Leaving Cuenca, southward bound
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Vilcabamba,
Ecuador
Friday, June 8, 2007
Although all the phones at the bus station seemed to be busy Friday morning, I packed up my stuff and headed over there. When I arrived I was told by one of the guys selling tickets that the road to Loja was still closed, so I went and bought a ticket to Machala on the coast. While I was waiting for my bus I ran into two German guys who had been staying at my hostel. They had bought tickets for a bus to Loja which they were told was running without problems, so I ditched my bus and bought a new ticket for theirs. Unfortunately it was a waste of $6, but that's better than wasting 6 hours of travel time to end up in a city I didn't want to even visit.
The bus ride to Loja was interesting. The scenery was gorgeous, but most of the time I couldn't enjoy it since it felt like my stomach was in my throat. Most of the road wasn't paved, but even the paved parts weren't exactly smooth. Plus, we were winding through the mountains for most of the ride. Luckily, I didn't actually throw up, but I felt like I was going to a number of times throughout the ride.
When we got to Loja, instead of staying the night we decided to hop right on another bus and go the hour south to Vilcabamba right away. This ride was on a smaller bus (about half the size of a regular bus), and it was packed with people. About halfway through the ride I hear a woman in the back row singing along very loudly to the music. After about 10 minutes of singing along to the music, she starts yelling out, "Gringo! Gringo! Turn around, gringo (in Spanish, of course)." I look back and see that she's trying to get the attention of one of the German guys who's sitting in the row behind me listening to his ipod and not hearing a word she's saying. I get his attention and tell him that she's trying to talk to him. She ends up moving forward to sit next to him and attempt to have a conversation in his broken Spanish. About half of this conversation is him saying "I don't know" and her saying "Why don't you know?" When we finally arrived in Vilcabamba, Gloria tried to convince him that he should go to the bar with her instead of coming to the hostel with us. He just wanted to get away from her as quickly as possible and was quite happy to head to the hostel. After that Gloria became a running joke.
Also on the bus, we met an Australian guy who was planning on going to the same hostel as us anyway (I started talking to him because he was looking at the same flier that we had for the hostel). The four of us decided that after sitting on buses for almost 8 hours we wanted to walk to the hostel. It looked like it wasn't too far from the bus station on the map. With our packs on our backs, we started walking, or really hiking. It ended up that the hostel is about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the bus station, all uphill on a very dark road. About halfway there we were wishing we had taken a cab, but there weren't any around and we didn't want to turn back. After about 30 minutes of walking we reached the long staircase heading up to the hostel. Once we got into our dorm room and ordered a couple of pizzas from the hostel restaurant (which had officially closed about 10 minutes before our arrival), we were much happier.
The hostel turned out to be really, really nice. It's almost more like a resort than a hostel. They put the 4 of us in a 5 bed dorm room ($8 per person per night) with our own attached bathroom. The dorm room is more of a lofted cabin with three twin beds up in the loft and two double beds below. They put the three guys up in the loft while I lucked out with one of the nice big double beds downstairs to myself. The best thing about this hostel is the shower. The showers are all gigantic with the walls and floor covered in large stones. They're absolutely gorgeous! Unfortunately the hot water is a little spotty, but at least when it gets cold you're in a pretty shower.
