Day 48: Quito to Cajabamba

138 miles

I had forgotten how big Quito is. It’s a huge city that sprawls on forever. It took me two hours to work my way across the city and out the southern side. It’s a beautiful city, but entirely too large for me. I was glad to get out of the city and back on some consistent roads without stoplights. Quito was actually pretty easy to navigate since I was able to use the bus lanes in the middle of the street. Ecuador in general has some of the best buses I’ve ever seen and the city of Quito has great public transport via bus. I wasn’t at all apprehensive about today’s ride, but in the past I was. When I was in Ecuador last December of 2023 after kayaking in the eastern part of the country for 10 days I took a bus from Quito to Riobamba to climb volcano Chimborazo. On the bus ride I was acutely aware that I was driving the same road that I would be biking 10 months later. I had my face glued to the window as the road sped by the bus on Ecuador’s Route 35. This is what I had to say about the road last December:

From Quito all the way to Riobamba the main road is the Pan-American, that’s right, the same one I’ll be biking in 10 months from now. I couldn’t see much on the way to Ambato, but I could see enough. The road was big. Really big. 8 lanes. It is the biggest road I’ve ever seen in South America besides the Pan-American through Lima which is also an 8 lane superhighway. However, in Lima the road is limited access, in Ecuador the road is a complete free for all. Driveways and roads come in wherever they please. The good thing about having 8 lanes is that the road can’t be too steep. The pavement was also really good. This section will be a stressful bike, but probably decently fast all things considered. It’s never flat, but never punishingly steep. That all changes in Ambato. Almost everyone in the bus got off in Ambato, so I moved up to an open window seat where I could get a great view of the road. We were in Ambato forever. There was awful traffic, then we got gas, then we went to the main station where we parked for 30 minutes, then we had tons of people get on and off over and over. As we finally started leaving Ambato we climbed up the valley. The road condenses to just 2 lanes, but it’s super busy. Nonstop cars, buses, and weighted down trucks. The buses go uphill slow, but the big trucks absolutely crawl. Cars and motorcycles make super sketchy passes, but it’s when the buses pass the trucks that it gets scary. Multiple times I saw, or was in the bus, as a bus overtook a truck and would ride the middle of the road as a car came from the opposite direction. The vehicle cars would stretch 3 wide in the two lane highway. Super scary passing. Biking it should be fun. As I was looking out the window and we kept climbing up this super steep road with really rough pavement, light rain coming down on the cutthroat traffic, I started thinking to myself how brutal the Pan-American bike is truly going to be. I even started second guessing myself. It’s going to be so immensely challenging. I knew this before, but today just reconfirmed my knowledge that I am incredibly naive to think I can average 163 miles a day without anything going wrong for 84 days straight. These roads are some of the hardest on the world. Climbing out of Ambato is a 5,000 foot climb up to 12,000 feet on a busy road, rough pavement, and almost incessant rain. Biking that loaded down with 30 pounds of gear is going to be hellish. It was good for me to see the road I’m going to be biking though. It gives me a lot of food for thought, and really makes the enormity of my undertaking apparent. It also makes my attempt seem a lot more concrete. Until now it’s all been words on a document and numbers on a spreadsheet. It’s real now, a lot more real. I have a lot to think about, but also a lot of questions that have been answered by my time spent in Ecuador in general and along the Pan-American today. I have 10 months of training and 8,000 miles before I’ll be biking through the Ambato-Chimborazo-Riobamba pass, and I really need to buckle down until then to make sure I’m ready for it.

Isn’t that a fun read? I was correct, I was a naive little kid. I still am. I also was correct in doubting that nothing would go wrong over the course of 84 days. I think the key part that I was missing is that ok for things to go wrong, it’s about bouncing back from those mishaps. I would also like to note that when I said the road was eight lanes I meant a four lane divided highway, so four lanes going each way, totaling eight lanes. It’s true, the highway from Quito to Ambato is four lanes each way at times and it is the biggest road I’ve seen in South America to date. That being said, I think today’s roads were some of the safest I’ve ridden since the interstates of the US (unironically the safest roads I’ve ridden on this trip were the interstates of northern Montana). The irony of that! I’ve come such a long way since then. I’m a completely different person than I was then. I love being able to read and see the change in my character reflected through my own words. That version of me feels dead and gone. I can’t believe that was only 10 months ago. That version of me is right there on the paper, but it feels like so long ago, that person is only a faded memory. I love how I got some things right and some things wrong. It helps me see how much I’ve changed mentally. It’s clear to me that when I wrote that, I had serious doubts that I would ever actually biking this road. I was pretty sure that I was going to flame out somewhere well before Ecuador. Here I am. Surprise :)

