A Gem in the Southern Highlands

After our exhausting, twisty, multi-leg bus ride down from Latacunga, we finally arrived in Cuenca, a city of 300,000+ people famous for its cathedral and universities. We ended up at Pepe’s House, a small hotel named after its proprietor’s cat, Pepe. In fact, there are usually three cats living there, but it turns out that while we were visiting, there was only one, as the others were away on vacation in Columbia.

Fortunately for us, Pepe’s House was located right in the middle of the historic center of the city, so exploring the beautiful parks and old buildings was quite easy. Cuenca has a number of lovely public squares and parks, including the central Parque Calderon.

Around Parque Calderon is a shmancy arcade and a number of rather grand buildings that look like they could be straight out of London or Paris.

I quite liked this little old passage we found off Plaza San Francisco…

And in some places, the plazas and sidewalks were quite decorative.

Of course, the center of all this is the Cathedral. From the front, the Cathedral is fine, but doesn’t seem that much more dramatically beautiful than any other. It’s large, but not huge. And…it seems oddly out of proportion. In fact, you may notice that the bell towers at the front are quite short. It turns out that as they were constructing the Cathedral, they realized that they’d misjudged some things and that the construction would not support the full weight of the planned towers, so they were truncated. This realization occurred when the building cracked right down the middle, a defect that survives to this day.

What really makes the Cathedral a treat is the bright blue tiled domes across the roof. As part of a walking tour we joined, we went up to the top of the Cathedral for some great views, and on a couple of occasions we wandered through the “gardens” of the Cathedral which were quite festive at night and included some decent restaurants.

The old town ends at the Rio Tomebamba. Walking along the river was a nice retreat from the busy city streets. The banks were littered with students hanging out in small groups and couples enjoying the scenery. Interestingly, many of the buildings on the “historic center” side of the river, were not historic at all–there was clearly some fancy new stuff developed here, drifting down over several stories from the city above to the river below.

One of the major bridges over the river had recently been the site of a feminist intervention, calling attention to the issue of femicide in Ecuador. Our walking tour guide, a sociology student, was one of the people who had painted it.

There were several other examples of fascinating street art, from the political, to the beautiful, to the just plain strange littered about Cuenca. The first one here was my favorite (despite the grafitti and splash of blue paint over it). Notice how the guitar player is actually sitting on the (painted) lintel over an actual doorway. Nicely done anonymous artist.

One of the more amusing bits of art we came across were the light fixtures in the Raymipampa restaurant, a classic place in one of the old building overlooking Parque Calderon. Also, a decent lunch spot for anyone heading that way.

One craft that seems dear to people in Cuenca is the art of hat-making. The “Panama hat” is actually from Cuenca. The name evidently comes from the fact that the hats made in Ecuador started to be shipped to other points in South America later in the 1800s. Eventually they made their way to the US, but always came through the shipping center of Panama. So, they were mis-named “Panama hats” because of a stop in their transit, not their place of origin. On our walking tour we visited a hat repair shop and later we stopped by the Museo del Sombrero, where we learned some about hat-making techniques from one of the workers in this history museum/workshop/store.

Another highlight from our walking tour was the Mercado 10 de Agosto where we examined medicinal herbs and learned all about the important powers bottled in the perfumes of Ecuador. (Even our level-headed sociologist tour guide said she occasionally used these perfumes when pursuing a date, aiming for good grades, or trying to land a job.)

Across from the Cathedral, a group of cloistered nuns lives behind the flower market, which sprang up as a place for people to buy offerings for El Señor de la Justicia (you know, Jesus) whose altar inside is adorned with rose petals and messages of gratitude for the changes he’s brought to people’s lives. Another thing you can buy there is Agua de Pítimas, a special herbal infusion made by the nuns that is said to have healing powers. It did taste kinda medicinal. I’ll give it that. The flavor was…different, but not exactly a pleasant beverage.

