Almost everyone around me as I write this is asleep, stretched out full-length on the mostly-empty airport seats or nodding over their hand luggage. It’s 1.10am and I am at the gate for the flight to Easter Island. Just over an hour ago Katie and I said our goodbyes for the time being in a nice hostel near Kennedy Park in Miraflores, and the sharpness of that is still cold and near.
When last we spoke on these pages, Katie and I were coming back from the Galapagos and we had four days in Ecuador with no clear plan as to how to use them. In the end we went south, to Banos. Karl, our motorbike-riding friend from Peru, had recommended it strongly, and at three hours from Quito it was within easy reach. The only problem was that it’s notoriously common for people to be relieved of a few of their belongings on the bus to Banos, and given my recent run of loss and larceny I was unwilling to chance it. On top of that we were tired from all the early-morning starts and motion-interrupted nights on the boat. So we checked into the relatively upscale Hotel San Francisco in the old town part of Quito, and had some much-needed R&R.
We had dinner in a place that was recommended by both the hotel and the guidebook, but was in fact the very definition of beige forgetability. After that we just had time to make it to an English-language bookshop that didn’t shut until 6.30pm, by coincidence very close to our old hostel. It was drizzling a little but we didn’t pay too much attention. We should have. By the time the taxi dropped us off the rain was falling in streams that were practically continuous, heavy and soaking. We were wet to the skin in moments, and I finally understood the purpose and glory of a rain poncho. And when we found the bookshop, it had closed up early. Anyway. It took a few minutes to get a taxi back to the San Francisco, and it was a great relief to get warm and dry again and hang up the dripping clothes.
The following morning we packed the bare essentials into backpacks and left our rucksacks in the safe keeping of the hotel. The bus station in Quito is towards the south edge of the city, and architecturally resembles an airport more than anything else, though one where little of the budget was reserved for aesthetics and they got a really good deal on concrete. We hit an annoying window between the very early buses to Banos and the afternoon buses, and so had a few hours to kill. We were almost the only foreigners there, and there wasn’t much to do to pass the time. The bus was supposed to leave from either bay 26 or 28; in the event it arrived at bay 27, and left within 20 minutes of the official time, which I understand is pretty good.
It didn’t take long to slide out of Quito. There was a major two-lane motorway south, and it was hypnotic to stare out the window and watch the towns and villages and occasional city slip by. The light of Ecuador is more golden than at home, and the greens of the plants a deeper, almost glowing colour. About half way there we got caught in a rainy-season downpour that rattled off the top of the bus, similar to the night before. We were in a large town at that point – I don’t have the map with me to check the name – but the streets turned almost immediately to shallow rivers. People skipped and jumped through it as best they could, but everyone was soaked. Buses coming the other way created waves of spray two metres wide on each side. It’s serious rain.
The front part of the bus is partitioned off just behind the driver’s seat, and there is also a seat for an assistant driver up there. Whenever we passed through a settlement of any kind, the bus would slow down and the assistant would hop out shouting ‘Banos! Banos! Banos!’ rapidly, and pick up anyone who wanted to go there. For those slow-downs or occasional stops, local hawkers took the opportunity to come on board selling water, Coke, Inca Cola, corn, a baked bread thing, sandwiches, chips, fruit and probably many other things I have forgotten. If their transactions were not complete before the bus sped up again, they would just ride along for a bit and then hop off down the road, probably catching another bus back. There was such an easy routine about it that I deeply suspect some sort of kick-back system is in place.
Sharp-eyed Katie managed to spot the street our hostel was on as we came into Banos, so we walked back there from the bus station, pleasantly unburdened by our normal large rucksacks. The place was the called the Princesa Maria, a blue building on a corner. To get in the front gate you reach your hand through the bars and press the button to release the gate lock, which is a questionable form of security through obscurity. But we had no problems during our stay there.
On that first evening we went out for a walk around to see what might be seen, and I tried to get a poncho, which turned out to be harder than I thought and I didn’t manage to find one. What we did find though was an Indiana Jones hat, and it even fits my extra-large head. It is sitting beside me as I write this. I am very pleased.
Banos sits in a valley bordered on all sides by steep, high mountains, the tops of which are often lost in cloud. They are densely covered in vegetation. There are houses scattered on the hills here and there, making me think there is not much in the way of planning permission, and large greenhouses are common. The ground on which the greenhouses sit is so steep that from the level of the town it looks almost as though you are seeing them from above. You can walk from one end of the town to the other in 15 minutes or so. In the centre is a square with a small park and a clock tower, and the clock showed ten past two for the entirety of the time we were there. One of the trees in the park has a tree-house in it, about one storey off the ground, and it seemed to be a popular place to play for the local kids.
To the south of the town is a massive volcano. You can’t actually see it from the town level, or at least you couldn’t on the days when we were there (though we did get one glimpse of it, explained later). And every now and then it erupts – twice in the late 90s, once since, many times before that. Painted on the streets are giant blue arrows that show the evacuation route to take should it erupt again, and in the tourist information place they give you a flyer saying what to do should it blow. The advice is to wear a hat and breathe through a wet handkerchief while getting the hell out of Dodge.
