Sunday 20th November, from Banos to El Tumbo

We left the camp ground and Rita and Mango to drive through five tunnels and through Banos. The jungle scenery changed slowly from jungle to dry alpine scenery. 

We passed Chimborazo, a snow capped volcano.

The dry environment continued all day as we passed through various cities on a long drive day through Rio Bamba, Cajabamba, Calta and Alausi as we drove southwards.

My first South American railway, a station and a level crossing and although we travelled parallel to the tracks for several hours, I saw no trains.

 

And on the road we overtook a red vocho.

We pulled off the road at lunchtime for a truck lunch. Basically eating a freshly prepared salad in glorious surroundings.

Some of the surrounding lunch time scenery.

At El Tumbo  which was where we were going to camp, we left the main road and climbed into the mountains. We were going to see Ingapirca. 

This was an excavated ruin of the Canaries. a civilisation that predated the Inca.s until Inca expansion  swamped the CAnari’s/. The Canari remains all had round walls. The Inca’s built there walls with a trapezoid cross section, i.e. narrowing towards the top and their doorways were a similar shape. The Canari’s built with vertical walls but rounded.

Back in El Tumbo, we set up camp in the grounds of an out of town hostelry, set in pleasant landscaped gardens, hot showers, flat pitches for the tents, a bar an

I was on cook group duties so together with Shannon and Christine we cooked chilli con carne and rice.

It is an irony that we were in Ecuador, a country that straddles the equator and just four weeks away from the southern hemisphere summer solstice and we had one of the coldest nights so far on the trip with a frost falling overnight. We all had a bad night as we geo up in the night to put on extra layers. Admittedly we were camping at about 3,000m.

Not surprisingly we were all awake early in the morning well before the appointed breakfast time to get our hands around a hot cup of tea before heading of for a two day stopover in Cuenca.