It’s Feb 08 and next weekend Carnival is coming … Ecuador’s Mardi-Gras…
Four days of festivals, parades, dancing in the streets, festive dress and water throwing… yes balloons filled with water, pans, buckets, bottles and sometimes hoses of water coming at cha. Each province has it’s own celebration and style but the water throwing is everywhere. A mass exodus of people out of the city to the beach was all I needed to know to make the decision to head in the opposite direction.
I haven’t yet been to Quito, the capital of Ecuador so the cooler temperatures, a bus ride thru the mountains and a chance to go to the Otavalo markets just an hour away from Quito sounded good to me. As always in Ecuador though…there’s a hitch..Expect the Unexpected.
A little bit of research showed that there are lots of buses that go to Quito from Guayaquil and usually you just buy a ticket at the bus terminal the day of your journey. Well forgetting that this is Carnival weekend proved interesting.
So there’s this special non-stop bus running only from Guayaquil to Quito but what time it runs is a guess and you need to buy the ticket at bus company location. Figuring on a 9 hour trip…best to get to the bus company early and get going, sounds good huh?
The place is super packed with long lines for ticket purchasers of families and their belongings all buying tickets to Quito via Transporte Ecuador. Finally at the ticket counter…all buses sold out until the 12:45 pm bus.. That just added three hours to the already nine hour trip.
Knowing that the bus will stop at the terminal ..just down the street from here and knowing there is a mall there, might as well grab a taxi and get a coffee at Sweet ‘n Coffee, Ecuador’s Starbucks.
The mall is wall to wall people, line ups of people buying tickets, people with bags of stuff and of course line ups of people at the coffee counter.. oh well..
With all this action thought it was best to get to the bus platform early… ah … but because this ticket wasn’t purchased at this location you need an additional ticket for the right to board the bus at this location… YES… back downstairs thru the mass and to the ticket counter, thank goodness most people were going in the opposite direction..
Finally on the bus at 1:20 pm…this is going to be a long journey in the night..up the mountains in the dark…hummm
The only thing really special or different about this bus was no one standing in the aisles. That’s a good thing, no need to dodge elbows in the ears and babies falling in your lap. But alas no A/C, well for the passengers anyway, Mr Driver and Mr. Conductor shut the door between us and them! We have the windows open but when driving slowing through the towns, those windows became targets for the kids and their water balloons… soon all the windows are closed. The bus very quickly becomes a sauna and just before I faint or throw up… I knock on the diving door and say I am sick ,we need air… the conductor opens the two top roof hatches.
You can feel the fresh air move in and then the conductor closes his door…. the air movement slows down. Some of us open the windows while moving and close them when passing through the towns…but the heat is melting us and for me who has motion sickness I am not fairing all that well.
Oh and just to add colour to this story… crazy lady in the seat behind me is sure to make herself known by dry coughing as loud as possible as often as possible…hey I get being sick but can ya cover your mouth please rather than spraying air borne virus molecules over the back of my neck? I mean inside of this bus is the perfect petri dish for growing cultures!
One stop/bathroom break at about 7:00 pm and off we go…lots of lines of traffic lights winding through the mountains, it’s late so we can have the windows open now… Avatar (in Spanish) is playing on the screen, then a kid’s movie about a pet pig. It’s quiet now, the movies are over and it’s late…. the heat makes you very tired…. so why not blast some mariachi music over the speakers? Let’s just say the woman I was traveling with put a stop to that asap.. She speaks Spanish so they had no trouble understanding her!
We arrive at the north bus terminal in Quito around 11:30 pm.. I felt like I just stepped off a boat! I fall into bed and feel like I am swimming.
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