The border crossing from Colombia to Ecuador would be the last crossing of my second big journey. But first I met my mum in Ipiales in Colombia. The only reason to go there was “El Santuario de las Lajas”, a white-tip church in a canyon, and it was truly magnificent. Fascinating to me is the way, people practice church there. Children are laughing, and mothers are nursing their babies during the mass – to me it looks less serious and livelier, than the way I know church. Two nights were more than enough in this ice cold and grey town. Time to get out of there and join the Venezuelans in the 500m long waiting line at the border. Many left their country because of the though living conditions in Venezuela at the moment.
Our first stop in Ecuador was Cotacachi, close to the lagoon Cuicocha. It’s a pretty town, known for their leather wear. One day walked around the lagoon, and mum was fascinated from the local flora – we had some differences if we would stop at every flower, or only at every second one. Mum won, we stopped at EVERY flower!
A long day on the bus and we arrived in Latacunga. The lovely lady from our hotel recommended a local plate for dinner at a restaurant called Mama Negra. At first, we were hesitating to enter the place, but since it was recommendation, we tried. We should have trusted our gut feelings. I think we found the most tasteless decorated restaurant in South America and in my opinion the worst food as well. Dry, toasted corn, white cooked corn, fried pork belly, fried other pork – uuuh, but the empanadas were good – eat these or go for pizza in Latacunga 😉
It could only get better, and it did! We visited the close by, local market in Saquisili, tried tons of incredibly delicious local food, a ton of blackberries and bought alpaca scarfs and woven blankets – no idea how to fit all in backpacks.
Next day we took the bus to the famous lagoon Quilatoa. We arrived there at 11.30am. Locals told us that we could either walk down to the lagoon or walk around the crater. Around would take us 3h quick, 5h long – so exactly the time to catch the bus back to Latacunga. It was a beautiful hike, stunning! The lake was shimmering in different shades of blue and along the crater were purple and yellow flowers all the way. We even met a group of sheep. However, about half way around we were at 4h and it looked like there was no way we would make it in time and mum had already the “You seriously did it again – face” (remember, Costa Rica?) and was stubbornly sitting down, not moving any further. I forgot one more time that hiking at 3500m requires some adjustment. But lucky as we are, some local kids were hanging out at a hut – and had a motorbike with them. They were happy to earn some extra $$ and mum got a ride back to the bus. The penalty of god? There was only one place on the bike and I had to run the rest, to make it to the same bus. What’s life without a little trouble, hey?
From there we went to Alausi for a train ride along the devil’s nose. The train covers 500m of elevation on only 12km, impressive engineering achievement for the 19th century. However, the story is far more interesting than sitting on the train.
In Cuenca we met Susi and Alfred, an Ecuadorian and her husband from Austria. He gave us a tour of Cuenca and the surrounding villages etc. which are famous for its silver jewelry, fine braided Panama/Ecuador hats and leather. I got stuck with a couple ladies braiding hats and selling veggies – I didn’t understand much, but enough to know that they were already making wedding plans for their grandson and me.
Cuenca and the region are famous for the hand braided hats. They are commonly known as “Panama Hat”, because the thousands of workers of the Panama Canal around the year 1900 used to wear them, and when they were shipped to Europe they came in boxes with the Panama Canal label on it. The credit for this famous hat goes to Ecuador.
Also close to Cuenca is the National Park “Las Cajas”, because of it’s many small lakes. It way a unique flora up there, again different to the one at the other lagoons. This park was as well on about 4000m, mum was having some height issues again and was acting like she had two bottles of red wine before: “Antonia, look, the flowers are moving” – VERY INTERESTING side effects of height! I walked to the peak on my own, not trusting her motoric skills 😉
Then we left the mountains. Within three hours we crossed several vegetation zones and arrived at sea level.
Jutonia 