Chapter 23

“The camera makes everyone a tourist”

New York Review of Books

A few weeks ago I had arrived in Riobamba with Explore after midnight, crashed out into bed and left early the following morning on my way to Cuenca. Not only had I seen nothing of the town but even the hotel had registered so little on my consciousness that I had been in it for several hours this time before I realised that it was actually the same one. This time I had arrived in the late afternoon, checked in, dumped my gear in my room and gone for a walk in search of for a drink. At first glance Riobamba was nothing very special. Another ordinary town, although my perception of it was probably being coloured by my inability to find a bar. Beer and I circled the block clockwise to no avail then circled the next block anticlockwise for variety but still without finding anything conspicuously bar-like. Eventually I tried out my recently acquired Spanish and we were directed to a cheap, tacky and very downmarket cafe which also sold beer. A couple of bottles later we wandered back to join the others for dinner followed by Tungurahua.

Tungurahua is a volcano. More specifically it is the volcano that several months ago had become so active that it had forced the evacuation of the town of Banos. It had been the main reason for coming here with Explore and was the main reason for being here now. Then we had gone to a restaurant that Pablo had recommended which was on the opposite side of the valley and commanded an excellent view. It had been a clear night and we had eaten our meals and then sat outside watching the silhouette. Every now and then there was a distant rumble as the mountain cleared its throat and then we would see a faint glow growing brighter as lava spewed out of the cone, running down the side until it cooled off too much to be visible any longer. A couple of times there were more substantial lave flows, with rivulets pouring away in several directions at once. We had been fifteen kilometres away but it had been a spectacular sight anyway. Tonight we were taking buses up to another different viewpoint to hopefully see the same thing again.

As we left the restaurant I already had my doubts about how successful we were likely to be. A fog had rolled in and was already dimming even the nearby street lights. As we drove out of town visibility was at times no more than a few yards although up on the hill it was a little better. The two minibuses followed a twisting, tortuous route and finally stopped at a tiny house on the hillside where a fire was burning in the yard and there would, on a clear night, have been an excellent view out across the valley. At the moment the view stretched roughly as far as the trees at the end of the field. We climbed out and waited, fortifying ourselves with glasses of a bitter alcohol mixed with hot water. Behind the mountains there was an incredible thunderstorm going on. Every few minutes the peaks were silhouetted black and purple against the latest crash of the lightning. On the other hand there was no sign at all of the volcano. We weren’t even sure that we were looking in the right direction and the occasional comments of

“Look, over there I think I just saw a faint glow.”

were more wishful thinking or tired hallucinations than any genuine sightings. The fog was closing in alarmingly so that now even the lightening did no more than fill the sky with a brief diffuse glow. Visibility was reduced to a few yards, then as the fog billowed and shifted increased to a couple of miles, then reduced again. So it went for several hours. At about two O’clock we took a vote on it and the few who were interested in staying were vastly outnumbered and we returned to the hotel for some sleep.

As we had a free day in Riobamba I had the chance to sleep late. After a quick breakfast, which the restaurant was reluctant to serve as I was so late arriving for it, I sat around deciding on a strategy for the day. I decided to begin with a telephone call to home, a duty I had been a little remiss about lately. I was reckoning without the vagaries of the Ecuadorian telephone system. I already knew that my BT charge card only worked here after a fashion, requiring the purchase of a local card also to make the call. None of the public phones would work at all without a paid up card in the slot and there seemed to be no coin operated phones. This had presented a problem for me in Quito but here it was much worse. The problem here was because there are two separate and incompatible telephone networks. I could find shops selling cards for one network and phone boxes for the other one but that was no use. When I eventually spotted one of the bright red booths I hurried away to buy the card and then returned to the phone. I inserted the card, dialled my BT access number and even got through to the English speaking operator. It was immediately clear that while I could hear her she couldn’t hear me and the card was being used up at an alarming rate.

I started to look for another phone box. What should have been a simple task was turning into something of an epic struggle. After spending the whole morning in my vain search I took a break and went for some lunch with Mark and Maria before starting the search again. Finally I stumbled upon the telecom office and discovered that this was the one place in Riobamba where it was actually possible to get through to home. It was three O’clock. It had taken me all day.

One look at the restaurant chosen by most of the group, El Relino, told me all I needed to know about it. The decor was subtle and tasteful, the lighting low and the ambience perfect. I didn’t even need to check the menu to know that it was too expensive. I did though, for forms sake and confirmed that I couldn’t afford the prices although the selection on offer was excellent. Instead I wandered down to the Ashoka for a vegetarian meal with Lizzie. It was clear that she was literally not a happy camper. The trip was not meeting her expectations at all. She felt we were spending too little time in each place and that far too much of our travelling was taken up with, well travelling. We were spending all of our time getting there and none of our time staying there. There was also the problem that she wanted more interaction with the locals. She was she said, going to be getting off the trip when we reached Cusco. While I had to admit that her comments were largely accurate I couldn’t see why she had booked such a trip in the first place. It was exactly what I had expected from the brochures and information I had before I started. For her, with fluent Spanish, travelling solo and interacting with the locals was an option, for most of us who could barely manage to order a beer it would have been difficult and time consuming. If I had been travelling solo I would have spent even more time trying to get to places and even less being there.

When we finished Lizzie went straight back to the hotel while I went in search of the others and failed completely to find them. I toyed with the idea of having a couple of beers by myself in one of the bars that I had by now managed to identify but it seemed a fairly desperate course of action. Instead I went back to the hotel and sat for an hour writing postcards before boredom with writing out minor variations on the same half a dozen words sent me to bed.