After leaving Quito, I began climbing up up up. It was one of those long highway climbs that aren’t that much fun on the bike, especially with a 20 mile an hour headwind. I’ve had a pretty nasty headwind for the last couple of days, but I’ve been on tight twisty mountain roads, so it hasn’t always been a huge problem. Now that I was in a wide-open valley on a relatively straight road that wind was getting funneled and pounding me. It’s almost impossible to complain for too long about the wind though. I had excellent views of all the volcanoes around me. When I was in Ecuador in December, it been cloudy almost the entire time and I hadn’t seen any of the volcanoes. Now these great beautiful mountains revealed themselves to me in all of their magnificence. Even at my baseline elevation of 10,000 to 12,000 feet these mountains had impressive prominence. Since the tree line is about 12,000 feet the upper slopes of the volcano are all rock until about 16,000 feet when the rock turns to snow. These peaks have huge glaciers on the top. Since I am literally on the equator, the seasonal variation in temperature is about 5° so every single day all year long the temperature is the exact same. The snow line is very precise and it goes from rock to glacier pretty much instantly. Unfortunately, the glaciers are receding due to climate change. An addition, the drought means that on the summits, the glaciers are not accumulating as quickly as they once were. Nonetheless, these volcanoes are a magnificent site. During the rainy season it snows consistently every single day top and the glaciers are quite fast moving off the peaks. They crumble off the side of the mountain. From far below I could see huge crevasses opening and seracs falling away as the glacier split. The volcanic rock is crumbly and cliffs fall away into scree fields. Evidence of recently popped off pieces of glaciers are evident by little bits of broken ice at the base of seracs, waiting to be melted by the sun. Cotopaxi is incredibly famous. It’s actually only the second tallest volcano in Ecuador behind Chimborazo. I believe much of Cotopaxi’s fame originates not only from the clothing brand that gets its namesake from the mountain, but the fact that Cotopaxi is the perfect stereotypical cone volcano shape. From the valley one can look up and see the entire mountain in one clear view. After creating the pass, my road briefly turned east and Cotopaxi stood directly in front of me, engulfing my entire line of sight. As oredicted, rapidly building clouds on the summit obscured the mountain behind a veil, but small gaps allowed me to glean glances of glaciers and small spits of rock sticking out from the sky.

My descent from the pass wasn’t all that fast with the headwind, but I made my way down to Latacunga. Much like yesterday, between the cities is more or less urban sprawl. There was a little bit of farmland between Latacunga and Quito, but for the most part, there was consistent development. I stopped for some empanadas and ice cream in Latacunga before continuing on my way. Before the pass, I had stopped at a vendors stall to grab these delicious discs of fried dough with cheese inside. I’ve heard them called several different things so I don’t want to miss name them here, but they were absolutely amazing. I got 12 of the suckers for two dollars. I had planned on eating them over the course of a couple of hours, but ended up wolfing them down in about seven minutes. Fry oil dripped down my chin and my mouth scalded as I shoved them down. They were absolutely fantastic. What a spectacular find. Food here in Ecuador is noticeably more expensive than Colombia, but by American standards things are still dirt cheap.

In Ambato I hoped to be able to fix my seat post. I have given up hope of finding a new seat post until Lima. I am working with a bike shop in Lima to try to source a new seat post. In the meantime, it is up to me to create a DIY solution. I stopped at a hardware store in search of epoxy or resin, but they didn’t have anything so I had to backtrack to a different hardware store before I found what I was looking for. I’m out of electrical tape and couldn’t find more anywhere, so I had to settle for duct tape. I found some epoxy glue that claims to set in five minutes. Hopefully this will be exactly what I need to temporary fix for my post.

From Ambato I begin climbing back up to 12,000 feet again. This was that road that I’d been so concerned about last winter. Instead of feeling scared at the traffic or struggling with the elevation, I really found myself enjoying the climb. It wasn’t as steep as I made it out to be, or perhaps I’m just a much better cyclist now. It was beautiful and Chimborazo began to emerge from the clouds. By the time I got up to the flat pass, the clouds departed from the summit as the sun set. To the east beautiful mountains covered by green pastures rose to meet cumulonimbus clouds that took on a deep shade of orange as the sunset lit them up . Right in front of me Chimborazo rose out of the parting clouds. The mountain that I know and love came out to say hi to me as I passed by. I have very fond memories of standing on top of that thing. Just beautiful. Truly a marvel.

At the pass, for the first time since entering Ecuador, I turned off the main highway. I found a road that would keep me west so I could avoid the city of Riobamba and cut off a couple kilometers from my original route. This road took me right up next to Chimborazo. I got my first taste of true high Andean culture. The road wound its way through small farming villages populated by primarily indigenous groups. Men and women walked by me on the side of the road dressed in traditional Andean garb adorned with beautiful shades of pinks and blues with ponchos and fedora esk hats.

I found my way to a hotel just before the last climb that I have in the Ecuadorean Andes. The power was out again so I just went to sleep. I’ll work on my seat post tomorrow night. I’m not super happy with my mileage from today, but with the headwind, climbing, and elevation gain I can’t be that disappointed. It worked out well anyways because tomorrow I’ll have a nice climb to start the morning so I can warm up, then I’ll have a loooooong descent down from almost 13,000ft to sea level.