La Nariz del Diablo, the Steepest Train Descent in the World

On the first part of the journey, I was looking at all the life.  There were plants and birds and rocks and things.  If you missed that, go back and read the previous post!  Or listen to the song, either one will work.

Heading out from Banos to Alausi, we decided to double up on the GPS.  Using the maps in the Garmin and using the free, offline app Maps.me, we thought we might have less of an opportunity to end up on those dirt roads that Bruce hates (and I not so secretly love).

No such luck.  Both gadgets sent us on a left-hand turn off the main road not far outside Banos.  This one turned into a dirt road only a kilometer or two down it, so we turned around and went back to the main road.  We knew that road would take us to Ambato because it was the way we came in.  We also knew we could go from Ambato to Riobamba, which was on our way to Alausi.  So, we ignored both GPS programs until they agreed to go that direction.

The scenery was beautiful, with the patchwork quilt patterns of the fields, colorful grains growing, and the hand waving hello to everyone!

 After several hours, we finally made it to Alausi.

Perfect timing, too.  Just as we got downhill enough to be in the middle of town and found a hostal for the next couple of nights, the brakes let us know we needed new pads.  So, we checked in and walked around until we found a mechanic who did brakes.  Twenty-five dollars and 30 minutes later, we had new pads.  Good thing we did it at the top of the hill.  With less than 1/8 inch of pads left, we might not have made it home!  Alausi is also higher in altitude than Banos, and it was beginning to get a little uncomfortable for me since I forgot to bring long pants!  We now need to keep the following in the Geezermobile:  Emergency bathing suit in case there is an unexpected water opportunity (which happened on the cost of Ecuador), emergency sneakers and socks in case of an unexpected hiking opportunity (which happened in Central America) , and now emergency long pants in case we go somewhere chilly and I'm in shorts.

After settling in and getting the brake pads replaced, we walked around town a bit.  It's small, but tidy and beautiful. About half of the people wore traditional dress instead of the more modern clothes.  It amazes me how the women can carry just about anything in that little shawl tied around their shoulders!

As in other parts of Ecuador, shoe shine benches are busy.

We found the train station, too.  This shiny, red train looks like the one that goes on the full route between Guayaquil and Quito, lasting 4 nights.

We were only doing the short Devil's Nose segment from Alausi to Simbambe and back.

It's a good thing I got our tickets online.  When we talked to the gentleman at the station to confirm it was the right place, he told us the train was sold out for both rides the following day.  If you plan to take this trip, definitely book your tickets in advance.  They do two trips per day except holidays, when they do three.  They sell out in advance.  While you technically can buy tickets at the station, they are rarely available a week out.  When we went, tickets were $30 per person.  Highly expensive for the average Ecuadorean, but they sell out two trains a day, three on holidays.

At the station while waiting for your train, you can eat in the outdoor cafe, get your passport stamped, or browse the gift shop.  There are neat trinkets, and one of the ladies selling ponchos was spinning alpaca wool into yarn for weaving.  The smashed penny machine was broken, though.

The cars are comfortable with nice seats, and each car has its personal bilingual guide.

When you get your tickets, try to get window seats where they are doubled.  The tracks are so steep that the train faces the same direction going up and down.  The single row is mostly (but not always) on the side by the mountain.  The best views are out the other window.  On the trip down, it really doesn't matter, though.  The conductor encouraged everybody to walk back and forth to make sure nobody missed any of the views.  This is what our car looked like during much of the trip (at least what I saw when I wasn't hanging out the window).

The entire Ecuadorean rail system is considered the most difficult in the world to have built because of the rugged terrain over which it passes to connect Quito and the "high Andes" with the coastal city of Guayaquil.  This section, including the mountain it runs down, were renamed the Nariz del Diablo because of the high number of workers who lost their lives building it.  It makes a 500 meter (almost 1650 feet) change in elevation in a mere 12 kilometers (just under 7.5 miles).  By some accounts it is the steepest train track in the world.  It looks very steep to me.  We're going to that river.  We've already been descending a portion of the way.

The train makes this change in elevation by the use of some uncommon switchbacks.  Instead of tight turns or roundabouts, the train pulls onto a section of track.  A worker jumps off the train and flips the switch on the track.  The locomotive (which can drive either forward or backward), reverses direction and sends the train back the other direction.  When pulling out of the station in Alausi, the locomotive is pulling the train.  Once you pass through the first switchback, the locomotive is pushing the train.  With each switchback, you change from being pushed to pulled and viceversa.

This is a couple of switchbacks we will be navigating.

This is pulling out of a switchback on our way down the mountain.

When pushing the train, the engineer can't see where he's going.  Workers on each car help him out by giving hand signals that are passed from car to car to let the engineer know what's coming up.  I'm pretty glad our engineer had driving this route a few times!

