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Vilcabamba, Ecuador
4° 15' S 79° 15' W
Jan 19, 2006 23:38
Distance 155km

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Other entries in Vilcabamba

The not so ruinous Ruinas

Text written in: English

Somebody has to wake first and do the fake stretching thing, maybe cough, to remind the others that it's knocking on seven, we have breakfast to demolish and the taxi will be here in ten. I do it, eventually, and am met with a chorus of similarly faked coughs and yawns, as everyone 'just wakes up'. There's only one shower for seven people, so rather than fight or queue for thirteen seconds of water each, we do the decent thing and go dirty for the day. It's still a mad rush to tear Finnish girl away from her no-doubt fascinating conversation on shutter-speeds with Slovenian guy, and we jog to the corner, sandals a-slapping to hail a Lada. A Lada whose boot (trunk, if you insist) opens vis-a-vis a screwdriver (Philips-head), whose luggag space is equivalent to that of a unicycle and whose passenger seat promptly collapses once Finnish girl clambers in, rucksack atop her. Well, she'll have to stay that way until the station, as there's simplynomoretime. We're four, with German chica, and she's got the smarts on a two-dollar reduction on the bus fare, and good to her word she gets us all on for six bucks. She's also been telling us about this crazy hippy scheme called Hospitality Club, whereby you sign up on the web, state whether you have a spare room/couch in your house and then look for similar people in the next town you visit, on the assumption that you will at some stage in the future return the favour to another traveller. She's got free accommodation sorted until Lima, and it sounds like a pretty nice plan, though some mean people are bound to mess it up for everyone else.

The road to Lojas, where we will split from the eurolasses, is as gorgeous a highway as any we've travelled heretofore, though the photos below do very little justice to that (does anyone have any tips for shooting landscapes so they don't just look like photos of hills in the distance?) and we pass through a charming old-school village en route, where the men wear longshorts and red neck-ponchos, like a whole village of Charles Charlie Charleses. It's drizzling on the way to Vilcabamba, which goes against its reputation as a mystical faerie village with a rain-free microclimate, where everyone lives to a hundred and fifty. The town has long held a reputation as a place where the folk live on into eternity, thanks to the clean air and the spring water. This is patently not true, and the so-called geriatrics are most likely just shrivelled teenagers with bus-passes, but the air is clean enough and the water is wet and watery. Arriving at the bus stop, we had a suden attack of the lonelies, as the Royston Vaseyish size and quietness of the place brought back recent memories of abandoned hamlets in Lasso, but this was soon eased with the arrival of a charming lady with a prospectus for Las Ruinas de Quimara, offerring a double-double room with skeet nets, swimming pool, sauna, jacuzzi, turkish baths, breakfast, bikes and internet all for six bucks apiece. We had scrambled under the truck's tarpaulin before she had got as far as 'jacuzzi' and were pulling into the gates of paradise within minutes. We spent three glorious days relaxing and enjoying all the goodies on offer, making a half-hearted attempt to cycle somewhere on the almost-free bikes (they insisted they were free, for a one-time down payment of a dollar, likewise with internet access), but giving up very quickly, as in order to go anywhere scenic from Vilcabamba, as Yazz will tell you, the only way is up. We met there a chilled-out chileno, who was actually Anglo-American of Irish descent, a Hungarian lass on her first week in South America, already holding down a job in the bar and getting to grips with Spanish grammar (some holiday! :) ), and a French girl, taking time out from here stressful six-hour weeks as an Erasmus student in Santiago, whose path we would cross at least once more on our journey.

Suitably relaxed, refreshed and recharged, we left in the dead of night for Peru, via Lojas, to a nauseating soundtrack of reggaeton.