Sunday (10-12-2008). Montanita to Guayaquil. Guayaquil to Loja, a terrifying bus ride.

Ryan was the first to get up. It took me maybe until around 9:30 to actually move even though he’d burst into the room and insisted that we must be at the bus station at 10 am or the next bus we would be able to catch is at 1 pm which would put us in Guayaquil at 2 pm and then the earliest we’d be in Loja would be 11 pm or 12 am. At the time this sounded terrible; in retrospect—with 20/20 vision we should have both just gone to sleep or gone to the beach and surfed. It turned out to entirely be a travel day. As we headed out of Papaya Hostal, I lamented the fact that with a three to four hour bus ride, we’d have an empty stomach. This changed when we saw a van serendipitously stationed in our path with a sign on it that said “direct to Guayaquil.”

Not only was it six bucks a person to go, they said they’d give us time to eat breakfast. But then they waited and waited and waited until it was totally full of passengers and we didn’t end up leaving until 11:30 am. I was content to knit, but it was still a little aggravating. Especially when we got to Guayaquil and the earliest bus we could get was at 7:45 pm which put us in Loja at 4:15 am and Ryan had to get up at 7 am to teach a class at 8 am. Suck.

In any case, the route ran along side the ocean so it was a lovely view and the day was particularly sunny. The weather at the beach always seems to be the sunniest when you’re leaving. The time in the bus terminal wasn’t terrible because we had Ecuadorian fast food, chilled out and I made a lot more progress on the scarf:

It’s kind of amazing that the most expensive food at the terminal was McDonalds. I ended up ordering a calarmi soup dish that should have come with rice and shrimp from some seafood joint. What I ended up getting was a shrimp omelet with some kind of fish soup. I definitely stated Calamar y Camaron and not Pesca Camaron with huevo, but by the time I got my food I was so hungry that I didn’t care even though the soup had some sort of corn floating around that still had the husk attached.

We had booked an “ejecutive”—direct bus to Loja. This is where things got a little wild. I appreciated that they gave us a ticket to claim my suitcase that we stuck beneath the bus; They were clearly a secure bus company. I didn’t appreciate that they patted every passenger down for weapons and made us stow our backpacks beneath the bus instead of taking it on (it had all my comfort items in it including my contacts case, solution and my glasses). The guy frisking Ryan most definitely grabbed his balls. Then they made everybody check their cell phones. This is possibly the only time in my life that I’ve traveled where I felt like a prissy American. Even though I had my cell phone shut off before I boarded the plane to Ecuador, the notion of parting with it in anyway made me very finicky. I couldn’t grasp why this would be necessary. They stuck a sticker on my cell phone like the one that they had placed on my bag, handed me a ticket, and then they dropped my brand new Samsung slider phone into a black plastic bag. Before we even took off, a man with a strange smile on his face and a video-camera walked down the aisle, documenting each person. If an incident had occurred and all that was left of me was that videotaped image taken in that moment—you would have seen me with an utterly perplexed expression on my face, staring into the camera quizzically. Something like:

The rest of the ride was kind of tainted even though Ryan explained that the company was looking out for everybody’s best interests as people regularly get assaulted on these busses by weapons and there is the possibility that through the use of communicating with a cell phone it could have gotten hijacked. WHAT? Why the hell wouldn’t we have taken a plane? 80 bucks is more but it’s faster and clearly safer. Okay, I wasn’t that p’od but I was really getting paranoid about them taking our cell phones. If anything happened—nobody could call for help. If the whole operation was a hijacking—we’d be royally screwed in everyway possible. Suddenly I understood how Ryan felt the other night when we took the “bus” to Kamala. It’s like a sudden burst of travel panic that could probably happen to anybody.

We slept a good amount of the trip, but I managed to steal glimpses at the scenery including a town called “Inspiracion de Poeta” that had a brightly lit carousel. We passed a lot of forests and banana plantations.

And then we began climbing through the Andes to steeper elevation where the fog thickened and the journey became kind of treacherous to the point that I was ill at ease with my position in the universe as a mortal being. I wasn’t positive, but I was pretty certain that as the bus sped through curvy narrow roads slicked from the rain, up an increasingly steep mountain that we would hydroplane off a cliff. Obviously, I lived to tell the tale—but there were points where I could just barely make out the fact that we were skimming ledges at a pretty ridiculous speed. We kept passing road signs defining the upcoming curve of the road, often featuring 90 degree angles. Bus at night to Loja, Ecuador = BAD idea.

Finally we made it to a point where I could see the lights of Loja which rested in the center of several very large hills—a point of elevation so high that no mosquito nets or malaria pills are necessary—there are no mosquitoes. We made it into town. I got my cell phone back with a somewhat indelible souvenir attached: the sticker they put on it is now a permanent fixture. Ah, well. We made it through the city gates that featured a solider liberating Loja from Spanish rule.

Ryan showed me to the room I’m now staying in. It has a resplendent view of many homes on the mountain side.
In fact, the house that we are staying in is unusually large and has a fantastic roof top that one can stand on and see all of Loja from. We are in the center of town.