I woke up at 09:00 hrs. and decided “bollocks to a ten-hour bus trip to Cuenca”. Instead, I went for a hot shower and a leisurely breakfast in the now familiar hotel restaurant. I chatted with the Swedes who were exchanging addresses as the more affluent of them were departing for the Galapagos Islands.
I decided to return to Baños where I heard that Jackie was nursing a bad ankle after being hit by a rock on the volcano. At 11:30 hrs. I walked back to the Terminal Terrestre, carrying my bag on my shoulder as the handles were already to starting to come unstitched.
I got my minibus ticket for 230 Sucres and sat on my pack drinking coffee while waiting for the bus to depart at 12:10 hrs. On the bus and underway I had an interesting talk with an English train driver who had been travelling with his girlfriend for ten months in South America.
En route we passed the scene of an accident. A group of people stood around the inert body of a little Indian girl in the middle of the road. A stream of blood was running from her head. Further on we had to halt in Ambato while the road was used for a car rally.
After about half an hour police with ornate cowboy hats waved the traffic on and we raced down the valley towards Baños. The hills got greener and higher, and we saw the huge volcano across the gorge.
Finally, we pulled into the dusty crowded bus station. I showed the English couple to Residential Patty and then went to find the Residential Timara where I heard that Jackie was staying. It was a pleasant family-run guest house with nice rooms for 250 Sucres. The landlady confirmed that “yes, the Scottish cyclist was here”.
I just got settled in my room when Annika and Anja came up the stairs – most unexpected. Together we went up to knock for Jackie who was having a siesta. He feigned disgust at our appearance and then invited us in to share his banana supply. Once again, his excitement and enthusiasm was infectious and he soon had us all laughing.
We went for a meal in the Central Chifa Chinese Restaurant, which was excellent. A banal variety program featuring a sickly young girl singer and some performing seals was showing on the television. The waiter repeated the story that we had heard from Jackie, that two Germans had a big fight last night and one of them was in the town jail.
We went on to sample chocolate-covered ice cream cones and returned to the kitchen at our hotel to make tea. A stall by the marketplace was doing a roaring trade in roast cuy, guinea pigs skewered longways and grilled.
In the mountainous regions of Ecuador people love to eat roast cuy (pronounced kwee). A cuy is a guinea pig raised for meat. Ecuadorians raise them in small pens, caring for them until they’re large enough to make a good meal. That could be a few weeks or a little longer. No matter how long, each guinea is eventually headed to the grill.
There are a lot of holiday makers in town. I finished off my pulsera whilst listening to Jackie singing loudly on the roof. At 20:00 hrs. we trooped into town en masse. There was Jackie, Annika, Anja, Hannes, and a couple of other Germans. The Central Chifa was closed so we went to the other Chinese Restaurant in town.
Here we tanked into churrascos while the waiter tried to get the best out of a scratched, warped vinyl rock music sampler LP on the record deck. Twice boisterous behaviour resulted in beer bottles being overturned into Anja’s lap.
We went on to find out that the Banana Pancake Emporium and the local disco were closed. This left only the street corner rum bars. Here women served rum with hot sweet orange juice at a trestle table for 20 Sucres a nip. There were two drunks to provide entertainment, an aggressive footballer and a happy one with a runny nose who smiled at us and rambled on incoherently.
There was also a small man with only a couple of teeth, who laughed uproariously at everybody. We sat on roadside benches and drank these rum toddies until the stalls packed up at 23:00 hrs. running up a bill of 100 Sucres each.
The indigenous Indian woman serving the drinks poured the white spirit from a respectable looking rum bottle, but the illusion was shattered when the bottle was empty and she refilled it from a grubby plastic motor oil container!
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