Visiting Loja: Detours On Exit

“Whenever I’m on the verge of leaving a county, a flurry of energy grips me, urging me to explore as many nooks and crannies in the area, lest I let them exist unexperienced forever.” – Old Sean

Planning Detours

So ends my time in Ecuador. 

For the past two months, I’ve made my home in the city of Cuenca, gradually branching out from there by following the Central Valley both north and south along the Andes.  My visa is on the verge of expiration and my rent is nearly up, so I’m making a point to try traveling full time again, this time far more proficient in Spanish mumbling than before. 

I have my teacher,  Sol, to thank for that.  Under her tutelage, I’ve gone from using Si, No and Bueno in every imaginable situation to full sentences and three hour conversations in an entirely foreign language.  And I only sound slightly rediculous.

Thanks Sol.

Packing Up

My second-to-final week in Cuenca was spent… leaving Cuenca.  Finishing my work and Spanish classes, I spent the remainder of my weekday hosting a DnD session with my tabletop game friends from Centro. 

As a parting present, they made me a sort of gift basket, a tiny, light container with dice and game pieces from all the tabletop games we played with one another.  When the party finally wound down, I made one final lunge out into the mountains of Ecuador in the hopes of wandering freely and spotting a new area.  The result was a somewhat impromptu trip to Loja, a city south of Cuenca.

I clambered onto a late bus which followed the usual daunting drive in deep darkness as we wandered through mountains.  A deep chill rolled in and the taillights of the bus showed a caking of white obscurest fog on all sides.  As always, we thundered and trundled over flat patches of roads, past dirt sections cratered with potholes and around heaps of stone, dislodged from sheer, harrowing Andes peaks. 

It was a peaceful night right.  I didn’t sleep through the ride however, since a famed Turkish film, Miracle in Dungeon 7, was playing.  It’s a masterful film and I didn’t need a powerful grasp in Spanish to understand it, so poignant were the emotions displayed onscreen.  I generally don’t like when my public transportation plays videos, since the quality is lacking and I would prefer to focus on my own work and thoughts, but this was a nice exception.

Visiting Loja

Arriving in Loja allowed me a little time to bumble around the tiny bus terminal while I blinked weariness from my eyes.  I eventually found a taxi, which shuttled me to my hostel.  My poor host was utterly unintelligible, so thick was his accent and groggy my temperance. 

However, I settled into my room easily enough, and slept only until 6 AM the following morning, where an unholy, proud pigeon cooed loudly and frequently on my balcony.

Rousing myself, I showered in cold water (the shower and the toilet of my room were in the same “stall”), unlocked my room and scampered downstairs, thin waterproof backpack bounding on my shoulder.  It was a Sunday, and most of central Loja was asleep, prepping for church or quietly opening up.  Very few shops were open, and I was given entire streets to myself for minutes at a time.

Central Loja is very pretty.  The roads are well-maintained, there’s a fair number of parks, the churches are beautifully swept, statues crop up fairly frequently and the tiny morning stalls flutter with knick-knacks of startling color. 

I purchased a snack of bread and marched north, towards Puerta de la Ciudad (City Gate).  Loja has a pair of twin creeks encasing it’s central Old Town which split at the gate entrance. Interestingly, City Gate is the only fortified entrance of it’s type in all of  Ecuador.  Granted, it won’t be stopping many incoming armies (or stubborn militias) but it’s extremely beautiful to look at. 

Basically a thin castle fortification filled with botanical accents and awash in the sound of bubbling water, the gate is beautifully reminiscent of European fortifications.  Within, there is a small art display of modern art and a series of cafes built into the outer wall.  Across the street are murals, thin palms and winding roads. 

In short, it was the most photogenic area in Loja.  Nearby is the very odd boat and sail sculpture, El Barco – Conjuncion del Zamora y Malacatos.  A simple series of pillars with great metal sails billowing out over a narrow creek stands in defiance of a rising sun, providing ample shade at very strange angles. 

Around Central Loja

The rest of my time in Centro Loja was spent walking the city streets, trying small stalls for food.  Loja is very nice, and peaceful to walk around, but I wouldn’t call it an interesting city. 

Vilcabamba is further south and highlights the rustic, free-minded mountain living culture.  Cuenca has more museums, Cajas National Park, points of interest and access to the rest of the country.  Banos Ambato is a adrenaline-junkie-dream mountain-range.  Puyo is heavily influenced by native tribal culture, has access to the Amazon rainforest and surrounding mountains and flaunts a cavalier worker culture.  Quito holds the honor of capital and supercity of Ecuador.  Guayaquil is a crime-riddled mess, but nobody could tell me it’s not an interesting place to thrive (or just survive). 

In the end, Loja is nice, pleasant and kind to walk around.  But not an exceptional place to visit in my opinion.  My time in the Old Town area was spent visiting many of the beautiful churches and parks around here (Parque Central, Inglesia Catolica San Francisco, Parque San Sabastian).  I even wandered down the suprisingly bright and colorful Calle Lourdes, a small, rainbow-leaning shopping street with snacks and unique little shops.

Up the Valley Edge

I eventually made it out of the Central part of Loja and began hiking southward and upward.  Old Town Loja is in a rather intense dip, and the rest of my day would be spent going uphill.  The buildings gradually diminished in quality and the far mountain ridge hosted a flock of windmills rotating lazily over the city. 

