Day 145
I left Quito early and it was cold. The road out of the city climbed and climbed and at one point I got a break in the clouds from where I could take a photo of the city below.
However just after I set off again I was back in to the clouds and climbing again. Once on the descent I encountered a road accident in the fast lane where a car had stuffed itself under the back of a bus in the heavy fog. The diesel tank of the bus had ruptured and it was running down the road but luckily for me the road was so steep that it all ran straight downhill in the outside lane and it did not flow across the road in to the inside lane.
As I left the city I spent all day ridding up one mountain and down the other side. Most of the time this was done in cloud with visibility at times down to thirty yards, only to do it all again, and then again and again. it was cold and wet in the clouds and whilst I would have loved to have ridden these road when I could see where I was going, riding in constant low cloud was not pleasurable. I normally take photographs of the views that I see however on this day the camera was almost never out of my pocket.
Only as I started to get near to the city of Cuenca by late afternoon did the road eventually come out from under the clouds and the air started to get a little warmer. As I arrived in the city the sun was out and it was getting hot. I found a small hotel on the internet which was located in the historic part of city for 27 USD for the night. The hotel was very bohemian in style, not my usual choice but because it was advertised as having on site parking I chose it.
However it did not and I had to park my bike in a nearby parking garage and that cost me 19 USD for 24 hours. Once showered and changed I headed out to have a look at the city and although it was very nice it was too touristy for my tastes. As always I took a few photographs of the older building that I saw.
There was some sort of celebration going on as lots of adults and kids were dressed up and on horseback accompanying a couple of floats as they drove around the streets. As usual the streets were full of stalls and people selling all sorts of stuff including a woman with a wheel barrow full of the largest cherries that I have ever seen.
The historic part of the city was very easy to get around in as it appears to have been built in a grid and it even had a modern tram system that only seemed to run up and downhill.
I eventually found a place where I could sit out and have a smoke but nowhere in the city sold coffee where I could sit outside so I had to park my arse in a Belgian style micro brewery where they charged me 4 USD for a beer. Tourist prices right enough!
Day 145
It was overcast when I left Cuenca and I was about thirty miles in to my journey when I stopped to refuel. Beside the petrol station was a small restaurant with a small pond beside it where I had breakfast. This part of Ecuador reminded me a little of the Alpine regions in Europe as the houses here have been built with steeply sloping roofs. The barbecue area in front of the restaurant was in full swing cooking a few pigs.
As usual the first part of the day involved riding up one side of a mountain and then riding down the other side and this went on for a couple of hours. Again when I could I stopped to take a photograph of the scenery when I could see it.
As the road descended out of the mountains I rode for about fifty miles along a very lush valley and then suddenly all of the vegetation disappeared and the next twenty miles looked very dry and barren.
Then as suddenly as the vegetation disappeared it returned and I then rode all the way to the Pacific coast to the city of Machala where I stopped for lunch.
After lunch I rode to the city of Huaquillas which is right on the border with Peru. I had decided to stay for a couple of nights as I needed to get a few things attended to such as my laundry and an oil change for the bike so I booked in to a nice hotel on the main road in to the city which cost me 56 USD for 2 nights including breakfast and secure parking for the bike.
Things had been going reasonably well since I had come down out of the cold cloudy mountains and in to the sunny and warm coast but that night as I was writing this post my laptop suddenly stopped working. I had a go at fixing it and I got it going again only for it to completely die an hour or so later. I back up most of my stuff on a regular basis on a couple of old laptop drives that I carry with me so I was sure that I would not loose too much work.
The next day I arranged to get my laundry done and then I set about looking for oil with which to do an oil change on the bike. I then discovered a place not far from the hotel which would do the oil change for me if I bought the oil from them. I then returned to my hotel to fetch the bike and thirty minutes and 10 USD later the oil change had been done for me.
After returning the bike to the hotel I ten set about looking for a new laptop. I walked along the main road and I passed a small square that had a lighthouse shaped building erected in it. Then suddenly the road was full of market stalls, people, three wheeled mototaxis, and bikes. There were also crowd control barriers across the road at either side of a small bridge over a dry river bed but the bikes just ignored these and rode on through over the bridge and through the crowd of pedestrians trying not to hit any of them.
Unbeknown to me as I was walking through this chaos I never noticed that I had actually crossed the border and I had walked in to Peru. Like the border between Panama and Costa Rica as Paso Caanoa people can just go back and forth as they please with no one stopping them or asking for passports etc.
In the Ecuadorian side of the border I managed to buy a new laptop for 200 USD but it only came loaded with MS Windows (which I thoroughly detest) in Spanish. I tried to change the Spanish language to English but the version of MS Windows loaded on to the laptop only allows one language and I couldn’t change it. I then tried to install a Linux OS alongside the Windows OS but again the windows software wasn’t having any of that. Eventually I got a new solid state hard drive from a local computer shop for 45 USD and I stuck that in to the laptop and installed the Linux OS on the laptop with no issues.
As you can now see, by reading this post which I was able to complete, my new laptop is working well. On one of my other trips in and out of the hotel I passed a small bike shop so I enquired about warm weather gloves. To my surprise they had a pair in my size for a bargain price of 15 USD. I was also able to go over the border again on foot and change US Dollars for Peruvian Sols and get a Peruvian SIM card for my phone so that I did not have to try to get these things done at the vehicular border crossing when it was time to go there.
All in all I felt that my time in Huaquillas was very well spent as I was not only fortunate enough to be able to get so many things done and I was also fortunate enough to be in a place here I could find a replacement laptop when mine died on me.