Chilled in Cuenca

After our train ride we arrived in Cuenca on a bus full of tourists and in order to avoid ending up in the same hostel as all of them we ignored the touts at the station and used a recommendation from the guide book...which turned out not to be so great... so we followed a French couple to a nearby hotel with a charming guy on the front desk - not so charming rooms (what would you expect in Hotel Siberia?) but we decided to stay there for the night anyway and look elsewhere in the daylight.

Not such a great idea when the bar opposite started up with a live band at midnight and roadworks commenced at about 7am! Still the guy on the front desk was so friendly and helpful I (Lesley) couldn´t quite tell him that we were moving to a nicer hostel on check out and told him we were leaving the city!

We’d arrived on the last night of the Corpus Cristi festivities, which involved lots of stalls selling sweets and a lot of fireworks, some of them a little too close for comfort when misfiring into the crowd, but a great atmosphere.

The hostel we moved to was quite charming – a lovely tranquil place with garden and hammocks to escape from the city. Cuenca is very different to the other cities we´d experienced in Ecuador. Very beautiful colonial buildings and a laid back feel. We were there for the weekend so museums and tour agencies were largely closed, so we wandered along the river and followed our noses to explore the city. We did decide to hide ourselves away and watch the England Ecuador match in the hostel kitchen, but that was partly through lack of places to watch it in public (though the tv in the local funeral parlour was attracting quite a crowd). Everywhere else there had been numerous cafes and bars showing football at all times (this is a country obsessed!) but on a Sunday morning in a small town, the options were limited.

They were gracious in defeat though, and the tv and radio stations were all broadcasting their thanks to the national team for doing so well, and being among the 16 best teams in the world for some time afterwards!

After a couple of days of relative inactivity we headed out to the Parque Nacional Cajas and a 4 hour walk at the highest altitude we´d encountered yet. It was quite beautiful and very remote - we didn´t see a soul for the duration of the walk, unless you count the llamas, and ate a picnic lunch at 12000 feet by the side of one of the many lakes which supply drinking water to Cuenca.