Goodbye Peru... Hello Ecuador!

After our amazing trek we made our way back to Cuzco via train and got a room at Loki for the night.  We woke up early and spent some time on the web.  Then wondered around the city and decided to book a ticket to Ecuador. With a few hours left to spare we walked a few blocks to the local San Pedro Market to sample fresh fruit juice, artisan bread, and local cheeses. For about 5$ we bought a bag of 7 small baguettes, an avocado, a few tomatoes, a half a pound of Andean cheese, 4 passion fruits, half a kilo of grapes, a bag of mini bananas, and four fresh squeezed smoothies. Just enough food to keep us full for our 30 hours of bus rides to the boarder. We went back to the hostel and said goodbye to our friends and departed for Ecuador. We will spare you the uneventful details of our 30+ hour bus ride. It was filled with lots of reading, terrible dubbed movies, and enough  traditional Peruvian music to drive you crazy.

After arriving at the boarder, being led to two very sketchy border patrol offices on both the Peruvian and Ecuadorian side, we got our passports stamped and got on yet another bus to Machala (our least favorite place we have been to yet).  Machala wasn’t just gross and loud, but boring!  We searched for a decent hostel and found an overpriced place in the center.  We then searched for a place to eat and learned that all of the eateries were not serving any food for reasons beyond our understanding.  We settled on a mediocre Chinese restaurant.  Anyways to spare you from anymore boring details we went to bed early and got on a bus to the colonial town of Cuenca.  We checked into a hostel called El Cafecito (the little coffee) and had a pretty delicious lunch there with our first REAL (non instant) coffee since arriving in South America. Don’t let their vicinity to Colombia fool you, Peru and Ecuador struggle when it comes to serving a drinkable cup of coffee. El Cafecito was a really cute hostel with clean rooms, a hot shower, and an extensive menu of pretty good food. But their best attribute has to be their understanding for good coffee. After checking in, eating our first decent meal in days, and getting our caffeine fix, we headed out into the streets of Cuenca to explore what the city had to offer. We found a pretty cool old church and rows of colonial architecture, but after still being a little ‘bus-lagged’ we ended up having a few beers at a hookah bar and watched a number of outrageous Bollywood music videos. We had dinner at a nice, hard to find and slightly overpriced, restaurant called La Vina and then went out for ice cream. The next day we decided we had seen enough of the small colonial town and hopped on a bus to Montanita, a small “surfer” town on the west coast.