Southern Exposure

Saturday, January 31

We did the impossible and actually were up and out of our hotel room before eight. The staff of the hotel had been fighting or partying or something all night, so we had not slept well. Our efforts were rewarded with every single breakfast place we had picked out the night before being closed. Apparently not many people eat early in Baños.

We walked around, found a busy restaurant and took our seats at a table. We sat for a few minutes waiting for service, and then we were asked to move from our nice table to some picnic table setup behind a curtain against the wall. I don’t know what that was all about, but we weren’t having it and just walked out. We decided to eat at a hostel because they must be up early, and chose the French hostel near our hotel. The food was fine but the service was slow.

When we were doing our final packing, we could hear loud music coming from the park across the street. Inna went out onto the balcony and watched the local middle school girls doing dance aerobics. It was a huge group being led in doing dance calisthenics by an instructor. It was a strange sight for a Saturday morning and it must have been compulsory judging by the turnout. As we were packing the bikes, the boys of the town marched by led in cadence by a few soldiers.

Once we were on the road, we had to backtrack. Although the map indicated there was a road going south to Riobamba, the sign pointing to Riobamba pointed to a pile of dirt. Our best guess was that a mudslide had closed the road because there wasn’t anything even remotely resembling even a dirt road south from Baños.

Once the backtracking was done, we were headed south. The scenery was lightly populated countryside, but not terribly scenic. Once we were past Riobamba, the scenery was back to the green rolling hills of high altitude Ecuador. We had heard that Riobamba to Cuenca was a tough ride, but the road was nice and the scenery spectacular.

Some of the days’ rides are a grind, just transiting from one location to another, but this was one of the rides where we are constantly stopping to take pictures. Every corner brings a new vista and another stop to take it in and a few photos.

The native dress of highland Ecuador is charming. The little ladies in their felt hats and brightly colored shawls stand out as brightly colored dots in the green fields. We were shy about taking their pictures and invading their privacy, but on one occasion we couldn’t resist and pulled over. One of the two women tending some sheep was willing to have her picture taken, for a price. Inna didn’t understand the price, but gave her $.50 and she seemed happy.

Nothing good lasts forever, and we could see rain on the horizon. It looked like we weren’t going through those mountains, but the road soon turned in the direction of the rain. The rain was relatively light, and we switched to rain gloves as we already had our rain gear on.

We ascended to the level of the clouds and the rain became heavier. We were riding inside the clouds, which meant both moisture and low visibility. Progress was slow as we worked our way through the invisible curves, just following the painted line at the right edge of the road.

We finally made our way through the clouds, and what we gained in visibility we lost in road quality. The road along this section was really torn up, full of huge pot holes and rocks. Some sections were just dirt. Other sections were actively under construction, meaning mostly chopped up dirt. It was slow, tough going, and now we knew why this was considered a tough ride.

We had one final climb ahead, and the steady rain was accompanied by lower temperatures. The lowest temperature I saw on my dash was upper 40s, and we were only wearing shorts and tshirts under our riding gear. The heated grips were on high. We had one more pass through the cloud layer, with the high point of this last leg of the ride being 11,678 ft.

The descent to Cuenca was more traffic and potholes. It finally smoothed out, and the sky cleared a bit, even showing an occasional bit of sunlight. Without getting too lost, we found our way into downtown Cuenca and found our hotel. There was no normal parking garage, so the hotel manager invited us to park our bikes in the in the hotel lobby. We felt bad riding our bikes covered in mud and dripping wet into the nice, clean hotel lobby, but the manager seemed happy. This was the first time on the trip we’d ridden our bikes inside a hotel.

It had been a tough ride of only 233 miles. The scenery had been great, but rain, clouds, road construction, and general poor condition of the last third of the ride had been exhausting, and we were so happy to have hot showers and a warm meal.