The life of a study abroad student: 18 hours of travel for a 36 hour visit to Cuenca!

This past weekend I went to Cuenca with my friend Liz. Cuenca is Ecuador’s third most important city and it’s the city I drove through with my host family on our way back from Loja. It’s very different from Quito and I really wanted to spend a little more time there. Despite the fact that it’s 9 hours away, we decided to take a short weekend trip. Overnight buses are awesome for trips like this because you don’t lose any time traveling! Although it’s unfortunate if you don’t get much sleep. On the way there, however, I slept surprisingly well. We arrived at around 8:30 am, checked into our hostel, and found a great little organic breakfast place. We packed our bags for the day, including PB&Js for lunch with the stuff we had bought at the grocery store in Quito, and set out with the intention of hitting all the main spots in the city in one day. We first went to the Museum of Pumapungo. Although we knew it was the most important museum in Cuenca, we didn’t realize just how huge it would be. It encompasses everything from religious art, to archaeological artifacts, to ancient ruins, to informational posters about the history of Ecuador, informational posters about every indigenous group in Ecuador, life-size figures displaying various aspects of indigenous life…you get the idea. Although it was interesting, it was never-ending. Despite the fact that we were afraid we wouldn’t have time to do everything we wanted to do, we couldn’t pull ourselves away prematurely. We finally got through everything (I think….there were a few more floors, but we’re pretty sure they were just archives) and went outside to eat our lunch.

We quickly passed by some other ruins that were right nearby, and decided to forgo another museum we had considered since the first one we went to was so comprehensive. We started walking toward the main part of the city. The size of Cuenca seemed perfect to me – not too small, but small enough to walk to most of the important places. We arrived at the Parque Calderon, which is where I got out to take pictures when I stopped through with my family. We went into the New Cathedral, which was gorgeous. It has blue ceramic domes that can be seen from all over the city. After that we were tempted by some delicious ice cream, which we ate in the park. We walked around a little more and tried to find a ceramics store that I had seen in my guidebook, which unfortunately was either closed or nonexistent. We made our way a few blocks down to the Plaza San Francisco, where there is a little street market. We also passed a flower market on the way there. We briefly walked though and continued on to the Plaza San Sebastian. This one was very quiet and peaceful since it’s a little bit out of the center of the city. Unfortunately it seemed as though there was no way to get in to see the church. Although there were certainly a ton more churches to see in Cuenca, we decided we would rather do some of the other things on our list. We stopped by the shop of the most important Panama hat maker, and then we wandered into a market that had about 120 vendors of all different types of handmade crafts. I did some of my gift shopping! At that point we met up with another girl, Charlotte, who my friend Liz met through her volunteering in Quito. Charlotte’s from England and she’s taking a gap year before college. She volunteered in Quito for a while, and now she’s using the money that she saved up over the past few years to travel around Ecuador. She happened to be in Cuenca at the same time, so we met up! She was so incredibly sweet and I’m thrilled that I got to meet her. The three of us took a cab out to the lookout of the city, which was beautiful. We stopped into this workshop/ceramics store that was really beautiful. Unfortunately it’s a little more high-end and expensive—not the kinds of things I would want to pack in my suitcase and risk breaking on the way home! We headed back to our hostel and got cleaned up for dinner. We decided to go back to the place we got ice cream, as we had noticed that the food looked good. It was, although not exactly typical Cuenca food. By the time we were done it was getting late and we were pretty exhausted. We headed back to our hostel and got to bed with plans to get up early and head out to Cajas National Park.

In the morning we packed some more PB&Js, grabbed a quick breakfast, and got a bus that would get us to Cajas in about 45 minutes. At the entrance we got a map and the ranger recommended a route for us. Within the first 5 minutes we were absolutely captivated and knew we didn’t want to leave. It ended up working out perfectly that we took a slightly different route than intended and ended up hiking for about 6 hours instead of the anticipated 3. We were never lost from the trail…there were just a few times where we thought we were somewhere different on the map. The scenery was incredible though so we really didn’t mind, and the weather was perfect! We were over 4,000 meters, and it was pretty chilly at the beginning, but the sun made it really nice a little later on. We were surrounded by hills, mountains, and lakes. At one point we walked through a polylepis forest (they call it the paper tree because it’s used to make paper), and it was so incredibly cool. It’s hard to describe, but the color, texture, and shape of the trees just gave it a really cool feel. Basically the whole day I felt like I was in a magical fairytale land. On our way back we met a really nice Irish couple that had already paid a cab to take them round trip to and from Cuenca, so they gave us a free ride back! We had plans to leave on the bus that night, and luckily our hostel owners were incredibly nice and let us store our stuff there all day even though we had already checked out. We went back to change our clothes and found a good burger place for dinner (somehow when we go out to eat here we always want non-Ecuadorian food…) After dinner we walked around the plaza a bit to kill time. Around 10pm we headed back to the hostel, picked up our bags, and got a cab to the bus station. Unfortunately it was wasn’t as easy to sleep this time, but still much better than taking a bus during the day. I thought I would have passed out after our long day, but after a brief nap I was wide awake. It didn’t help that they kept the radio on all night (I think most buses do that and we just got lucky on the way there). We picked up some more people at around 4:30am, but I think I managed to get a few hours of sleep somewhere on either end. I came home and went to bed for a few more hours, which was lovely. Overall it was a short trip, but I had a great time and I’m really glad we decided to go!