We visited two big museums in Cuenca. One was the Museo Pumapungo, an archeological and ethnographic museum built adjoining the site of the ruins of an Inca temple, part of the ancient city of Tomebamba. You could walk right out the back door of the museum into a miniature archaeological park…

The main floor of the museum had some great, well thought out exhibits, but the second floor looked like it hadn’t been updated in 30 years and was borderline offensive in its ethnographic representations. One of the better sections presented artifacts from the region around Cuenca from 3000 years ago up to through the time of Tawantinsuyu (aka the Inca Empire).

Another exhibit presented items from the museum’s collection that were being reexamined by archaeologists–things about which the interpretations were changing or that presented unsolved mysteries.

One fun bit in that exhibit invited visitors to act like archaeologists, trying to piece together loose bits of pottery to form a small statue.

Elsewhere, the museum’s upstairs presented outdated representations and information about a number of cultures from around Ecuador. I mean, it was kind of interesting to see some of the traditional houses of different regions, but the weird statues of the people were probably a little unnecessary. The most interesting part of this section examined (and had some actual information about) the Shuar culture, most famous for their practice of head shrinking–a way to harness the energy of their enemies.

The museum is owned by the national bank, so it wasn’t surprising that the basement contained a history of Ecuadorian money from the colonial era to liberation from Spain to the economic crisis of the late 1990s and the resulting dollarization of the economy.

Speaking of which–how have I not mentioned this yet? Beginning in the year 2000, Ecuador formally adopted the dollar as its currency, replacing the sucre (named after the liberation hero Antonio Jose de Sucre) as a means of fighting inflation. This caused many people to lose their entire savings and was a disaster for many in the short term. By now it seems to just be accepted, but it has had a major impact on Ecuador’s recent history.

It was interesting traveling there since it didn’t require any thinking to translate prices into dollars. No dividing by 3 or dropping a whole bunch of zeroes and multiplying by 7 or anything to figure out what the prices were–they were just dollars! Of course, this system was not without its flaws. There were plenty of $20 bills available, but it was hard to find anything smaller. The Ecuadorian government prints their own $1 coins which are widely available (and which we had to make sure to spend before going home!), but finding a $5 or $10 bill was a challenge. This meant that paying for things that cost less than $20 often meant some struggle on one or both sides to get the correct change. I got 16 dollar coins once as change for a cab ride. So, yeah, dollars in Ecuador. Weird.

Anyhow, back to Cuenca…

The other major museum we visited there was the Museo Municipal de Arte Moderno. It’s not a huge museum. In fact, most Latin American art museums aren’t nearly as extensive as most in the US or Europe. They instead tend to focus on small frequently rotating exhibits, often highlighting regional artists. This museum had a few different exhibits. One presented a retrospective of works by Manuel Rendon Seminario. I found his geometric style unusual and engrossing.

The larger exhibit there examined “el delirio de la alteridad” (the delirium of otherness? of altered reality?). In the courtyard at the center of the exhibit, there were a series of quotes that set the stage for the works inside.

Rough Translations:

  • Susan Sontag: “The only interesting replies are those that destroy the questions.”
  • Rene Magritte: “Everything that we see obscures something else.”
  • Friedrich Engels: “Everything real in human history will become irrational in the process of time.”
  • Salvador Dali: “There is nothing more surreal than reality.”
  • Paul Eluard: “There are other worlds, but they are in this one.”

(Side note: I considered looking up these quotes in their original languages, or in English, but I decided to go with my own translations from Spanish. Feel free to call me out if I did it poorly, but at least now you know what I was thinking as I wandered around this exhibit!)

The exhibit itself featured a variety of trippy art…

Probably the strangest part was this room where we encountered a class of children led by a very enthusiastic teacher (or docent?)

Eventually, we passed through this insane passageway from some altered reality. The best part was actually the tiny door at the far end. It was about knee high.

But once we passed through this, we came to a series of rooms that invited the viewer to become part of the experience, placing us inside life-size representations of several of the paintings from the exhibit.