The scenery was breathtaking.  I'll post a few shots, but you'll need to go to our Facebook page to see them all and the other videos.  https://www.facebook.com/travelingeezers.  Just so you know, we can put just about any of our pix on mugs, notepads, etc.  Just let us know, and we'll tell you if that picture is suitable for what you want.  We have a supplier for just about any novelty item you may want with one of our pictures. I haven't gone through all of the photos from this trip to see which ones are suitable for blowing up onto canvas, large prints for framing, putting on shower curtains, blankets or other large items.  I hope to have them done in a day or so, and I'm hoping that some of the stills pulled from video are of good enough quality for that.

Once at the Sibambe station, there are llamas, horses, artisans, dancers, cooks, and a little museum up a whoooole lot of steps.  I can't tell you anything about the museum!  I had an excellent fritada (pork) for lunch.  Then, we walked around a bit.  The mountain is now referred to as the Devil's Nose, and the section of track on this side of the mountain (where the switchbacks traverse) is the bridge of the nose while the tip of the nose points up into the air.  The museum is that little yellow building.

The alpacas don't look very excited about my hugs.

This horse peeked out at me.  I guess he was looking back to see if I was looking back to see if he was looking back to see if he was looking back at me.  He was cuter than Buck Owens ever dared to be!

The river gets this unique color from the sulfur that runs in it.

There were also dancers at the station.  They danced a couple of dances for us to watch.  One of them was a dance with ribbons around a pole.  It was really neat the way they wove and unwove the ribbon without even looking very closely!

After they danced for the tourists, they danced with the tourists until they called us back to the train.

The ride home was awesome.  Good thing we got the brake pads changed!  This is the first time Bruce has been able to really acknowledge that when crossing the Andes, you do actually go downhill.  Generally, it feels like we go uphill both ways!  This trip, it was obvious we were going downhill most of the way back to the coast.

 

As usual, we were set on a very interesting path.  We eventually realized we were actually supposed to be on the paved road up the hill that was parallel to the gravel road we were on.  We weren't far from town, though, so we turned around and searched until we found it.  That gravel road did take us to this awesome bridge!

The road we were supposed to be on was mostly paved - except this spot where the stream ran across it.  After crossing, it was a small waterfall down the side of the cliff.

I don't think this was an intentional or controlled burn.

It was above this cloud cover that stayed beside us most of the way down the mountain.  Unfortunately, it didn't stay beside us all the way.  We've been in worse.  We could see through this cloud.

We finally made it to flat ground, though.  When we made it to Guayaquil, there was a detour taking us off of our normal route and right to the iguana statue.  We have finally seen all three: al loro (by City Mall), el mono (heading to the malecon from the airport), and now la iguana (wherever we were).

The entire trip was awesome!  I recommend both parts of it to everyone!

Puerto Lopez to Banos and Puyo

As some of you know, we will soon be leaving Ecuador because Travelin' Geezers must be travelin'.  We will be travelin' back here in the future, though.  Still much more to see and many friends to visit.

We decided to take another road trip in Ecuador before jetting.  There were two more things I reaaaaaly wanted to see before our next trip - a monkey rescue in Puyo and the Nariz del Diablo train ride.  So, we took a week and drove to each.  We had planned it the week before, but a pipe in our house in Puerto Lopez sprung a leak, so we hung around to get that fixed.  Once we were convinced it was fixed and the concrete walls just needed to dry, we took off.

The drive out to to the monkey rescue was beautiful.  The GPS took us an interesting route.  As we got further and further into the mountains and farther from any towns, the road became a dirt road again.  That wouldn't have been a problem if it hadn't been along the side of a mountain with a steep drop-off on the outside.

Visibility was good, though, and the views were excellent.

Bruce was not happy about the road.  Definitely some tight switchbacks, and the dirt shifted under us reducing traction.  At least there was no asphalt falling away, though sometimes there was barely enough room for our little spark between the side of the mountain and the cliff.  In this picture, the brown squiggle down there is the part of the road we've already passed.

Just as we started seeing pavement, we also turned a curve and saw this breathtaking view of the volcano Chimborazo with it's glacier.

There were lots of abandoned buildings on this mountain, too.

After finding pavement and following the road heading toward Chimborazo, the GPS turned us back off the main road.  Again, lovely scenery.

About 30 km down the road, we came to this:

End of the road.  So, we turned around and went back.  Picked up some folks going to bring their livestock back.  I never expected to fit 4 adults, one baby, and a small dog in the Spark with all of our travelin' stuff packed in, too.  But we did.

We had some pleasant conversation and dropped them off by their animals so they could herd them back home.  I just love the way livestock grazes by the road here - except when they stray out into the road.