For our first full day we decided to trek up one of the hills to where there is a large cross, a place called Bella Vista, or ‘good view’. The trailhead was just off one of the streets in the town, and after only a minute or two it felt we had the mountain to ourselves. It was steep and the town fell away quickly below is. I led the way, puffing and sweating like a badly-tuned steam engine. Katie had very little trouble getting up.
The views were excellent, though the site itself was in disrepair – wooden steps were broken, litter was everywhere, graffiti covered every possible receiving surface, and the cross itself was protected by a high metal fence. We stayed a while and looked out over the mountains and Banos. For one brief moment the clouds parted and we saw the volcano, hulking and huge and topped in snow. I would love to be able to climb up there, but there are many smaller achievements between here and there should I ever be able to do so.
In the spirit of adventure we decided to go down a different trail to the one we came up. I should note that the map we had, which we got from the tourist office, was not so much a map as an illustration. On it, the trail up and the trail we chose to go down looked much the same length. This did not turns out to be the case in real life. At all. The trail we walked up was a narrow path through the jungle; the trail we walked down was the normal road, so people in cars and vans and trucks passed by and looked at us curiously.
It was still very pleasant though until we started to encounter the dogs. The first bunch were yappy little cowards, and when I took a step towards them they stepped back. The next set were larger. We remembered Karl’s approach and went straight for the stones. The sound of the stones hitting off each other as we picked them up was enough to have the dogs retreating. A little further on I picked up the sturdiest stick I could find, though I suspect it would have broken had I actually hit anything with it. On we went, and we seemed to encounter dog after dog after dog. We could hear the yip yip yip that meant a small dog or the booming bark of the bigger ones. I got progressively more nervous. The dogs seemed to sense our fear. Sometimes there were people outside, and they kept the dogs in check. And most of the biggest dogs were behind fences or chained. But some came close and barked and barked, though the stick seemed to do its job when I waved it around.
At one point there must have been ten dogs barking between the groups ahead of us and the groups behind us, and we christened the whole run Dog Alley. I was mighty glad to get back into the town proper, which came at the end of probably two straight miles of uphill walking past the pooches. Oddly enough when I got back into the town a friendly dog came up to me and kept looking at the stick as though wanting me to throw it. How differently the same things can be interpreted.
That evening we went out with the intention of going to the famous baths of Banos (the name of the town in Spanish actually means ‘baths’), but ended up settled in a nice place and had a few drinks instead.  But the following morning though we were still up relatively early. We had a rather unsatisfactory breakfast which was nominally of crepes but actually based almost entirely on salt and chocolate, and then we rented two mountain bikes, got a map that was of the same dubious scale as the hiking trails, and went on our merry way out of the town in the baking heat of midday. The rental place did their best to find a helmet for me, but they are not accustomed to tectonic-scale skulls such as mine. So my helmet tended to make its way slowly up my head and then tilt sideways, and ultimately served a largely decorative function.
We took the road that leads ultimately to Puyo, about 60km distant, and on the way passes several waterfalls. We intended to follow it to Machay, which is about a third of the way to Puyo, and then get a bus back. Most of that route is downhill from Banos, and so for much of the time we got to sit back and freewheel and look down on the river twisting along the valley floor, the vertiginous green hills on either side, the sun bathing the whole thing in that glorious glowing light. It was super.
Sometimes there were hills we had to labour up, and occasionally there were tunnels. The first tunnel we had to cycle through, but for the rest there were either carefully constructed mountain-bike roads around the tunnelled hill, or there was a dirt trail. Often on the biking trails there were stalls set up where you could buy water and sweets and nuts and what not, and at one area there were quite a few of these and a lot of people gathered around. It turned out that the principle activity of that spot was ‘punting’, an Ecuadorian spin on bungee jumping. Essentially you get tied to a bridge with a slightly elastic cord, then you jump off the bridge backwards and swing over and back underneath for a while until you are pulled back up. We saw a guy do it, and it looks terrifying. You would need to put immense trust into how the operators take care of the equipment.
When we got to Machay we stopped at a roadside place selling drinks and snacks. For one dollar you could go down and see the Machay waterfall, which was not visible from the road. We could see from the outdoor balcony where we were sitting that it would involve quite a long descent, almost to the level of the river below, and we were tired from the 22km on the road. But we decided to go down. The path switched over and back and then turned into steps, so steep was the grade, but then finally levelled out.
And then we saw the waterfall. It falls from maybe 40m, flowing down to join the river proper. Its sound is an endless, changeless roaring, powerful rather than angry. The water has ground out a circular pool over the aeons, and from where the falling water hits the pool spray rushes out in circles, like visible shockwaves. You can feel it on your face from 20 metres away, the same effect as a helicopter landing. And because of the spray in the air and the shining sun, a circular rainbow forms at the bottom of the waterfall, clearly visible in its arc. It’s breathtakingly, wonderfully beautiful. We stayed there for a long time, sitting in the shade and watching it, and watching the reactions of people as they came around the corner and saw it. I seem to be accumulating a store of memories of places of such beauty that I want them to be visible to me always, fresh and clear in my mind.
