Thursday (10-23-2008). Loja to Sara Guro. Sara Guro to Cuenca.

Since 9 am on Wednesday I had been incapacitated and primarily unconscious. The turning point happened after whatever had gone rotten inside me was finally purged. By 9 am Thursday, I was up and moving and able to pack for Cuenca. Mathematically, I probably slept roughly 20 of the 24 hours I had been infirm.

I was still very weak, but the worse had clearly passed—so we went on with our travel plans and by 12:30 were on a bus on the way to Sara Guro, a town that carries the name of an indigenous group of people who populate the southern highlands of Ecuador, primarily in the Loja and Azuay provinces.

The women wear black skirts, a colorful blouse and a shawl. The men wear black Capri pants with their hair tied back in a braid. They all wear hats. Their overall attire is coincidentally similar to a stereotypical Austrian, and despite the presence of Austrians and Germans in Cuenca (it´s a primary vacation destination because of its many spas)—there is no actual connection otherwise.

In Sara Guro we wandered around and took a few pictures –






But other than a great view, a really nice park and a shopping strip it wasn´t terribly exciting. We saw more traditionally dressed people on the bus than in the town. Ryan did manage to buy a really nice hand-knit sweater from a local artisan´s shop.

The ride to Cuenca featured many cows milling about the hillsides and towns of wooden homes surrounded by fields. We rode through mountainous deserts and past canyons, all the while watching Raiders of the Lost Ark in Spanish. As we reached a steeper elevation we literally rode above the clouds

until we were roughly 3000 meters above sea-level, extraordinarily close to the stars and the sky was completely clear. You have never seen stars until you have rode through the Andes at night on the way to Cuenca. It is an image that will be burned into my mind for a long time.

When we arrived in Cuenca, we were greeted by a woman in a tan pea-coat who asked us if we needed a place to stay. She directed us to her hostal located in the ritzier part of town very close to the central park. Six bucks a person each night covered us and we were able to walk around and search for dinner much earlier than we thought would be possible. Despite feeling better, I still ate almost nothing the entire day and was only able to stomach a bowl of broth at the restauraunt we stopped at and a cone of limon sherbert ice-cream at Tutto-Freddo.

In this town we did not stick out as gringos, as it is a popular vacation spot. Part of its appeal is the many brilliant cathedrals and the way the buildings are lit at night.


It is a beautiful city, very different from Loja. It´s also filled with much more expensive dining establishments, but if you know how to avoid the tourists’ traps, you can still get a pretty great meal for under three dollars. Cuenca is also known as the ¨Athens of Ecuador¨ because of its huge cultural scene. There are numerous museums ranging from Banco Centro, which is filled with dioramas and information on the diverse indigenous tribes of Ecuador, to an archeological museum with artifacts of the Incans, to a Museum of Modern Art.

We spent our evening wandering around town and then called it a night.