Hosteria Duran Cuenca

... their sins (it took a long time) we have a mooch down by the river and head for some culture in one of the local museums. I know you might all be shocked by this...but they had some shrunken ecuadorain heads we had to check out! They used to do this to murderers back in the day. After we´re done we head to the nearest bar.....bottle of vino by the river just to get a balance between culture and booze. Great day.

... arrive around 8 am which was perfect because we had no place to stay and needed to do that first thing. We ended up getting dropped off at 6 am and nothing was open. I was expecting to have to wander around for a couple hours waiting for hostels to open but luckily we found one (Hotel Milan). We wandered for most of the first day after getting settled. We visited a couple of the main plazas, Plaza de San Francisco and Plaza de Sebastian. We also explored the Cathedral de la Immaculoda ...

... city workers wearing orange or green coveralls ("Hygene" on the back) clean up the stuff every once in a while. Can't believe I'm telling you about horse ****!

Q: Why are their no rugs in Ecuador?

A: Sigh. Why indeed? At least some of the hotels in India had carpet! Here? Sigh. We’re busily constructing stuff; little house for the water heater (which went on the roof), concrete to shore up the wall next door… Winds come up in the ...

[Leon writes…]

[Okay so we're a bit behind on the blogs... we'll try to hammer through a few to get everyone who's following up to speed.]


We had an abysmal night's sleep on Friday night with walls that actually seemed to amplify the conversations from the next room. We had to listen through an inane conversation between the Australian couple next door that drifted into a travel argument (those unique arguments between couples that you can only ...

... hell out of here’. He seemed to figure out that the scam was going nowhere fast and ****** off, leaving us to navigate the market on our own. Although confusing with no signs and no bridge to cross, we made our way across fine, grabbed a taxi to Ecuadorian immigration (no one asked for money), and then took another taxi back to the bus terminal where we were pleased to find a bus was leaving for Cuenca in a half hour. Good news given we didn’t know what ...

... nourishing his soul with art while Tommy, Jennifer and I went to the museum. Taking the trolleybus which is so frequent and cheap, we checked for directions with a helpful local who advised us to take a taxi but we didn’t need one. Until we walked up the hill and realised it was crazy long and steep. But we forced ourselves on and finally got there. Guayasamin collected lots of pre-Colombian artefacts so there was a building dedicated to that, and then a gallery ...

... even the promise of cutting off peoples dre*dlocks for my r*st* wig could convince me to st*y. It w*s * bit like the hotel C*liforni* song, I couldn’t le*ve, liter*lly, I couldn’t find the w*y out. I spent h*lf *n hour trying without result *nd h*d to recruit the driver to help, who *lso couldn’t find it *nd ended up shoving me out the emergency exit *fter *nother h*lf *n hour. I *rrived b*ck to the hotel where shen*****ns were going on…..

On the 6.00am bus up to Cuenca, the first place in 3 days that we have actually wanted to stay in. The driver was a madman but the scenery was really nice. Matt bought us heart shaped cakes in the terminal which were very nice. In to Cuenca by 1 i think and went to the hostal next to the monastory. The town is really nice so we had a good walk around and some pizza for lunch before getting on the open topped bus tour of the city ...

... we liked this little town - but comparing city's of such varying scale is an impossibly difficult task. It's also funny how the weather can affect one's impressions. The sunshine certainly influenced our sentiments towards Cuenca. The central plaza was filled with greenery, and fronted on both sides with Cathedrals - on one side the Old Cathedral, and the other side had the much larger and imposing New Cathedral ...