Nariz del Diablo, Cuenca, Poisonous Amarucuna

So Tuesday, I left Quito and made my way down to Riobamba...

So I crashed in a hotel next to the train station and woke up bright and early to get down to Alausí to catch the tourist train through the Nariz del Diablo. Back in olden times, the steam locomotive chugged its way over the steep slopes between Riobamba and Guayaquil using a number of switchbacks, in which the train would kind of pull off to the side, switch the tracks and keep ascending BACKWARDS. And so on, over this mountain. Now the tracks to Guayaquil are broken, the locomotive engine is broken, and locals have no use for the track. But the engineering was so famous that they can plop a few train cars on the track and charge foreigners a ridiculous seven dollars to jaunt over the old Nariz del Diablo (Devil´s Nose) segment.

On the train, I met a German girl named Eva Maria who was traveling in my direction so we have joined forces and our now traveling together.

After the Devil´s Nose train adventure, we headed through thick fog and rain to Cuenca, the beautiful colonial city in the south. We found an amazing hotel with orthopedic mattresses and, once again with my mad bargaining skills, I was able to get us the room for 6 bucks each per night. Sweet!

Cuenca is an amazing city. Unlike most of Ecuador, it is very clean! It looks like an old European city. We walked around and looked at all the old churches, some of them built with stones from the nearby old Incan palace that had been the birthplace of one of the last emperors of the Incas. Those Spanish conquistadors just had no respect! We went in the huge Cathedral of Immaculate Conception, the Museum of Modern Art. We went to the Turi overlook to see the city from a high hill. Then it was off to the Central Bank Museum to walk through exhibits on all the indigenous cultures of Ecuador. I was stopped by an American woman and her daughter who wanted the inside info on Shuar culture after they overheard me talking to Eva about my time in the rainforest. They couldn´t believe that the shrunken heads in front of us really were people (well, used to be, before they were decapitated and their heads shrunk to tiny proportions through tsantsa)! Although the Shuar mostly shrunk the heads of their enemies the Achuar, rarely of white people, because white people were considered inferior, and it was not worth the effort of shrinking their heads.

After the fun with the shrunken heads, we headed outside to the ruins of Tomebamba, the old Incan palace. The site was called Pumapungu... I was very excited because I could translate the Quichuan... It means Gateway of the Lion. Yay, my mad Quichua skills!

Then, we went to the Amaru Zoo, a place full of poisonous snakes and frogs (I thought of Jessica!)... And, guess what??? I translated again. I knew Amaru means Snake in Quichua... Look at me go... I am a Quichua freak! We saw lots of snakes at the Snake Zoo, obviously... anacondas, a few X snakes, like I had seen in the Shuar village, and even a rainbow boa constrictor like the huge one I saw at the Hola Vida Reserve. The X can kill you in ten minutes! Now, THAT is venom! The Shuar have an antidote.

After that, I finally found flashcards! Yay! I had looked all over Ecuador. They don´t have a word for flashcards, so I tried to explain, and they kept trying to give me sticky Post-it notes. Finally, at an English bookstore, of course, they had something kind of like flashcards so now I can start practicing my Quichua vocabulary without reading the dictionary.

So it was an extremely busy day today!! Tomorrow we will be heading to Ingapirca, the ancient ruins... and I have to have to have to finish my applications... so I will update soon!

Quichua lesson of the day:
Amaru snake
Misi cat
Allcu dog
(-cuna is plural, so misicuna means cats, for example)

Go impress your friends!!