo Express
It's almost 2 weeks into the trip now and we are starting to get into a bit of a groove with travelling. We have made the transition from being somewhat apprehensive when we head out of the hostel, to walking around the streets with confidence and taking buses like we have never owned a car.
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The real equator |
Ecuador is proving to be an amazing country. The people here have been incredibly friendly and hospitable considering it is high season for tourism and they must be sick of gringos everywhere. The country has it's quirks that definitely make travelling interesting. The biggest one is that nobody in Ecuador has change for anything larger than a $10, and usually not anything larger than a $5. This makes buying food, taking buses, and paying for anything somewhat trying. Another thing that I find very amusing is that whenever you go to catch a bus, every ticket vendor yells out their location to you as if you are in an auction. It almost seems as if they expect you to decide to take their bus based on how well they sell it. Hmm…I was going to go to Baños today, but that guy is really passionate about me going to Guayaquil...maybe I should just go there instead.
Our past week has been spent hitting a few of the major tourist spots in the area. We took a trip to the equator basically to get a photo of us straddling it. It is quite a hyped up activity, but when you get there, it is really just a line on the ground telling you that are in the centre of the world. There are actually two museums devoted to the equator here. The first contains a massive monument and an impressively sized museum based on the French calculation of where the equator lies. The funny thing is that the French were wrong by a few hundred meters. Down the road is much smaller, much more interesting museum with the actual equator line calculated with GPS. This museum also focuses on the lives of the indigenous people, giving an insight into early Ecuadorian life. Most of the tourists don’t even known about the smaller museum and flock to the larger one to get pictures of themselves straddling a line that actually represents nothing. And of course the French museum makes no mention of the error in calculation.
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Early morning at the springs |
We spent a few days in the town of Baños, famous for its hot springs. The hot springs more resemble public swimming pools, but are a great way to start the day off. The earlier you go, the less crowded it is, so we hit them up at 6:30 am. The setting is unbelievable. A nice waterfall flows down by the springs while you stare out at the daybreak over the Andes. Our day activity consisted of renting bikes with our Dutch and Canadian friends and biking a nice downhill road that leads past numerous waterfall and lush green landscapes. About halfway through the journey, we arrived at a bridge where a somewhat dodgy man convinced Shawn and myself to try his half baked bungee system. For $7 each we strapped in to a climbing harness and jumped off a bridge, while a guy on a higher bridge not too far away held us up with some pulleys and was responsible for making sure we didn’t plunge to our deaths. The presence of two army officers made me think that it was a perfectly legit operation, until I realized that they were just waiting for their turn to jump.
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Room for more gringos at the back |
Today we joined an enormous amount of gringos for the train journey dubbed La Nariz Del Diablo (Devil`s nose). This railway used to be a fully functioning part of the Ecuadorian transport system until parts of it were wiped out in 1998 by El Niño. Now parts of it remain open solely for tourism. The unique thing about the train trip is that you are allowed to ride on the roof. At 5:30 am we crammed in with as many gringos as they could fit on the roof for a spectacular trip through the Ecuadorian countryside. The portion of this train journey that gives it its name is a section of a perpendicular cliff that the train mounts by means of three switchbacks in which the train descends caboose first. For $11, it's a great way to see parts of the country side that would probably be missed on a bus.
As we travelled along on the train we were greeted by loads of little kids that would come running down to wave to us. Initially I thought this was great and enthusiastically waved back. I soon realized however that we were encouraged to buy candy on the train to throw to the kids as they ran to greet us. This felt very strange to me as it seemed like it was a train full of rich westerners throwing candy to poor kids as we whipped past. I decided that it wasn’t something that I felt comfortable doing and decided to wave back instead. I’m sure they were thinking what a cheap bastard.
We are eager to head to the coast and check out the surf that Ecuador has to offer, so as of tomorrow that is exactly what we are going to do. We didn’t expect to be wearing pants and sweaters so much and are looking forward to lounging around in shorts, sipping beer on the beach, and working on our tans.
Posted by brett at August 12, 2005 02:49 PM