An early night wasn’t such a bad idea anyway as we were having a five O’clock start to catch a train instead of travelling on by truck.

At six O’clock in the morning the station was packed with people, specifically two sorts of people. There were of course the ubiquitous salesmen selling water, fruit, chocolate. cigarettes, matches, batteries, camera film, cushions to sit on - in fact anything that they thought the customers might buy. Then there were the customers. Among a section of the travelling public there is a fashion to be sneering and supercilious about ‘tourists’ who are not proper travellers. Overlanders, travelling together on an organised trip are considered to be scarcely better. After all it isn’t proper travel unless you’re doing it on your own, making the arrangements yourself, dealing with the authorities yourself and finding a doctor yourself when that nasty bowel problem is still persisting after two weeks of regular emergency dashes. It’s at places like Riobamba Station that you realise how little difference there actually is between the ‘wouldn’t catch me on a package tour’ brigade and the rest of us who actually form the majority these days. Riding on the roof of the train from Riobamba to Alausi and then down to Devil’s Nose sounds like something terribly adventurous and I suppose if your annual holiday is a week in a caravan in Rhyll it probably is but when you realise that the train has several very long carriages and the people on the roof are shoulder to shoulder all the way along - all of them tourists ( the locals have the sense to travel inside) you start to suspect that adventure it might be, uncommon it’s not. Practically everyone who comes to Riobamba makes this train journey whether they arrived hitchhiking, by local bus or on an overland truck. It may have been the province of ‘real travellers’ in the days before such mass travel became almost commonplace but nowadays it is definitely a tourist experience. No-one is riding this train because they want to get to Alausi, they are riding it so that they can say that they did. Kids with trays full of sweets and chocolate, or paper cones full of sweetened nuts walk along the rows of captive consumers. Railway employees sell hats and T-shirts. At the stations women climb up with their hot empanadas and their roast bananas and men with buckets of ice follow them selling bottles of beer. If this isn’t tourism then forgive me, I don’t know what is.

All of which is not to deny the excitement of the journey, or the unpredictable nature of travel. We were less than half an hour out of Riobamba, heading through some lovely scenery that seemed even better from this unusual viewpoint, when we had our first derailment. The train had slowed down which, given that it hadn’t been travelling very quickly to begin with, had brought us to little more than a quick walking pace. Suddenly there was a lurch, not a very big one, and as momentum carried the train forward it was obvious that our wheels were no longer on the tracks. Everyone instantly climbed down from the roof for photographs - more proof that inside every ‘real traveller’ a tourist is waiting to get out. The train driver and the guards crawled underneath and assessed the situation and then set about getting it back on the tracks. Their tools for this consisted of leaves, twigs, lumps of trackside stone and a curved piece of iron that was clearly purpose built for the job. They seemed very practised and skilled at it and although the whole process of edging forwards and backwards repeatedly, took over an hour, I couldn’t help wondering how often they had had to do this. Finally, it was done. The main difficulty had been that as each section of train went over the faulty piece of track it derailed in turn and had to be sorted out. Still eventually we were on our way. The second derailment came about an hour later.

By the time we reached Alausi the train had been off the tracks for about as long as it had been on them with four derailments in total - the last coming when in a fit of ‘oh no not again’ pique the driver had taken a fast run at a bad section and succeeded in simultaneously derailing the engine and every one of the coaches. I passed the time waiting for it to be put right in conversation with ten year old Sixto Ivan, one of the many children hawking sweets and cigarettes on the train roof.. He was, he told me the fifth of a family of seven brothers and sisters and wants, when he leaves school, to be a mechanic. When I asked him why he wasn’t at school he told me indignantly that he goes on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. He had spent the journey running along the roof selling his goods and asking people if they would give him their cushions at the end of the journey. He wasn’t alone in this, every one of the children - and there were quite a few - was doing the same thing, getting the promise of as many cushions as possible. I asked Sixto why and he told me that at Alausi they would be able to get money for them by selling them back to the cushion salesmen to be used again.

It wasn’t a very long journey but it had been made longer by all the problems so that when we reached Alausi it was already quite late and there was still the ride down to and back from Devil’s Nose before we rejoined the truck. I was apprehensive, having done this section of the ride a few weeks ago I knew how steep it was and with the four derailments still nagging at me I hoped it wouldn’t fall off the track again. If it did the consequences could be disastrous. I didn’t think there was any chance of it going fast enough to cause any injury but I did think that if it happened on this section it was going to be a whole lot harder to put right than at any time so far.

We pulled out of Alausi and started down and it became obvious that we were going to see very little through the low lying cloud that filled the valley. I was glad I’d been here before, I could imagine the glorious views of ever receding ranges of mountains and the dramatic drops down to the valley floor but the reality was a series of tantalising glimpses through the occasionally shifting cloud. On the return journey the rain, which had been stopping and starting all day finally decided to start properly and the kids, Sixto included, all snuggled down in among the adults trying to shelter from it’s sting. Nevertheless ten minutes out of Alausi, with the rain still falling sharply, all of them started to run about the roof gathering their treasure trove of cushions. There were dozens of disputes as two or more insisted that the same person had promised their cushion to each of them. There were scuffles and scrambles but in the end everyone was satisfied that they had got something for their trouble and we all climbed down from the train. The kids forgot us as soon as we were on the ground, ignoring us totally as they ran off to find someone to buy their booty before the train went back to Riobamba, taking them with it.