JJ's Travelogue

Leaving Baños, I headed south a couple of hours to Riobamba with the intent of riding on the famous steam train up to Devil’s Nose, an extremely steep incline (5½ % grade via a series of switchbacks) that required one of the world’s greatest feats of engineering. From the publicity: “The route was known as the ‘most difficult railway in the world’ when it was built between 1860 and 1874. The ride takes you through every climate zone in the land, starting in the cool highlands, going through the cloud forest, and ending in the hot coastal jungle. The train remarkably descends caboose first and mounts the cliffs by means of switchbacks with thrilling twists and turns, offering spectacular views of Chimborazo volcano.” As if that weren’t enough, one would typically choose to ride on the roof of the train for the most thrilling ride possible. Unfortunately this is now prohibited, ever since a couple of tourists got beheaded by a low-hanging cable in 2007. [Can you imagine sitting next to the beheadees? Gross.] Damn authorities, taking all the fun out of things.

The train only runs three days a week but apparently due to recent flooding damaging the tracks, the real steam train isn’t running at all. When this happens they replace it with an “autoferro”, basically a bus that rides on the rails. I don’t understand how the autoferro can ride on the rails if the train can’t, but there you go. So it wasn’t going to be nearly as thrilling, but arriving on Thursday, I bought my ticket for Friday’s departure at 7am. Woke up at 6 (quite an engineering feat in itself) to god-awful freezing pouring rain and zero visibility. Screw it I thought, I’m going back to bed and taking Sunday’s train instead. Naturally when I went to swap out my ticket, Sunday was already completely booked. So it looks like I’m missing one of the highlights of Ecuador, drat.

Instead I hung out with some local Couchsurfers and relatives of the sisters I met in Baños who live here. Always nice to meet locals, but nothing particularly special to write about. Oh, but I danced – to music that this gringo has zero claims to – cumbia, salsa, merengue, samba. Rather than butchering the actual steps, I invented new steps that I’m sure will catch on any day now.

Often I will set a goal for the day to act as a starting point for an adventure – getting something repaired, finding a distant monument, a neighborhood on the map, what have you. Here I began by following the train tracks out of town until I ended up in cow pastures. Crossed these and followed along the banks of a small river, which was beautiful until a lady came and dumped her garbage into it! Unbelievable. The “path” became more and more indefinite, and I realized I was suddenly in the midst of one of my famous “off-the-map” adventures that I have led so many of you reading this on. They seem so innocuous at first – “say, let’s take that shortcut – it looks like it leads somewhere pretty…” [and bless my dear friends for trusting me enough to follow along..] Cut to five hours later when we’re climbing over fences behind a military installation, tromping ankle-deep through mud, or bushwacking through brambles, completely lost. Ah, but never doubt JJ’s impeccable sense of direction! We always find a way back home. This day was no different, and I saw a side of the town I’m sure no tourist has ever seen!

John Lennon said that “life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” The wisdom behind that line was part of the impetus for this trip – for years I’ve felt that life was passing me by while I occupied all of my time and energy with inane things (work, mostly). I try to do the opposite on this trip. In the same way that naturalists sit in the forest for hours on end waiting for things to reveal themselves, I do this in city parks. Sure enough, magical things happen once you settle down and become part of the background. I notice things I didn’t upon first glance. Street kids befriend me. Parades wander by (this has actually happened several times now!) Wonderfully colorful vendors meander past.

I’m continually amazed at the complexities of Spanish. It’s far from a single language that spans the continent – every location has it’s own words for things, sometimes different even within the same country. To give just two examples:
I drink what in the States we call “coffee with milk”. Order that here and you get 90% hot milk and 10% coffee, yuck. In order to get the opposite ratio, you order a “café cortado” in Quito, but a “café pintado” in southern Ecuador.  They’re only a few hundred kilometres apart, yet have never heard of each other’s phrases! [The coffee phrase I like best is the "café correcto", which is coffee with liquor - as if your sobriety needs "correcting!" This reminds me of the coffee shop across from the stage door in Rome - ordering a "café completo" results in a piece of dark chocolate tossed into an espresso cup (the chocolate is then melted by the  espresso shooting in), and the whole thing is topped off with a dollop of real whipped cream. Stir it all together, toss it back, and you're good to go back to work!]
The second example is the “tortilla”. You probably think a tortilla is a flat pancake made from corn. This would be true in Mexico and Central America, but down here, a tortilla has nothing to do with corn – it’s an omelette!