WanderingWhy…

There were a few things that remained elusive to us while we were in Ecuador, especially on the last half of our trip. We traveled to the Quilotoa Loop in order to visit Lake Quilotoa. Lake Quilotoa is a lake in the crater of a dormant volcano. I won’t go on about this incident since we already blogged about it, but as you probably remember from the entry, we never saw the volcano because of the rain, and we got “stuck” in the Andes because of the road conditions.

Our next elusive volcano was the very active “Tungurahua” near the town of Banos. It was in the papers and on the news here and at home because of the recent activity. But where was it? From all the warnings, I expected to look out my hotel window at lava running down the street. We went on a hike to try and see the volcano while we were in Banos. We did two hours of some of the hardest hiking we had done to date, got to the lookout, and saw….clouds. Lots and lots of clouds. Shouldn’t we have seen lava spewing up through the clouds?

The next day we decided to rent a quad and ride to a different viewpoint in an attempt to see the volcano. When we got to the lookout, what did we see? More clouds! After all this trying, we finally decided to give up. As we were leaving Banos on the bus, I looked out the window and said “is that it? Where is my camera?” I pulled out my camera to catch the smoking beast only to find that Sean had left my memory card in his laptop!

Our next town was Riobamba, where we hoped to ride on the roof of a train down Ecuador’s famous Devil’s Nose. We heard mixed opinions as to whether the train was running. We heard it was not running because of the rain. We heard it was running, but you could not ride on the roof because some tourist stood up on the roof. Or was it because of the rain again? When we arrived in Riobamba, the train ticket office was closed, but an information center was open. They told us no, the train was not running from Riobamba because of the weather. The truth was actually much darker than that. But we could take a bus to the next town, pick up the train from there, and ride on the inside. The whole point of this quest was to ride on top of the train. Why take the train, which takes twice as long as the bus, to sit inside? I could sit inside the bus and see the same thing… or could we sit on top of the bus? Just kidding. We have no health insurance.

The most elusive item in all of Ecuador was toilet paper. Everywhere we went, we carried the famed paper with us. I realize that when you travel, you should always carry TP anyway. But in Ecuador the only place you could seem to find it was in your own hotel bathroom, and even then sometimes you had to ask for it. So Sean and I became TP snatchers, taking it from one hotel to keep us going until the next one. Some public areas did not even have TP holders, as if it really was never a thought. To make matters even a little more disgusting was the elusive soap. Most often there was no soap in the dispensers in public bathrooms if there were dispensers at all. In one restaurant I saw a bar of soap pushed onto a pole that was attached to the wall. In case a gringo like me wanted to steal it, I guess. No thanks, I only steal TP. Unless of course it is a FULL bar of soap, and not those little slivers you usually get at a hotel. We got a full bar of soap in one hotel, and it was in my backpack before we left. I can imagine the maid coming in after we left….”Damn gringos stole the soap AND the toilet paper!”

And while I joked about the weather in this post, it really is a serious situation in Ecuador. There are a significant number of landslides, their oil pipeline is effected, the roads are in a terrible state (and dangerous in some cases), homes have been flooded, people are displaced. In one area we saw a bulldozer lifting dirt from a landslide, and dumping it over the hillside. To prepare for a landslide on the lower section of road. A lot of the roadways off the main highways were not paved to begin with, or were paved so long ago that they were in essence dirt again. I wonder how long it will take the country to recover from this. And it is still raining.

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