Bye, Cuenca

 Another day, another national park. Again there was no terrifying road, no gasping for breath at 13,000 feet, no slamming my head into a low doorframe and also no bird shitting on my head.To be honest, I miss the drama.

Cajas is a two-level national park. We started on the ground level, where we hiked around a lush forest with hummingbirds, ducks, and tropical flowers.

Then we went up to the upper deck, where we hiked to the Ecuadorian continental divide. The
landscape is very forbidding – not much grows here. This is a spot where warm, humid, tropical air from the Amazon runs into mountains and gets stuck, causing permanent cloudiness and an unending supply of water for Cuenca, the city at the bottom of the mountains. These glacial basins in Cajas store the humidity from the Amazon.

Speaking of water, my current city is the only place in Ecuador where you can drink the water. It’s clean, chlorinated and comes straight from the mountains. Everything I’ve read on the internet and everyone in Cuenca talks about how safe the water is and the fact that it has a distinct, slightly sweet taste. I didn’t really sense the sweetness, mostly because I am still not putting any Ecuadorian tap water in my body. I have gotten this far without any gastrointestinal disasters and I’m not about to push my luck now. If you want to know what the tap water here tastes like, come on down.

On several of my travels here, I’ve run across the remains of this, the so-called Inca Road. It consisted of around 25,000 miles of roads through western South America. Used for trade, wars, and religious ceremonies, it also had drainage, rest stops and no Cracker Barrel restaurants, which made it even better than current roads. Built in the 1400s and 1500s, it probably would still be expanding but the Spanish showed up and sort of impeded the construction process.

Tomorrow Quito, and shortly thereafter, home.