Cuenca and into Peru

Right, plenty of drama, for starters the place I wrote the last entry from (Baños) has now been evacuated because the volcano started erupting properly, but that's fine cause I left there about a week ago, had a fairly long day down out of the Andes and into the edge of the Amazon basin, with absolutely awesome views over the rainforest.  Stopped for lunch at some tiny, but nice restaurant and got treated like royalty (this bit of Ecuador is definitely a backwater) had a delicious bbqed fish called tilapia that I'd never heard of before but was a bit like trout.  Probably too long a day on balance, but I'd decided I was going to get to Macas,which ended up resulted in a wee bit of night cycling through the jungle, awesome sunset though, and as soon as the sun had gone down a massive lightning storm kicked off, so that and all the sounds of night life in the jungle certainly made for an atmospheric ride.  Had a shorter ride the next day to Limón which is at the bottom of about 70 km of winding dirt track up to Cuenca, and it is a long way up.  The road to Limón was made altogether more exciting by regular landslides, they were very proud of this road that they'd blasted out of the hills but hadn't made any effort to hold up the sediment, and what with it being a rainforest and all a lot of it collapsed onto the road with the rain, and given that it was largely clay, it was pretty tricky to cycle on.

That said, it was nothing compared to the track up to Cuenca the next day, which was a rough, rocky and steep 4wd track up some impressively vertiginous valleys.  I was struggling for traction on the climbs so let the tyres down a fair bit, fatal mistake as I almost immediately got a pinch flat, and that proved to be the story of the day, the patches didn't really seem to withstand the rocks on the road and started leaking almost as soon as they were on, which resulted in more pinch flats, until eventually I ran out of patches about 30 km short of Cuenca and with a very flat tyre.  Which was incredibly frustrating, at that point there was nothing I could do but sit by the road and wait for a lift.  Ended up waiting until it was almost dark and then some friendly Ecuadorians gave me and the bike a lift in the back of their pickup, although going over the final sections of the road in the back of a pickup was pretty terrifying, especially in the dark, you could see where bits of the track had just fallen away over the side where there was about a thousand metre drop down to the valley floor.

Anyway got to Cuenca and had the next day off, spent most of it looking for replacement inner tubes but did get to see some of colonial architecture it's famous for, not many photos though as the camera was getting cleaned then.  The next day I headed out of the Andes again but this time for the coast and the border with Peru.  Had about 2500 m to lose that day, so it should have been plain sailing downhill all the way, and it almost all was. Everywhere in Ecuador they have these massive roadside billboards declaring how wonderful each new road they've built is, with the year it was 'completed'.  Invariably they still have unpaved sections and are plagued by landslides and cracking from earthquakes, and this one was no exception. About 70 km in to the day there was a particularly creative detour that wound about 15 km up into the mountains and back down again on what can only be described as road made of sand, I have some photos, at some points the sand was sufficiently deep that it was coming in over the top of my cycling shoes if it trod in it.  Suffice to say this made progress somewhat slow, although altogether more interesting.  Anyway, got down to the coast about as it was going dark, managed to get hit on the head by a bat, which was bizarre, but much nicer than being hit by the scooter that took out my front wheel about five minutes later, which was pretty unpleasant, bit of blood but no irreperable damage to the bike, except the front mudguard which is gone now, bent out of shape.  Basically some moron on a scooter decide to shoot the junction (I definitely had right of way, and lights etc) and clearly wasn't looking, and didn't even stop after hitting me, which I guess isn't that surprising, what was pretty unpleasant was that there must have been 20 odd people at the crossroads who saw me get hit (and I was knocked off pretty bad) and noone came to check I was ok, or give me a hand with the bike or anything, which was a pretty horrible experience to take away from my last night in Ecuador.

Anyway found a bed and got some sleep, and headed off to the border nice and early the next morning. The border crossing was a bit of a headache, mostly because Ecuador had decide to site their immigrations post not at the border, nor on the road to the border, but in a town about 5 km from the border in an unsigned concrete box,which took at least an hour to find, but got there in the end. After that I headed down the coast of Peru on incredibly straight, flat roads past what became increasingly arid scrub until I arrived in Mancora which is where I am now, having the morning off in a hostel that feels more like a club 18-30 (it has a swimming pool).  Hopefully camping somewhere on the coast tonight, then into Piura tomorrow before the real desert starts...


Some photos up now.