Another big city, Guayaquil..
Trip Start
Jun 07, 2008
1
9
147
Trip End
May 01, 2009
Guayaquil,
Ecuador
Thursday, July 10, 2008
The journey from Cuenca to Guayaquil was again another amazing trip, though, through the Andes. There are two routes from Cuenca to Guayaquil, one via Caņar and the other and shorter route is through the Cajas national park. Luckily this route turned out to go through the National Park which was a double bonus for the shortened ride and much more interesting scenery (having been to Caņar before) Its strange but having landed and started my trip in Quito which was already at 2800 meters and then continuing through the Andes to the other places I have visited I probably havenīt been lower that about 2000 meters in just over a month. Even though I knew this its difficult to fully appreciate visually what that means. It wasnīt until this bus journey it that became more apparent
Along the river
. As the bus wound its way along roads clinging to the mountainside with huge valleys beside us, we would then climb over the top of one valley to be confronted with yet another vast valley beside us. The shear scale of the this landscape is just something else. The roads in the mountains are continually being blocked by landslides and you can see evidence of the landslides all along the sides of the valleys. Youīll see where the start of a huge land slip has started above a road and then continued way down into the valley below. We passed quite a few places where the road was only down to a single track where they were still working to clear recent land slides.Gradually descending we passed through layers of cloud that at one point had been far below us. We then popped over the top of what turned out to be the last peak and before us, just a sea of cloud. Luckily I had window seat on the bus so had an excellent view. This marked the edge of the Andes and we again descended winding down the mountain road and into the cloud below.
Breaking through the cloud and down onto the flat land suddenly it became very warm and humid. My last week in Cuenca had been quite cold, I had even bought a new top in order to keep warm in the daytime and was wearing a beanie hat and socks to bed..
Lighthouse - no family
. oh what a picture! So the fleece finally had to come off. What a change in scenery, the peaks and valleys had now been exchanged for the biggest banana plantations I have ever seen. On both sides of the road for as far as I could see were these huge plantations, as well as rice fields and sugar cane too. Compared to the small farm setups in the mountains this is indeed farming on an industrial scale.So as for Guayaquil, well its ok, but just massive, the redeveloped area along the Rio Guayas called the Malecon 2000, is quite nice. Though I left Guayaquil with a sour taste in my mouth as I was seriously ripped off by this taxi driver the #&!+er...
