8/27/2006 – 9/1/2006 Cuenca

After a week of rice,aji and unrecognizable seafood and fruit, we were all in the mood for some pizza when we arrived in Cuenca. Of course the trip there is worthy of some coverage before I tell you about our pizza experience. We all thought the trip from Punta Blanca to Cuenca would take about four and a half hours. After all, that’s what Maria had told us: 2 hours to Guayaquil and 2.5 hours from Guayaquil to Cuenca. Well, we hired a van and a driver to take us. Maria and her family had tried to convince us that 16 of us could fit into 3 small cars (and I do mean small) with luggage. I think they were offended when we elected to hire the van. It wasn’t just the space problem. Maria had to take Brad to airport at 5:30 AM and since she was leaving, all of Maria’s family decided to leave at the same time. That mean’t they had to get up at about 4:30am to get packed and straighten up the house. We couldn’t understand why everyone had to leave at the same time but Maria said it was typical of her family. They all wanted to send Brad off and show him they cared. It was very sweet and completely foreign to our American minds. Anyway, getting back to the story, it took us an hour and fifteen minutes to get to Guayaquil and another 4.5 hours to get to Cuenca.
Much of the trip to Cuenca I spent going up, way up. The Cajas mountains are part of the chain of Andes that divide Equador into three regions. The chain is home to 30 Volcanos, 7 of which are active. The highest of those is Chimborazo at almost 21,000 feet. But the Cajas peak out at about 13,000 feet, still enough to make me lightheaded as we traversed up winding roads through intense fog. That would be challenging enough in America but here, you throw in the occasional rock slide or washed out road, a steady stream of busses that occupied most of the available pavement, indigenous folks with livestock and you begin to realize why it takes 4.5 hours to get about 120 miles.
We were traveling with 2 men in the front of the van, one of whom we knew indirectly because he Maria’s cousin and the brother of an Ecuadorian girl in Charlottesville, Mariella, who often babysat the kids when they were younger. John’s job was to get us to Maria’s home. Of course, as soon as we hit the outskirts of town, John made the driver stop the van and declared that he didn’t know where Maria’s house was. At that point, we tried to contact Maria but to no avail. Finally, John called his sister Mariella in Virginia and hands the phone to me. I had a nice chat with Mariella but she had no idea how to get us to Maria’s house so we sat on the side of the road in Cuenca for close to an hour.
Finally, John decides to stop a cab and ask if he knows where Maria lives. We then follow the cab through a seemingly endless maze of streets that don’t go to Maria’s house. Finally the cab leaves us and John stops some guy that he seems to know in a small red car and we begin following him. Low and behold, we finally arrive in front of a home that John declares to be the ARCE house. Unfortunately, there is no one home. We tried to imagine how Maria and her family could leave 5 hours before us and still not be home and surprisingly we were successful. They had managed to turn a 1.5 hour trip from Guayaquil to the beach into a more than 3 hour trip so anything seemed possible for the return. Anyway, John and the driver waited patiently with us for about 30 minutes until Maria and her family showed up. So began our Cuenca adventure.
We all had a taste for pizza that first night in Cuenca and the Pizza Hut sounded like a safe, if predictable solution. Maria assured us that it would meet our expectations and when we asked about the salad, she confidently gave us the green light. One week of bizarre food that was purchased and prepared without regard for sanitation or refrigeration and it was the Pizza Hut that did us in. I was the first to show symptoms but in the days that followed, everyone but Liz got sick. She was so excited that I had gotten sick and she hadn’t because it has been years since I was last sick.
We didn’t do much in the first few days because someone was always sick but we we did manage to get to the open air food market and the craft market. Ecuadorian wool goods, leather and art are a wonderful bargain. So is the food. There were simple pleasures of shopping like buying a bag of 6 tomatoes for a dollar or a fine bottle of Ecuadorian vodka for $3.68. Bottled water cost about 25 cents. Maria reminded often that we should not allow ourselves to be ripped off by the locals and would negotiate ridiculous prices even lower. She assured me that to pay more than $1.50 for a lovely wool and leather pocketbook was something only a dumb gringo tourist would do and I certainly didn’t’ want to be one of those. Never mind that every outward impression I conveyed each day was precisely that of a dumb gringo.