We got to Banos just before dark and spent the night at the Hostal Rossy.  Comfortable, clean room with good wi-fi and scalding hot water in the shower.  The water was so hot, I had to turn on some cold, and that's not a common occurrence for me.  Garage across the street for our tiny Geezermobile.

Puyo is a little town in the Orient (Amazon basin), just outside Banos.  We had been to Banos before when our daughter came down to visit two years ago.  Bruce wasn't feeling well during that trip, so Chrissy and I did most of the sightseeing.  This time, Bruce felt good enough to check out the waterfalls, so we did the Ruta de Cascadas and on to Puyo.

There are seven tunnels between Banos and Puyo, and Bruce hates every one.  In most of them, the tunnel walls are left natural with some bracing periodically.  They are vented for the water to come through.  It was a beautiful, sunny day in Banos, but dark and rainy in the tunnels.

Yet another dirt road leads to the Rescate de Monos in Puyo.

In Ecuador, it is illegal to own wild animals.  If they catch you, they confiscate the animal.  If the animal can be released back into the wild, that's what happens. If not, the animal is sent to a zoo or rescue.  Even while at the zoo or rescue, they try to release the animals.  Here, at the Puyo rescue, many of the rescued monkeys roam free and simply stay because they want to.  Only the ones that cannot be released for some reason are kept in pens.  If you happen to come at a time when the released monkeys are close to the pens, they will often come up to you and initiate contact.  That didn't happen to us.  Only two monkeys were by the house, and they were a little shy and standoffish.

It was a lovely enclosure.  The pens, as a general rule, were large and lush.  Some of the smaller pens had mesh tubes that allowed those monkeys to travel all over the place.

In one of these tubes, a family with a baby was playing around.

Daddy didn't seem to be very pleased about our presence.  He followed us all the way to the end of his tube.  Every time we turned to look at him, he showed us how big his teeth were!

I definitely recommend going.  The cost is $3 per person, and you might get lucky and have some monkeys to play with.  They say they are thieves, so be careful about carrying things in your pockets.

After a day of looking at waterfalls and monkeys, you have to eat.  Cuy (guinea pig) is considered a delicacy in the area, and I had to try it.  I was highly underimpressed.  What little meat existed was stringy and kind of tasteless.  The skin was too tough to chew.  I was glad Bruce got a larger than his usually chicken meal, with soup salad and rice.  I have friends who tell me it just wasn't prepared right, but I don't think I'll give it another try.

By the time I got around to booking our train tickets, the day I wanted was all booked up, so we had an extra day.  I had done the Swing at the End of the World and the Paillon del Diablo with Chrissy the last time we were here (feel free to view the pix on our Facebook page), but I had not seen the zoos in San Martin, kind of like a suburb of Banos.  So, we decided to check out the zoo.  There are actually two zoos, across the street from each other.  One is exotic animals that have been brought in from other continents.  This zoo has poor recent reviews, talking about the poor enclosures and sores on the lion's face.  The other is animals indigenous to Ecuador.  Not being from here myself, the animals indigenous to Ecuador are pretty exotic to me, and I hate seeing animals not held well.  I also don't want to contribute to their poor treatment.  So, we opted for the Ecuador animal zoo.  It was awesome.

The first major enclosure we saw was the Andean condor.  I have seen many condor enclosures, and always wondered why they don't want to let these awesome birds fly.  There is NEVER enough room for them to spread their wings and fly.  All I have ever seen captive condors do is sit on a perch or walk/hop over/down to food they are given.  Maybe a short little stint back up to the perch.  Not so at this zoo.  They have a large gorge walled off on two sides, retaining walls on the top of the gorge, and fencing over the top.  This enclosure is DA BOMB! The birds had plenty of room to hide from people if they were feeling a bit shy, to jump around and play with each other.  While watching one hop around from rock to rock, I turned on the movie function to film the other who had been mimicking him.  Instead of hopping, this bird turned and flew in my direction.  It is AWESOME to watch this bird fly!

Almost all of the enclosures were in good shape.  Some of the monkey enclosures could have used more grass instead of concrete, but they did have lots of enrichment activities, and the animals all looked healthy.  Like most Ecuadorean zoos, the emphasis is on care of the animal, not providing the public with good photo ops, so most of my photos are through wire mesh and aren't very good.  The zoo is built on the side of a mountain, though.  So we got our exercise for the week and then some.  Plus, some awesome shots of the Rio Pastaza and a bear hug!

It's getting late, and I still have lots to talk about on this trip, so I'm going to split this post in half.  Sleep well, and maybe I'll get you to Alausi and on the tren Nariz del Diablo in the next couple of days.  It is an amazing ride!