The climb back up was hard for me, easy for Katie, but caused no lasting discomfort for either of us. There were no buses going towards Banos at the time we happened to be looking for one, but a man with an open-backed truck pulled up and offered us a lift for two dollars each. There were two long benches down either side of the truck bed and beside the cab there was a canvas roof to keep off the sun or rain. We guessed that the driver must cruise up and down that road looking for people in just our situation. We agreed to the fare, he secured the bikes on the purpose-built wooden half-door at the back, we hopped in and sat on the benches, and we were off.
It was a great feeling to sit in the back of the truck and watch the road we had cycled fall away effortlessly behind us. There was just enough danger to make it interesting but not enough to feel afraid. I felt I was really travelling, doing what I have so long dreamed of.
That evening we went for dinner in a place called Café Good, which is a rip-off of another café called Café Hood, which is owned by a guy called Ray Hood. The rip-off version is actually much better, oddly, and I had a steak there of the kind I dream about in idle hungry moments, as good as I’ve ever had anywhere. Entertainingly there was a baby shower going on in the restaurant for the first while we were there, and there was much noise and excitement and oohs and aahs of various volumes and durations as the presents were opened. It was almost all women that were there, and they posed for the sort of group photographs that will be treasured in the years to come.
We finally went to the baths on our last morning in Quito, getting there early enough that they weren’t too packed. It was a similar deal to Peru, but with the mountains forming an up-close backdrop and a waterfall close enough that we could hear it. One of the baths was so hot I could only stay in it for a few minutes – I think that one was 42C – but we felt great after.
Early in the day we were approached on the street by a Danish woman who owned a café, and she gave us her sales pitch, and it was excellent. So we went there for breakfast and the owner was even more charmingly eccentric than her brief street antics would have indicated. She told us that she once met a person whose family had a huge diamond business, and they had told her that if they ever started selling diamonds in South America that would get her to be their representative. The way she told it though took five minutes or so. The food, happily, was excellent, as was the coffee.
We were happy enough leaving Banos on the bus back to Quito because we had had such a pleasant few days of new things and adventure. On arrival in the capital we went straight to our old hostel and picked up my credit card, which Dad had couriered over, and I was muchly relieved to get it. The American Express advance was starting to look a bit threadbare.
From there we went to the bookshop around the corner that sold English books, which had previously been the cause of our soaking in the rainy-season rain. We had arrived in Banos with very little to read and we had scoured the town for somewhere to buy English books, but no such place existed. So once we were back in Quito we were suffering from what Katie called ‘book starvation’, and each of us bought several. The place was run by an English guy who had been there for a few decades, and we had a good chat with him. When I paid I was charged the full value of the books, but when Katie paid she got a discount.
‘I don’t give discounts to the guys,’ the owner said, with a straight face.
‘I would have asked for one, but I lost my nerve at the crucial moment,’ I answered.
A moment later, I happened to glance down at the children’s section that was right on front of me, and I saw a copy of Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I think I actually gasped. I picked it up and tried to explain that I hadn’t seen the book since I was 10 or so, that Dad had read it to me many times as a child, that I have loved it beyond almost any other book I have ever read, even up to the present day. I may have managed to get some of that across. I held it up and said, ‘Can I have this as my discount then?’ And the owner seemed happy to agree. So I even got it for free. I have since read it, and I could write a long post here on nothing but that book. Katie said later that maybe the book was Quito’s way of being nice to me after the unfortunate loss of my wallet, and I choose to believe that is true.
By eight o’clock in the evening we were well settled in our unexceptional new hostel in Quito, and we decided to go out for a walk around. We didn’t get very far. The streets were almost deserted, and anyone who was out stared at us as though wondering what we were doing out at night. Every shop and business was closed up, heavy shutters over the doors, windows barred. The street lights were weak and far apart, the streets beneath gloomy and dull, with the few people who were out moving through hazy dust. I have never in my life felt such a sense of threat, and I was delighted to put a locked door between us and the outside world as quickly as possible.
The next morning we flew from Quito to Lima, and then we had the rather interesting realisation that Katie’s flight was not, as it should be, later in the afternoon. It was in fact the following day. I had become confused – I booked my flight to Easter Island for February 2, but it’s at 3am on Feb 2 so really it’s the night of Feb 1. Katie’s flight should have been the afternoon of Feb 1, rather than Feb 2.
D’oh. So we ended up with a final day in Lima. We re-lived our taxi ride from a month ago, when we were so excited to be arriving in South America. We walked around Kennedy Park again, and we had dinner in the same restaurant with the chess tables beside it (which funnily enough was recommended to us by the people in the hostel). The hours slid by peacefully and enjoyably, and when midnight came my taxi was outside to take me to the airport for the Easter Island flight, and I had to leave Katie there to have one last night in Lima and get the flight home the following evening on her own. It was a parting far more sorrowful than sweet.
I have written the last of this on Easter Island. This blog is my only record of the travel now, as it was too much duplication to keep a hand-written diary as well, hence the length of the posts. I have written of my first day here also, and most likely at this post and that one will go up together once I have internet access on my latop again. Until then, adieu.
