Railroad (mis)adventures

In case anyone was wondering, it did rain today. And it rained at the worst possible time - when I was sitting on the roof of a moving train. Continuous days with rain count is now at 6...

The Train

What a day! And I say that not in the good sense, but in the "I am totally frustrated and wet and ready for a shower" sense.

The plan was to take the scenic train ride from Riobamba this morning. One hundred years ago, Ecuador constructed a railroad track that went from Guayaquil on the coast, up into the Andes mountains and ended up in Quito. The steepest ascent of the whole railway was labeled "El Nariz del Diablo" - the Devil´s nose - and was regarded at the time as one of the most incredible feats of railway engineering ever. However, the rains of El Niño in the early 1980s and late 1990s destroyed large portions of the tracks, and the railway is no longer used as a means of transportation. Only the stretch of track from the town of Riobamba to Alausi is currently open, and it is used just for a tourist train that runs three days a week and goes through the "hair raising" Nariz del Diablo descent.

Train tracks in Alausi

This train is supposed to run every Wed, Fri and Sun - leaving Riobamba at 7am. They have seats on the roof which offer the best view, and people told me to arrive at the train station at 6am to claim a seat. So I woke up at 5:30am, got to the station just after 6am and was told that the normal train was not running today. Instead, a smaller train was going to just do the Nariz del Diablo section of track which begins in the town of Alausi. So all of the foreign tourists who showed up this morning at the train station had to get in a bus and travel two hours to Alausi. When we get there at 9am they tell us the train will depart at 12:30. So I have three and a half hours to waste in a tiny town without anything to do. By 11:30am the train shows up - it´s just one car and it fills up with a group who booked their trip from a travel agency, leaving all of us backpackers to wait for the train to return and make a second journey. We were told the train would return at 2:30pm. So I went to an internet cafe for two hours. When I got back to the train station at 1:30, it was already back from its first run and was about to leave. Had I stayed at the internet cafe for 15 more minutes I would have missed the trip (in retrospect this wouldn´t have been so bad). The roof of the train is already full of tourists, but they tell me there is room for one more person to sit up there. So I climb up on the roof just before the train departs.

View from the train

About 60 seconds later it begins to rain. It starts off as a light drizzle, and I don´t mind because the scenery is beautiful with mountains on all sides. Then it starts to really rain. I mean it is seriously pouring, and I´m stuck on the roof of the train with 30 other tourists. It was a miserable experience. The mountains were covered in clouds so we could barely see anything, my backpack was getting soaked, and I didn´t want to take out my camera because then it would get wet. I was wearing a raincoat, but my pants were soaked through and I was freezing. ALl the while the train descended on a series of switchbacks which I would have found interesting if I hadn´t been so wet and cold. Finally, after a half hour we got to the bottom of the valley and the train stopped so it could reverse direction and go back up to Alausi. THose of us on the roof climbed down and got inside the train car. And all of the dumb people who spent the first part of the journy inside then climbed onto the roof thinking they would have a nice view and not really considering the fact that the rain would make them very unhappy.

View on the bus from Riobamba

We got back to the town of Alausi at 3:30pm, a group of soggy, cold travelers. From there most people were traveling on to Cuenca, a four hour bus ride. The bus left at 4pm, and things were fine for 20 minutes. Then the bus driver decided to take us down a dirt road that traversed down a very steep mountain pass. It was just as steep a descent as the one on the train, but this time there were no tracks and the road was mud and dirt. The worst part was when we made a hairpin turn that was just wide enough for the turning radius of a car. One of the people on the bus had to get out of the bus to help the bus driver make a K turn that took about 6 back and forth motions. When we finally made the turn, everyone on the bus clapped for the driver. Soon afterwards we returned to the paved road and everything proceeded as normal.

An hour later we stopped at a police checkpoint in a tiny village. Apparently the local police wanted a little "tip" to let our bus pass by. Our driver started yelling at the policeman, saying "I have to get these gringos to Cuenca," but the police required their propina. The driver went inside the police station, somehow things got sorted out, and ten minutes later we were on our way again.