We had no intention of driving through Colombia, and it is impossible to drive through to Panama from Colombia anyway. The Darien Gap is impassable in any vehicle, although someone has driven through the gap, or rather, has been dragged through with the aid of military vehicles and we don’t know anyone with military vehicles to spare.
We had the afternoon to reach Loja after crossing the Peruvian border, which was not overenthusiastic in terms of distance. As we climbed we came across land slips that sometimes covered half the road. There were obvious signs of previous slips and large potholes in the road where boulders had fallen and bounced, sometimes a couple of times. Then we came across a few cars queuing and a big rockslide that had covered the full width of the road and carried on over the edge and down. An earthmoving machine was trying to shift rocks and debris to clear a path through. Half an hour later it was passable.
We spent the afternoon dodging potholes, ridges and folds in the road surface on hairpin bends with no guardrail and sheer drops. It started to rain as we entered Loja. We thought we had planned our timing to enter Ecuador at the end of the rainy season. Mother Nature had thrown a spanner in the works with an El Nino event. We were caught up in the tail end of one hell of a rainy season, hence all the landslides.
It rained all night in Loja. The drive to Cuenca took ages over shocking roads. We were held up for over an hour as earthmoving machines tackled a mudslide over 200m long and metres deep. The TC slithered all over the place through liquid mud 150mm deep. It was still raining on and off and low cloud occasionally cleared to reveal stunning scenery of precipitous slopes, green slashed by red earth landslips. When unstable loose soil on near vertical slopes meets vast quantities of rainwater the end result is something with the characteristics and substance of self-levelling compound.We were meant to travel twice the distance this day but Cuenca was as far as we could travel with the road conditions. Cuenca is more of a tourist destination than Loja with its UNESCO World Heritage historic centre, colonial buildings and churches and narrow streets. The next day was better with clearer skies and no rain; the river levels had also subsided. Roads were worse but the scenery was amazing. We couldn’t understand why anyone would want to build sleeping policemen across the road entering and through towns when the road into and out of towns was appalling? There is no need to slow anyone down. I’ll qualify that – there is no need to slow down normal minded people.
The other problem with driving through Ecuador is the standard of driving. Bus drivers are manic to the point of murderous, closely followed by bus drivers, taxi drivers and the remaining 95% of the driving Ecuadorian population. We could not think of a reasonable sensible explanation. The Ecuadorian male uses the horn like a verbal battering ram, regards red stop lights and double yellow lines as strictly advisory and the lives of other people as disposable. I use the word male because you see very few female drivers.
Our eventual explanation was the alpha male syndrome. In the early days of the human race, alpha males ruled small groups rather like pack animals do today. Alpha males no longer go around bashing lesser males over the head to assert and reinforce their superiority, except in juvenile gangs maybe. Instead, the lesser educated do the same assertion and reinforcement routine behind the wheel of a car. If another male gets out of their way, they themselves must be the alpha male. It is all about ego self-massage.There are some gigantic egos in South America. The further north you travel the bigger the egos. Fortunately the alpha male syndrome is predominant in particular ethnic groups. Educated South Americans with a strong European or cosmopolitan influence do not carry the pack animal gene. The juvenile stupidity has been overruled by rational thought.
The road between Cuenca and Riobamba was even more interesting. The landscapes just got better and better, the ups steeper and higher, sometimes to the point where we were above dense white cloud. It was like being in a plane. The problem with being above cloud comes when you descend through it. This happened to coincide with extensive high altitude road improvements which entailed temporary narrow mud roads with tape for crash barriers and dodging earthmoving machinery. We could barely see a thing, which may have been an advantage. Some of these drops were vertical and went on for hundreds of meters.
On the descent from these roadworks, we were overtaken by a bus. Less than five minutes later we came across a big rockslide. There was no bus in sight so it had to have happened in the past few minutes. I got out of the TC to find a way through it, taking my camera with me. There was enough space between two huge boulders so I beckoned to Bob to drive on. At that moment loose soil started to cascade down the vertical slope. Bob took the chicane quickly, I managed a quick snap, jumped in the moving car and we didn’t look back.Riobamba marks the start of the Avenue of the Volcanoes - a sprinkling of volcanoes either side of the main highway north to Quito. They are all over 4000m in height. Chimbarazo is the biggest at 6310m and inactive. Volcans Cotopaxi, Antisana, and Gaugau Pichincha are still active and large enough in number to make anyone nervous. The most active – Volcan Tungurahua – had blown it’s top again in the last few days so the road we wanted to take to Banos was closed.
We carried on past Riobamba to Ambato to give us more time the following day to drive the Quiolotoa circuit. In our hotel we read of landslips on the Loja/Cuenca road that had killed people. A lorry had been swept away with the mudslide down the mountainside. There were also photographs of a landslide that had covered four lanes of a highway somewhere. We also learned that the Quilotoa circuit road, a bad road at the best of times but worth the effort, was impassable. Doors were closing behind us and ahead of us. Were we able to make Quito?
It had rained overnight so we thought an early start would give us a better chance if we were held up by landslides. There was more up and down through cloud level. These volcanoes are huge, with bases kilometers wide that sweep up to the heavens, the tops shrouded in cloud at this time of year. To use an overworked word, it was awesome. We were surprised at how green the slopes were with cultivated fields at heady heights. The proximity to the equator mitigated the cold effects of altitude. Looking at these mountains makes you feel obliged to wrap up against cold and the closeness to the equator makes you wonder why it isn’t hotter - quite a logical dilemma.
