from Quito to Mancora, going down the Panamericana

¡Hola!

We are back in Mancora, on the beach in the North of Peru, where we intend to spend our last week of holidays in the warm weather ; indeed it seems that Mancora is the only place in South America where temperatures are pleasant day AND night!
In Quito it was warm during the day and cool at night, because despite being a few miles from the Equator we were still in the Andes. We took the cable car up to the top of volcano Pichincha, at 4100 metres high, from where there was a fantastic view over the city and the surrounding volcanoes. It was surprising to see just how green and fertile this altitude valley seemed. The country as a whole striked us as looking very lush and green (maybe it has something to do with the fact that despite it being officially the dry season, it rains all the time!)
From Quito we took a bus, the first of a series of hair-raising rides (what’s wrong with bus drivers in Ecuador, I ask you?!). At the start we were the only ones on the bus, but as soon as we passed the bus station gates a crowd of people got on. They were seemingly waiting outside to avoid having to pay the 0,20$ departure tax ( indeed the currency in Ecuador has been the US dollar since September 2000, which has made life very expensive for most people). We spent the next hour driving around Quito’s various neighbourhoods at snail speed to try and get more passengers ( until the central aisle was full of people standing, including elderly people and mothers with babies…) before launching ourselves onto the winding roads of the cordillera, reaching speeds we wouldn’t dare do in a car on a motorway in Europe, and overtaking 4WDs with ease, despite the vehicles coming the other way….
Anyway, we reached the small town of Baños alive, after having spotted on the way the lower half of the Cotopaxi volcano (the top half was in the cloud). In Baños we were so close to the Tungurahua volcano (which has showed signs of activities this year, but thankfully nothing while we were there) that we couldn’t actually see it! Our main reason for coming to Baños was to do a 60km bike ride down to Puyo, which would have allowed us to take a glimpse of the Amazonian rainforest and to ride through the town of Shell, which was described in a book that we had read at the beginning of our trip (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins, 2004). The author also mentioned a dam near Baños that he had helped to get built, as part of his role as an “EHM” , when he was paid by the United States to “utilize international financial organizations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks.” They had pretended to help Ecuador with its development to then utilise this debt to turn the country into a slave of the USA.
The book is very interesting and eye-opening and we recommend it ; it is the confession of a man who was part of that system and came to regret it, and has now exposed the workings of it to the world. He explains how the oil interest in the Amazon region of Ecuador has led to both human, ecological and economical disasters for the country, whose poorest people only receive about 3% of the oil revenue.
There I close this political bracket to come back to our bike ride… well, it was a nightmare… That day it was raining cats and dogs, but we had motivation. We set off on our rented bikes (after testing them) and reached the dam mentioned in the book. Five minutes later, Pete’s bike’s chain comes off. We put it back and carry on, and five minutes later the same thing happens. This scenario repeats itself again a couple of times before we decide to give up and return to Baños, sodden and full of grease… so there you go, we never reached Shell or the Amazonian rainforest, maybe next time!
From Baños we went to Cuenca, further South, on another crazy bus, and spent a day strolling between the churches with their colourful tiled domes, the flower stalls and the toquilla straw hat makers (“panama” hats to you and me).
It was cold and rainy there too, so we decided that we had had enough of this weather and of these kamikaze bus drivers and that we were going to go back to Peru.
So we got on another kamikaze bus to the Ecuadorian border post, had our passports stamped, then took a taxi to the bridge that marks the border with Peru. From there we got a mototaxi (tuk-tuk!) to the Peruvian border post, and after the formalities we found a collective taxi to take us to Tumbes, from where we were meant to find buses to Mancora. The driver sat us at the front, next to him, and started questioning us on topics as eclectic as our ages and jobs, the Bible, homosexual marriage, the channel tunnel and women at work! In Tumbes we found another collective taxi going to Mancora, and it left once they had managed to stuff 22 people in a 15 seater minibus. We reached our destination at nightfall, with the feeling that we had lived an adventure!