So, not an overwhelmingly huge museum, but nicely curated and creative.

The other major thing we did in Cuenca was a long walk to El Mirador de Turi. To get there, we passed through the University of Cuenca and across a large chunk of the “new” part of the city, on the far side of the Rio Tomebamba. To get there, we, in fact, crossed two more rivers, the Rio Yanuncay and Rio Tarqui, the first quite lovely, and the second a narrow channel hidden away in a residential neighborhood.

As we got closer to the Mirador de Turi, this came up on google maps, making me laugh.

Why isn’t hell busier? Are all the people dying these days just angelic? Sorry, it was just too weird not to share.

After crossing a good chunk of city, a steep ascent awaited us. We had been warned not to walk. We ignored that warning. But after a week hiking at altitude, we didn’t do too bad. We went slowly, but without too much huffing and puffing.

At the top, the Mirador de Turi provides a great view over the city and to a number of the surrounding peaks. An amphitheater there looks like it would be a great place for concerts and such, but we were there on a random Wednesday, so no luck there.

After wandering the area for a bit (and witnessing a funeral procession coming out of the church there), we ended up at the bar advertised on google, Hell’s. It was pretty empty, but we enjoyed a nice canelazo (spiked cider) and played a game while watching the view as the sun went down. It was a pretty sweet spot, and it was quite cool when the cathedral started to really shine later in the evening. Overall, a nice way to end our quick visit to this lovely city.

From Cuenca we had to head down to the coastal metropolis of Guayaquil where we planned to catch a flight out to the Galapagos Islands. I have to thank the tourist agency we spoke with in Quito for this. We had thought we’d need to return to Quito to fly to the Galapagos, but they pointed out that (a) Guayaquil was much closer, and (b) if we hired a driver (rather than taking a bus) we could easily stop in Parque Nacional Cajas on the way. Cajas had been on my list of places I hoped to go, and this seemed like a great way to slip it into our itinerary.

I found it interesting reading about Cajas. First of all, the name sounds like it means “boxes” in Spanish, but it seems that it may actually come from a Kichwa word that means “cold.” This makes sense because…it is. The park is deep in the mountains and is dotted with lakes everywhere, giving it a foggy high altitude chill.

Cajas again features the paramo type of landscape, but it is also famous for the rare polylepis trees that grow there. Sometimes these trees are called “quinuas” though they have no relation to the grain quinoa. They have an interesting papery bark and in some cases looked quite inviting, but against the dark clouds and the lakes they appeared to be more haunting.

Unfortunately, our driver said we only had an hour to stop, so my initial plan for a 2 to 3 hour hike was nixed. Instead, we made a quick loop of the Laguna Toreadora and then a very brief stop at the Tres Cruces overlook. Despite the truncated visit, it was still incredibly beautiful, and a nice way to say goodbye to the mountains.

And it was a fast goodbye. From there, the road to Guayaquil plunges down at a steep and unrelenting angle for the next hour or two of travel. Most of this part was in a deep fog that made it hard to see more than a few feet in front of the car. On top of that, there were several landslides that covered large chunks of the road, usually forcing us to drive in the oncoming traffic lanes. There were no signs saying when these were coming up and no attempt to make lanes for the downhill traffic–you just had to hope the uphill traffic was far enough to their side of the road to make it work. This wouldn’t have been too bad, except that the driver seemed oblivious to the dangers and just chugged along at normal highway speeds through the fog and oncoming traffic. It was a bit terrifying.

As we came down to the coast, the landscape suddenly flattened and was overtaken by endless fields of bananas. So many bananas.

We spent only the evening in Guayaquil, so didn’t get to see much. We did, of course, go to the mall near our hotel, because what else are we supposed to do in a Latin American city? But it looked like an interesting city, spread throughout the delta of the Rio Guayas. The little we did see reminded me of Miami, but maybe that was just the steamy heat.

Anyhow, next stop, Galapagos.

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