Cuenca (via Piura and Loja)

The Catedral
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Another day, another bus ride! First it was the overnight bus to Piura in northern Peru. We spent the night there (in beds!) but didn't really do anything (because there didn't seem to be anything TO do). Next day it was a 'quick' eight hour jaunt over the border to Loja, our first stop in Ecuador.

Crossing the border is easy these days - bascially all we needed to do was hop on a bus where they drop you off at the border to take care of all the formalities and then pick you up on the other side. The Lonely Planet actually said that we wouldn't need to even get off the bus (drive through immigration!) but this wasn't actually the case and we had to get out and walk the 10 metres between each country which I think is a much funner way to do it. Once again the border crossing was very relaxed and the Ecuadorian officials were even more relaxed than the Peruvian ones and had South American soapies on in the background!!

Nathan in his Montecristo!
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Our first stop in Ecuador was in Loja which was a nice enough town but not a place that you would probably want to hang around in for more than, let's say 1O minutes!! That's a bit harsh, it actually was a nice little town and we did have cable TV in our room which made up for it being a dump so we got to see Ice Age 2 which brought out the kids in us!

Finally after three days of bus-ing we ended up in Cuenca and we checked into Hotel Milan (thought we would check it out before the wedding!) which was a great base for the 2 days we spent in Cuenca. Cuenca was a great town with lots of colonial buildings. Apparently there is actually a lot of rivalry between Cuenca and Quito as to which is Ecuador's best city (bit of a Sydney/Melbourne thing going on!), I guess we will have to judge for ourselves after seeing Quito.

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Cuenca is also THE place to pick up an authentic Panama Hat, which actually for all you trivia buffs out there is from Ecuador and is really called a Monti Cristo. So feeling the pressure of the occasion I decided to take the plunge and invest in one. Look out for it in the upcoming blogs!

In Cuenca I also decided to take the plunge and try my best to grow something that resembles a beard. I've tried this before without much success but thought I would give it one more go to fit in with the backpacker crowd. A clean shaven backpacker just doesn't fit in! I'm only giving it until the end of our South American trip as I don't want to risk looking a bit shady going through US customs, gotta be careful these days.

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We headed out on the town our last night in Cuenca, and went to dinner and a show at a well known café called Café Eucalyptus. It had a too good to miss $3 cover charge which included four free drinks (for the ladies), the only catch was we had to wait aroung for 3 ½ hours for the show to start. We just made it as Emma got stuck into her drinks in the couple of hours so by the time the show came aroung it was nighty, night (I'm sure it was the altitude!) Anyway it was a fun night, was great to see how the Ecuadorians party. The only thing they didn't tell us was included in the night was the bout of food poisoning that was about to hit us!!