We're on the train to nowhere
Trip Start
Nov 03, 2004
1
49
165
Trip End
Nov 23, 2006
Riobamba,
Ecuador
Friday, August 5, 2005
bus station here) to Riobamba to ride the Devil's Nose Train. The
train tracks used to run through the agricultural valleys outside
Riobamba and then through the Andean foothills to Guayaquil. In the
late 1990s, about five hours out of Riobamba, the tracks were washed
out in flooding. There's never been any money to repair them so now
they run a tourist service through the countryside to the new end of
the line and then bring you back again. The odd bit is you travel
by train to an arbitrary point on the route, basically in the middle
of nowhere (where the tracks run out), everyone jumps off the train
and stooges around for a bit and then they turn the engine around
(this takes quite a bit of phaffing and shunting) and then they
bring you back again
One of Ecuadors wide selection of volcanos
. The cool bit is the train is made up offreight cars and you get to ride on the roof.
If you want a seat on the roof you need to be at the train station
by 6:00am. Departure is 7:00am so you have plenty of sitting around
to decide that you should have rented two cushions for between you
and the corrugated iron roof and you don't actually own enough
clothes to be warm (and that's before the wind caused by moving gets
up). Departure is dead on time (despite everything we have heard
and read about Latin America this has been the rule and not just the
intention). The train has been running as a tourist excursion for
about six years now but the adult locals still think it's cute -
they come out of their houses or stop in the fields to wave and
smile (someone even threw strawberries up to us)
So many corrugated butts
. The children comeout to wave and hopefully catch some of the sweets thrown down from
the roof (if I'd known that was the custom I'd have made up bags of
toothbrushes and toothpaste to throw - I don't think the toothfairy
does very good business in this neck of the woods). The train is
such an attraction that even some of the tours follow the train or
race ahead to be able to stop and get photographs.
The first half of the journey is through the valley where people
make their living farming. This is the highlands so not much banana
or pineapple but plenty of corn, quinoa, commercial flowers and
other horticultural stuff. It was the closest we have been able to
get to people's actual fields (the bus is always quite remote) and
people still till the fields with hand-held wooden ploughs and
digging sticks and grow exactly what they needed to survive with a
small cash income. Each holding was a patchwork of tiny squares,
each a different, brilliant green, dotted with the farmers i
n duncolours and their wives in bowler hats and scarves of cerise,
turquoise, emerald, or cobalt.
Climbing into the foothills the vegetation gives way to commercial
pine plantations (much smaller (trees and plots) than those at
home), eucalyptus and silver dollar trees. The earth is ochre and
the smell strangely dislocating. And then it's tussock and massive,
modest and tiny agaves on steep sided rock slopes - so nearly
perpendicular and unstable that just the passing of the train can
cause mini rockslides. The valley sides are closing in and it seems
that you are passing through the throat of some ancient, rockbound,
Ecuadorian myth. Descending to the river valley involves a series
of complex switchbacks down a near-vertical hillside (the "Devil's
Nose") - apparently a miracle of railway engineering when first
constructed, and surprisingly not the bit that got washed away.
Just before the end of our jaunt we pass through a village, deserted
and crumbling, whose life ended when the train tracks disappeared.
Both well, the corrugations in our butts are just about ironed out,
