Semana Santa 2 - Of Utter Misery

So, Elizabeth and I arrived in Alausi on our bus from Loja.... at 3:00 am. We didn't want to walk around at all, so we found a hotel right where the bus dropped us off which was actually really nice. I called some friends on the bus that was coming to get us for the field trip and they said they were a few hours away. They ended up being a little late getting to the town, at about 6:30 am, so we got 3 or so hours of good sleep (in beds, as opposed to buses).

In the morning, I realized that I had left my hiking boots on the rack above our seats on the bus that took us to Alausi from Loja... (sorry mom, they're gone forever) I had flip flops... but that was NOT going to help me hike part of the Inca trail for our field trip. So after we met with the group and had breakfast, I went with my professor to go buy some shoes. I only had the money Zack had given us, and we still needed some for food. Unfortunately, I didn't know that it would have served me well to have rubber boots, which about half of the group had, so I bought gym shoes, which were twice as expensive. :(

We set off to a small town called Achupallas, and at some point our bus stopped and said that we would have to take trucks to go further along because the roads couldnt support the big bus we were in. Some Ecuadorian men packed our stuff onto a truck... which looked a little shady because they put our bags on a tarp-like roof supported by one pole, hanging over all of us sitting in the truck bed. It was about an hour ride in a pretty darn uncomfortable position... but it wasn't raining or too cold... so we were alright.

When we got to Achupallas we thought there were going to be mules there waiting to carry our stuff... but we waited... and waited... and finally about 2 and a half hours later the mules came so we could start our looooong hike. My shoes got muddy in the first hour for sure... so it wasn't too great, and I was really regretting my purchase. It was also raining a bit, but we went through a cool mountain pass and saw a river down below. We got to a big open area and set up camp for the night... it was already getting cooold.

That night we used the last of my iPod battery and had a sing-along in our tent :) That kept us warm for a while, and some hilarious ecuadorian guys came and joined in for a little while... but then Elizabeth and I kicked everyone out and got some sleep. Also, we ate our food, tuna and crackers... which was eaten many, many more times, because that's basically all we bought... mmm survival food :P The other girls on the trip were so nice though, so they gave us some snacks and peanut butter later when we were running out of food.

Anyways, we started the next morning and hiked FOR-EV-ER. I'm not the best hiker, and I wasn't the worst in our big group (about 25) either, so for a good 2 or 3 hours I was basically hiking alone in between the fast group and the slow group. The trail was easy to follow for most of that part of the day, and I also passed the mules once, then they passed me, then I passed them again, then they passed me again. This whole time it was baaad weather... rainy and cold. I'm pretty sure I was the most miserable I had ever been in my entire life. Especially since hiking alone for a few hours messes with your head...

I caught up to the first group in the early afternoon where we all stopped for a lunch break. This was also the part where our guide (Ecuadorian guy that was hired who knows the trail) said that the trail gets hard to follow, so we all have to stay together. When the slower group caught up with us, we began to hike across the top of a bunch of mountains. I was a little confused, because our professor (Canada lady, who i talked about in a previous post here) had gone ahead with a few students, even though the guide who knew the trail was behind in the group with us. Hiking across the mountains, we were pelted by horizontal rain and high winds from the side, FUN. At one point, the guide stopped and said something to the effect of "this is the highest point on the trail.... here is where the Inca blahblahblahblah...." After about 2 sentences, a few of us in the front just yelled "Siga! Por favor!" (Keep going!) because we weren't about to stand in the freezing rain and listen to a lecture when we could walk faster and get off the god-forsaken mountain. He was very understanding, and we kept walking.

Eventually we went down the mountains and came to a river with a big open area. There we found our professor and some students, but when we all joined up they realized that someone was missing. A boy from Riobamba, Adrian, had gone off in front with our professor, and she had gone ahead of him and thought that he went back to find us. He was all alone, and he (as we learned later) had fallen down some sort of small cliff and passed out.

So when we were all together they sent the ecuadorian guide backwards on the trail on a horse. We had all stopped walking (obviously) and were freeeezing at this point... so we huddled like penguins and waited for our professor and one of the teaching assistants on the trip to go check out some little huts that were on the side of the mountain to see if we could stay in them.

