Day 41 Sunday 4th November 2018: Presidential Send Off

Mike writes:

Our last evening in Ecuador was spent in Cuenca, an attractive city which showed us that not all of Ecuador is shabby and run down and populated by depressed campesinos wearing funny hats. The city is an UNESCO World Heritage Site and famed for its Tomebamba waterfront bars and restaurants, Panama hats and of course the obligatory cathedral. In fact it has two.

Cuenca was in festival mode last night, no doubt in our honour. The great and the good of Ecuador were flooding into the city to bid us farewell. This motorcade included assorted dignitaries guarded as always by machine gun toting soldiers who were incongruously being driven in a clapped out little Suzuki saloon.

El Presidente – the splendidly forenamed Lenin Moreno – waved us farewell.

Despite some half hearted protestors chanting slogans – disappointingly not baton charged, tear gassed or mown down by Gatling gun fire – the President launched into a lengthy speech. I concede that my command of Spanish is such that I may have missed some of the finer points but I’m pretty sure that he was expressing the heart felt thanks of the people of Ecuador to us for visiting their country and boosting both the millinery and brewing sectors of the economy.

We graciously accepted his good wishes and left shortly after to continue bolstering the economy, focused this time on the hospitality sector down by the Tomebamba river. We enjoyed another guinea pig free meal over which we reviewed our short time in Ecuador.

Ecuador certainly has surprised us.  They seem to have cracked civil engineering – the roads (with a few exceptions) are magnificent, twisting their way around hillsides at incredible altitudes. They’ve been equally ambitious with the rail network, at least as far we could tell from our short trip on the Devil’s Nose.

They’ve also mastered hat manufacturing although they really need to recruit a few of the Cartagena hat vendors if they want to maximise their revenue. Enthusiasm isn’t part of the Ecuadorian sales technique regardless of the product being promoted. Most of the indigenous population look miserable and that’s before I’ve pointed a camera at them.

Despite their outwardly glum appearance, almost everyone has been friendly and helpful as soon as we’ve spoken to them. Ecuador feels like the least threatening country we’ve visited so far. Let’s see how Peru compares.

Avis were as efficient as always when we dropped off the Toyota this morning. They had obviously been forewarned about Chris’s stature in the rental car world. We then had a short flight back to Quito and another longer one south to Lima, in between which there was another hat shopping opportunity.

The more adventurous among us (ie Doug only) are planning to swim with sea lions tomorrow while the rest of the team check out Lima and take delivery of the vehicle which we will use for the next 2,800 miles to Mendoza.