Cuenca: Otra vez

Our roadside restaurant

The Inca Ruins

At the National Park

I took a trip to Cuenca (a beautiful city in Southern Ecuador) with three of the volunteers at FHC. Dina and Rahel are from Germany and Marcus is from Denmark. We spent about 5 days exploring in and around the city. I had been there a couple times before this, so I knew the city pretty well. This was the first time that I got to venture a little more outside the city. On our first full day in Cuenca we visited a national park, Cajas. It was about 1.30 minutes outside of the city. We took public transportation and I loved being able to see the beautiful countryside. We hiked for about 3 hours in Cajas. There are beautiful lakes and mountains. The landscape there was very different from anything that I have experienced. As we were leaving, we were told that the bus comes every 30 minutes to an hour. We decided to start walking back to Cuenca and catch the bus on our way. Well two hours later and with no bus in sight, we stopped at the first sign of civilization that we saw and got some food while we waited for the bus. It finally came about 30 minutes later and we made it safely back to Cuenca. Another exciting adventure was going to some Inca Ruins called Ingapirca. This was 2.30 minutes from Cuenca (each way!). We took advantage of our time on the bus and Rahel taught me German. Ich bin als New York. We didn’t really progress much further than that. Our 5 hour bus ride was rewarded by being able to stay only 1 hr. at the ruins with a Spanish-speaking guide who spoke very softly while we were almost blown off cliffs. It was cold and windy and rather unimpressive, especially since we couldn’t hear anything the guide was saying. We met a guy from Scotland there who is doing a world trip. We met up with him for dessert when we got back to Cuenca along with a girl from Norway who we met in an Austrian café. Our Scottish friend ended up coming over for dinner a week later when he was in Quito. I love that about traveling. You are always meeting new people who have very interesting stories. In the midst of all my new European friends I tried to represent the States well. Some other highlights included attending a free Mozart concert for kids, trying some cuy (guinea pig) and a WHOLE chicken at some roadside restaurant (it’s amazing we didn’t all get sick), and playing foosball at a German café. Apparently that is a popular thing to do in Germany!