I had heard of a hiking trail called Sendero Ecológico Teleférico Loja from a friend, so I forged towards that.  The closest trailhead was embedded within Parque Pucara, which is a bit of a rundown place.  There’s a wall of honeysuckles on the walk up, which hits with a pleasant aroma, but immediately afterward, the area is a jumble of cement, old playground equipment and inversely-well-kept hedges. 

 Sendero Ecológico Teleférico Loja is entirely uphill, either from one side or the other.  The trail is steep and somewhat slippery with slippery patches of mud.  There is a railing for parts of the short hike; a thin sapling of wood nailed into stout pillars, but half the trail has these so broken, they’re virtually unusable.  Where foot traffic hasn’t cleared the area, a thick brush of brown and orange pine needles absolutely blanket the ground, giving each step a springy feel. 

Atop this trail is an odd series of structures, known collectively as Teleferico Loja.  First, a giant metal guitar that roosts sideways, nearly obscured by trees on the opposite side of the trail.  Further along is a wall connecting two castles; one a great rectangle locked shut behind an iron gate, the other an elegant, diminished spire with a spiral staircase leading up the side.

A Return to Parks

When I finally descended the trail, admittedly gasping slightly, I puttered around low town for a while, giving weary glances to my setting.  The area isn’t the best of shape.  Where the central part of Loja is somewhat pretty, clean and well-maintained, the outer parts of the city are in a crumbling state of disrepair, growing more severe the further out I wandered.

I finally grew weary of the constant influx of more buildings and small parks and decided to catch a taxi back to the north.  I completely bypassed Centro and instead attended Parque Recreational Jipiro. 

This park is a great little area.  Being a weekend, the place was fairly crammed with people.  There were a few horses tethered about, munching placidly on grass.  A great stream of deep, muddy water flowed past, burbling groggily.  The foliage is somewhat ragged, but superbly green.  The best part of the park, however, is the cartoonish buildings that dot it’s premise.  All around, there are famous European and Asian structures that are colored a shade too brightly, and slightly balloonish in proportions.  There’s the Kremlin of Moscow, a Chinese temple sitting over a lake, a small, vibrant train pulling kids in a huge loop, a large European-style housing castle, a Thai temple, a Japanese Zen garden dwarfed by it’s counterparts, an Aztec ziggurat and several brightly painted bridges. 

It is, frankly, an extremely amusing place to wander.  There are also traditional Ecuadorian dance performances, where women clutch the edges of specialized dresses into great, sweeping wings and the men keep tempo while wearing shaggy pants of rippling llama fur. 

Snacks abound and many tourists spend their time entertaining and feeding the various waterfowl found on-site.  Slightly further along, the park has more serious accommodations, such as tennis courts, soccer fields and a fairly impressive full-pipe skate park, where a young man was doing plunging dives on a small trick-bike. 

Early Retreat

I originally intended to stay in Loja for a full day at least and possible ride back early on Monday.  However, I found my energy quickly diminished and Loja, while nice, isn’t exactly my top pick for a tourist destination.  I found myself lunch, ate a sinful number of soft-serve coconut-cream ice cream cones, and lodged myself onto a bus for the long ride back. 

However, my time in Ecuador wasn’t quite finished.  My final week was spent neatly uprooting myself from my home.  It may not seem like it, but two months is plenty of time to put down substantial roots. 

I finished up my yoga, martial arts and Spanish classes somewhat sporadically.  More time was spent selling off the possessions I had accumulated, including a bicycle, some whiteboards, several notebooks and workout clothes that wouldn’t fit in my backpack. 

I met with people in Cuenca again and again, sorting out my goodbyes.  First came the farewells to my gaming group, where I introduced a many from the UK to serve as my replacement on the Blue Team. 

Next came farewell to a couple of Austrian friends, spending Austria’s National Day in Café Austria to eat schnitzel and partake in a somber, somewhat rainy happy hour. 

Goodbyes with my lovely Spanish teacher occurred in the astoundingly pleasant Hotel Cruz del Vado which overlooked the city getting struck by sporadic storms and subsequent rainbows. 

Leaving Cuenca

And then time vanished.  I donated my uneaten kitchen foods to people on the streets, poured my pennies and unspent change into the bowl of a mother on my street, packed a bit haphazardly while watching Danger 5 and finally loaded myself onto a bus. 

My original  (and blessedly cheap) plan had been to take a bus to the boarder of Ecuador and Peru, visiting the town of Huaquillas and committing myself to the boarder crossing there, for the sake of entering Tumbes, where I could hop on a sixty or seventy dollar flight to Lima. 

I had cobbled this plan together a few weeks early during a visit to the bus station, where I repeatedly asked a man at the terminal if the land boarder was open and accessible.  I was under the impression it wasn’t but I had heard mixed reports and this action was an enormous potential money-saver. 

However, on a whim, I returned and asked the same question to another three representatives if the land boarder was actually, truly open.

Naturally, all three assured me the answer was no.  To traverse the boarder, I would need to cross it illegally.  That’s one route and plan scuttled. 

As such, I threw up my hands and bought the cheapest, fastest flight ticket I could find leaving Ecuador and entering Peru.  Unfortunately, this required a secondary trip, heading to a supercity I’ve been avoiding for some time now.  I’m not a fan of supercities, and nothing I’ve heard of Quito deeply impresses me.

But often, the dice roll themselves.  So as I write this, I’m on a slow bus to Quito to the north, where I will finally depart Ecuador on Halloween.

So until then,

Best regards and excellent trails,

Old Sean

Written October 30th 2021

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