Alauisi to Cuenca

 I left my room this morning really early looking for coffee and ran into one of my German buddies looking for the same thing. Along the way, I walked across this railway bridge above a river valley. Why? Because Nadine was already doing it and I wasn’t about to let a girl beat me at something. It was a little uncomfortable because you have to look down to make sure you’re stepping on solid wood, but in between all the wood slats is a view of the river way below you, which is very disorienting. But if you look up to avoid the discomfort of the view of the river, you can’t see where to step. Win win. Regardless, I’m still here and I did find coffee.

The Pan American Highway is the main artery through Ecuador (actually it runs from Chile to Alaska). In March there was a major landslide that closed a large part of the highway. It’s a little hard to see in this picture but basically a large part of the mountain collapsed over the road. Ecuador is doing the best it can, and is predicting that the road will reopen in 2 years or so.

As a result, we had to take what I’ll call a “secondary” road yesterday, which is essentially a rutted dirt road carved into the side of the mountain and which looks something like this. I’m just going to say that the trip on that road was by far the most harrowing drive I have ever been on in my life and leave it at that. Bottom line, despite the train bridge and the secondary road, I continue to still be here.

We hiked today to a famous overlook near Alauisi called Devil’s Nose because it has a beautiful view of the valley. How do you like it?

Then we drove to an indigenous family’s lodge to have lunch and participate in a traditional cleansing
ceremony. We helped pick the plants for it, which the family grows in their backyard because they do it every Friday. I will say that the whole experience was pretty serious and pretty intense, which coming from me means a lot.

And finally, we visited the largest Incan ruins in Ecuador. I’m not posting pictures of the ruins but rather a picture of these stones, which have a story from which you can draw your own conclusions. In the 1950’s, local people were clearing some fields and found some odd rectangular stones. Figuring that they had uncovered an old quarry, they took many of the stones and used them as foundations for their houses and barns. Ten or fifteen years later, some archeologists visited the site and said “Hey everybody, this isn’t a quarry, it’s a priceless, once in a lifetime discovery of an Incan village. So would everyone who took stones in the last ten years please return them.” And amazingly, many of the people dismantled their buildings and returned the stones. But then the archeologists realized that they didn’t know where the stones should go, so they just placed them all gently on the ground as a modern monument to peoples’ good nature.