Quito is just short of La Paz in altitude. It’s a long thread of a city following a narrow valley so navigating through it to find a hotel is difficult. The taxi routine solved all our problems. Quito was the first place where we had been able to plan to meet MG people. Alfonso and his wife took us on a night time tour of the UNESCO World Heritage historic city centre and helped us with sorting out which roads were open or closed. They had a TF. We also met “Just Call Me Al” (used to have an MGA) for an afternoon; he proved to be an absolute hoot. Other members of the Old Car Club based in Quito turned up to look at the TC in the hotel car park.One reason for visiting Quito was the close proximity to the equator. We had driven to the most southerly point in the Americas to Lapataia Bay on Tierro de Fuego. There was no way we were going to drive to within 30kms of the equator and not drive to it and over it. There is a tall stone pillar of a monument that marks the equator, with the equator line marked out in red that runs up to and through the monument. It is impossible to drive close up to the monument to take photographs. Alfonso warned us that we would need special permission to do that.
The weather was with us, not a cloud in the sky and warm; well, 19C. Finding the road to Mitad del Mundo was a challenge. We found the small town and missed the side road to the monument and headed off uphill. We had inadvertently driven over the equator several kilometers back, and crossed it again to go in search of the monument. We pulled into the car park, looked towards the monument and cracked up. It was an emotional moment, we have to admit. The distance we had covered suddenly hit home.
The monument is surrounded by touristy shops and restaurants plus service buildings. We did the usual tourist stuff, up inside the monument, pictures of each of us with feet in different hemispheres like everyone else, etc etc. It wasn’t too important really. We already knew that the monument doesn’t actually sit astride the equator; modern GPS technology shows that the true equator is actually 150m north of the monument. Looking for postcards, we started talking to a shop owner to ask him where the true equator line was. He was clearly of Indian extraction.He took us outside and pointed out a pile of stones just visible on one of the mountain tops. He then showed us an aerial photograph of this mountaintop with a big circular stone wall and a pile of stones slightly off-centre of the wall. He then pointed out the position of a temple built at the top of another hill at the same time by the Indians 1400 years ago. If you draw a line between the two points, guess what? The line marks, to the millimeter, the position of the true equator. With no technology the Indians knew exactly where the Mitad del Mundo was, and yet, with 1700s technology, French scientists got it wrong.
Regardless of these minor discrepancies, the monument was the significant landmark. How could we get the TC close up to the monument for photographs? We looked for an office, found one, asked the bloke if it was possible to get closer to the monument, he wrote on a business card for the security guys to give us 15 minutes for photographs, we took it to the security people who let us in on one of the service roads.
The security people guided us not just close to the monument but right up against the monument. We took photos as fast as we could, as did other tourists, security people and a professional photographer who just happened to be there. What a coup. Monument staff wanted their photos taken against the TC, tourists, children, anyone and everyone. It was a very special moment for the TC with its rear wheels in the southern hemisphere and front wheels in the northern. Just to finish the job properly, we found the Temple of the Sun, a stone replica temple 150 meters away, positioned the TC as accurately as possible and photographed it again. This was a great day in the TC’s history.There was only one road open between Quito and Guayaquil; it was the main heavy transport route that headed west to San Domingo, then turned south through Quevedo and continued on south to Guayaquil. Everything moving between these two points would be on this road. We set off early and within an hour were delayed for over an hour while machinery cleared a landslip. The queue was enormous by the time we could proceed slowly.
The road between Quito and San Domingo is spectacular – a series of hairpins through unbelievable landscape and near vertical slopes, densely vegetated and dripping in waterfalls. Looking backwards uphill and onwards downhill, all we could see were lorries, buses, cars, all nose to tail. Progress was slow. The alpha male does not do slow. It does not do patient. The alpha male does dangerously bad driving. The alpha male rubs the noses of other males in the dirt to assert his superiority. We found out that the next worse thing you can call one of these alpha males is “stupido”. The very worst thing is to call them a “burro” - an ass. They really, really don’t like that.Ecuador is a fantastic country. It has something for everyone – 1600 species of birds for a start. It has a variety of habitats from Amazonian in the east to the Galapagos Islands to the west. The hotels we used were, without exception, excellent. The food is unbelievably good. The landscapes are awesome. The people are terrific, with the exception of alpha males. It has ethnic diversity unparalleled by other South American countries, exemplified by costume, physical appearance and culture.
For the MG enthusiast, Ecuador has something else really special, besides the group in Quito. Jose, you are about to blush scarlet. Ecuador has an MGA 1600 nut called Jose Guerra in Guayaquil, a top flight member of the MG brotherhood/family who worked tirelessly on our behalf to get our TC onto the dock and into a container. Customs the world over are an absolute pain in the butt, staffed by alpha males who wield a pen to terrorise everyone who crosses their path. Guayaquil Customs prove the theory. Jose is what you might call “inventive” when it comes to getting customs officers to actually do their job. Apart from being a lovely, lovely man, he is true to the spirit of MG. We hope very much to see him again.Sadly to report, only one day after writing this we read on the BBC news website of the death of five young British women killed in a bus crash in Ecuador. A lorry hit the bus and ripped the left hand side clean off. The crash was obviously the result of an overtaking manoeuvre. The lorry driver did a runner. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t written about the dreadful driving standards but it has to be said. The crash does not surprise me, and neither does it surprise the rational, thinking safe drivers in Ecuador.
Wherever you are, drive safely. Safety Fast.
