Cuenca and Cajas

Thursday the 14th of October 2010
After about 8,5 hours on the bus, we arrived in Cuenca, one of the most beautiful colonial villages in Ecuador. We quickly found a hostel and enjoyed a long and nice dinner in ‘café Eucalyptus’. Afterwards we decided to go for a short evening walk along Rio Tomebamba. There we ran into Tim, a Belgian guy who shares a house in Cuenca with 5 other Belgians. They’re all making their thesis from the Catholic University of Leuven, in collaboration with the University of Cuenca. The areas of interest are quite different though (engineering, forest management, food industry ea). We sat a while with him in his house and we met the others later in the pub ‘Wunderbar’ where we planned our trip to the National Park of Cajas. First we wanted to skip this park, but when we passed it on our way from Guayaquil to Cuenca, the beautiful scenery made us change our minds.

Friday the 15th of October 2010
On Friday we planned a visit to the historical sites and the markets of Cuenca. The first stop was the cosy hat museum, Barranco. Here we learned everything about the fabrication of Panama hats. By the way, the heads have little connection to Panama, they are a full Ecuadorian product. The term Panama originates from the fact that the hats were exported through Panama.
We were pretty interested in the local market in Cuenca, that much even that we returned to it twice that day. The first time we returned for lunch (1.5$ per person for a big meal…), the second time to buy fruit to prepare our delicious salad for that evening and the next day. Now and then we managed to obtain a better price for the products than initially proposed by the ladies selling their crops. The most impressive landmark in Cuenca, however, is without a doubt the New Cathedral and the beautiful Parque Calderon that is situated right in front of it. The whole town made us think about Italy in a way, with all its squares and churches.
In the afternoon we ran into Maarten en Diewertje, a Belgian couple that we met before in Ecuador, in the Pumpapungo museum. I knew Maarten’s face from somewhere, which is not surprising since he lives in the city next the village I grew up in. From all the exhibitions in the museum, the one on Ecuadorian ethnical groups was most appealing to us. Ecuador is such a small country, yet so diverse in its people (and nature). Especially the Shuar part of the exhibition triggered our attention since we stayed with a Shuar family before, although the Tzantza’s (shrunken skulls) were a little bit scary. In the garden of the museum we further visited some of the Inca ruins you can find in Cuenca.
In the evening we met up with Maarten en Diewertje again for a beer and later we met a bunch of people that once went on a holiday to Ecuador and never returned to their home country, being the US, Germany and Wales. We would have to admit, it is a nice place to live.

Saturday the 16th of October 2010
We woke up early on Saturday to take an early bus to Parque Nacional de Cajas. The driver first dropped us of a little bit too far, but luckily we were picked up by a bus that took a larger group on a private tour. They dropped us of at the starting point of our walk, the Toreador laguna. The view along the trail was absolutely beautiful. The fact that we were constantly walking at an altitude of about 4000m, made it sometimes hard to climb, but it was surely worth it. We passed some magnificent polylepis forests, blossoming cactus and beautiful rock formations. A little bit after lunch time we reached the end of the trail and took a bus back to Cuenca and later via Loja to Vilcabamba.