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After the boat got in, we stayed in Coca for a day to send a couple e-mails. We had a couple meetings to plan: Daniel’s friend Xeno is flying to Quito to join us for the next part of the journey and my friend Colin and future business partner (from Earlham) is traveling in Ecuador at the moment!
We also had a bone to pick with MSR corp. whose water filter has been keeping us hydrated and healthy, but had recently broken mysteriously. After a brief period of communication they generously sent a replacement filter to Xeno getting it to him just in time to bring it to us!
I can’t describe how happy we both were to start riding bikes again. It was incredible.
We had ridden in the selva a little before (in Peru), but it was different here. It rained a lot. (Imagine that, rain in the rain forest.) It was winter, we were told, and usually rained every day most of the day. We found a few dry hours to ride in, but usually got wet every day.
The road starts just a few hundred meters above sea level around Coca and reaches just over four thousand right before Quito. Wow. We haven’t seen this much straight climbing in quite awhile. The good news is that it’s almost entirely paved from Coca to Quito. 350 km in total, our map shows 200 km of that as dirt (not true). Phew!
The Trans-Ecuadorian oil pipeline follows this road most of the way. We didn’t see any spills along the way, but saw one on TV soon after arriving in Quito. A quick Google search shows a lot of controversy around this pipeline. Here’s one BBC article that talks about some of the issues.
Due to the rain, we made a habit of staying in roofed football stadiums. What could be better: a huge roof and a dry (non-muddy) floor to sleep on!
One night, a few days after leaving Coca, we didn’t manage to find a soccer stadium before the evening rain started. We were in a small town of just a few houses and a small school. The school had a good-sized overhang in front, however, so we stopped and asked the profesora if we could sleep there. She was quite curious about our journey, so we chatted for a bit and eventually got invited into one of the classrooms to sleep. Luckily it was Friday, so there wouldn’t be classes the following day. She and her sister were the only teachers in that town, we found out, whose school had about 13 students (grades 1-8, all taught together in 1 room). They were from the sierra in the Cotopaxi region, but had been living here in the rain forest and teaching at the school for a year and a half or so. In their home town, there were a lot of teachers and not much work, so a lot of them need to travel.
The next day we weren’t feeling very well at all. Stomachs again. It was probably the water (more precisely, our filter’s inability to clean it). We were graced with about 8 km of downhill at the beginning of the day (this was good and bad, since we had just climbed up a whole lot and had a lot more climbing to go). We passed some beautiful sites, including San Rafael falls and El Reventador (a volcano). Due to our upset stomachs and lack of time, we didn’t make an effort to get close to either.
Around midday, after our downhill ended, the rain started. We didn’t really have the energy or the desire to continue uphill in the rain, so we stopped and setup our tarp on the side of the road. What would we do? It was taking way too long to get to Quito. And we were sick. Should we catch a ride? Naw… Give it one more try tomorrow, at least.
So, we decided to try to find a roof to stay under for the night and then continue on the next day. The place seemded pretty deserted. We had setup our tarp in the frame of a small building that was being built on the side of the road, but there was no sign of civilization except for a small, gated driveway that went off into the woods.
In a few minutes, however, a fellow came walking out of this gated drive. He was carrying a hammer and a huge machete. We soon found out that he was the caretaker for the campamento for the corporation that maintained the road and lived alone just up the driveway. In an hour or so he would catch the bus into El Chaco (a town about an hour away) to see his family, but said we were welcome to stay in his house there in the campamento. That afternoon he was our saviour. He brought us from huddling under our tarp with no hope for a decent place to sleep or feeling any better, to a dry roofed house with a stove to make plenty of chicken broth (he had lots of boullion).
A couple years earlier he had met a few German cyclists in El Chaco and they had stayed with his family for a couple days. He had taken a liking to them (and cyclists in general), apparently, as he just gave us the key to his house, said we were welcome to his food, and went on his way. Wow!
I spent most of the afternoon in my hammock resting. Daniel spent a lot of time in the kitchen cooking.
The next morning we were feeling a good bit better and managed to ride about 45 km into El Chaco. Unfortunately, we had failed to find out where our benefactor lived or how to get in touch with him! The police agreed to put us up in their jail (we had heard of other cyclists doing this, but this was our first time!). We made some caldo de gallina (chicken soup) and rice for dinner and ate with the policemen (although they had their own cook, a local woman they had hired). After talking with them a bit more, our sleeping quarters got upgraded from the dark, wet, and mildewy jail to a couple mattresses on the floor in their dining room.
The next day we road on to Baeza, the last town before the real subida (up hill) towards the pass starts. It kept raining off and on.
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