P.S. At this point, we were supposed to have been camping at Ingapirca... which was still about 2 days away... Time estimates = WRONG

The profe and TA signaled for us to come up because the little houses were abandoned... so we could stay somewhere "warm" for the night. We all packed into a little hut that was clearly meant for animals, and organizated ourselves on top of hay and rocks, and some people started to make a fire in another one of the huts that was more open so smoke could get out. We all changed out of our wet, wet, clothes, and tried to arrange ourselves in our sleeping bags in the small barn so that we could all be close together for warmth, but still comfortable... which never really happened...
At this point, the guide still hadn't come back from trying to find the missing kid, so right when it was getting dark, they sent out one of the TA's and a mule-leading guide to go try to find a cell phone signal to call the military or someone to search for the boy, and to call his parents in Riobamba.

As we were drifting in and out of sleep, at about 1:00 am there was yelling and scrambling for flashlights... the 2 people who had gone to try to find a cell phone signal had found Adrian! He had to walk back though, because it wasn't the guide on the horse that found him. He had been missing for something like 12 hours, and I didn't see, but my friends said he was clearly hypothermic and looked just horrible. He had only had a jacket, and no hat or gloves, plus he had passed out earlier and then woke up not to know where he was or which way to go. There was lots of scrambling for food and water to give him, and they started up the fire again to get him warm.

The next morning, we set out with promises of reaching a town later in the day. It was a long, even more muddy hike, where I had to pause many times to make decisions about where to jump so that I wouldn't fall in water or mud... but EVENTUALLY we made it to San Jose de Colebrillas at about 1 or 2 in the afternoon. From there, we rode in the back of a truck in the rain for about an hour, and my friend Kelsey and I were also buried under bags and tents... so we didn't get too wet. We arrived in Tambo and were able to catch a bus to Cuenca, where we would stay the night.

We got to our hotel in Cuenca and it was absolutely amazing. Elizabeth and I were so relieved to see the polar opposite of where we had slept the previous night... a King size bed, enough storage space for a family of 5, a gorgeous bathroom with HOT water (somewhat intermittent, but only because everyone was trying to use it at the same time), and two balconies. After one of the hotel workers showed us into the room... we just started to crack up in sheer amazement.

That night, we had obviously run out of food, and we both had no way of getting money (Elizabeth's debit card had expired by the way, whereas mine was stolen... both were in the mail on their way to Ecuador at the time) So we would have to find a fancy restaurant that would accept credit cards. Lonely Planet pointed us in the right direction, as always, to Cafe Eucalyptus. We had a HUGE dinner, after half-starving half-surviving-on-tuna for the past 2 and a half days, with smoked trout salad, Pad Thai, pork and pineapple skewers, and quesadillas, followed by a banana's foster for my dessert, and a chocolate cake for Elizabeth. We watched a live salsa band there for a while and then headed back for an amazing night's sleep.

We woke up the next morning and got the breakfast included with our hotel (sweet!) and then went off to run some Cuenca errands before we had to meet at noon to go to Ingapirca (Incan ruins). The errands consisted of finding a famous panama hat store (sidenote: Panama hats are from Cuenca, Ecuador, not Panama... don't ask me why they call them that... no idea) and getting to internet. At the panama hat store we got Elizabeth's uncle a hat, and got one for Zack, as he hadn't had time to get one when we were in Cuenca before. I also managed to leave my (really Liz Girten's) Lonely Planet somewhere in the store :( and now it's gone forever... unless I go back to Cuenca and they happen to have kept it... Then we found internet, went back for lunch with our group, and went off in a bus to Ingapirca.

Again, time estimates were quite off and we got to Ingapirca right when it was closing. Luckily, our professor convinced them to stay open for one more hour, and we got a sweet tour of some amazing ruins. This was definitely a good way to end a crazy, mostly terrible, trip. We were there right at sunset, and there were so many cool pictures that I took with the sun shining on the monuments/walls/etc.

After making a list of all the quichua words we could remember, we rode in the back of a truck (on a beautiful night, not raining) to Tambo, and had dinner in a little restaurant while we waited for a bus back to Quito. We arrived home in Quito on Sunday morning at about 6:00 am. And so ends my Semana Santa vacation!!!

Whew.