Day 49: Cajabamba to Santa Rosa

191 miles

I was so comfortable under all of my blankets. The last thing I wanted to do was roll out of bed. I had spent the night at over 10,000 feet and it was in the 30s when I woke up. I groggily reached over to turn on the lights, but of course nothing happened. For the third night in a row, I’d been without power upon waking up because of Ecuador’s continuing energy problems. I used this as a good excuse to linger in bed for a couple more minutes before I rallied. I got dressed with the illuminating help of my bike light. I put on every article of clothes that I brought with me. At some point along the way since Montana I have managed to lose one of my gloves. Instead of bringing a pair of thick gloves, I only have two pairs of thin gloves. I now have three gloves with me, so my left hand is going to get cold a lot quicker. Hopefully it won’t get cold enough that I really need that second set of gloves again. If that does happen, it won’t be until I’m down in Argentina. I’ll be close enough to the end at that point that I can just cut off that hand and keep biking.

From my hotel, I had a 2500 foot climb up to the pass, although I was quite looking forward to this. I knew I needed some time to warm up and let the sun rise before I began my descent. I turned off the main highway—which I had rejoined late last night—and set off up to my pass. The road went from nice smooth asphalt to these concrete slabs that I’ve talked about before. They were cracked and marred with potholes. At the end of each slab there was a gap as they dropped to the next slab so every 20 feet, I roll off with a successive “thump thump” onto the next slab. The road was very cracked and some of these cracks were a real danger to me. In the dark I had to be hyper vigilant, even if I was going under 10 miles an hour up the climb. These cracks would be very dangerous on the descent, but I focused on getting to the top first. I climbed into the clouds that began to lighten around me as the sunlight started to penetrate the sky. Although I was climbing, the temperature was not. It initially dropped as I gained elevation, but then the sun came out at around six and the temperature held steady at around freezing as I continued ascending. At the pass, I was thoroughly shrouded by clouds and well above the tree line. I topped out at about 12,700 feet. The trees had given away to golden tan grass. It’s a beautiful grass and it quietly waves in the wind, which seems to be always present in the high Andes. When the sun is out the grass glitters and shines, but in the cold clouds, it wavered in abated motion. Everything was coated in a thin crisp layer of frost. Men and women walked along the road herding sheep and goats. They watched me inquisitively as I passed. Now that I was off the main road it was a lot quieter and I must’ve been a very unusual sight not just because I was biking but also because I’m a gringo. The communities that I passed in the high mountains seem to be primarily indigenous communities of the Quichas and Cañaris people. Their skin was much darker and their clothes were indicators that they had not yet fallen victim to the complete globalization of society. It was striking as schoolchildren ran around in collared shirts and khakis or sweatpants and tracksuits as their parents and grandparents walked by in bright chalecos, chumpi, petticoats, and bowler hats. I was interested in the commonality of the bowler hats since I found it interesting that communities of the high Andes have similar headwear fashion as 18th century England. Indeed, the bowler hat was introduced to the Andes by English railroad workers in the 1920s and is now a staple of traditional Quecha clothing.

As I crested the climb I immediately began a very steep descent. I had built up enough body heat on the climb that I managed to stay warm until I popped out below the clouds 10 minutes later. I was greeted by staggering views of an enormous valley descending into thin air. It was a little hazy and cloudy at the mouth of the valley so as I looked out through the gaping V of the valley mouth it seemed that the land gave away like I was floating on an island in the sky. To my north Chimborazo towered above me. I couldn’t see it through the clouds, but I knew it was there. To my south, a massive volcano of its own right lay asleep. I could just see the beginning of its rocky caldera through the clouds as I got further down the valley. Instead of bombing down the 60 mile descent like I had hoped, I had to proceed with caution as the road was a chopped up mess. In addition, every little town I passed through was ridden with speed bumps. It was difficult to get my speed above 30 miles an hour. Every bump presented a chance for my seat post to snap off. I could hear it creak every time I hit the smallest bump. In addition, it seems that the spokes on my rear wheel are starting to loosen up on their own. They also rattled with every bump that I hit. I felt like I was riding a glass machine down the mountain.

I passed a bunch of really small towns and as the sun came out, I found myself weaving through groups of school children walking to their day’s classes. If I can get my body warmed up and working well, I love riding in the morning as children walk to school. Adults will commonly wave at me, but children will yell and scream and run beside me when possible. I always yell back at them and they always put big smile on my face. Without fail for the first several hours of my descent gaggles of school children urged me down the hill. I found the older people along this section of highway apprehensive to acknowledge my presence and instead favored to stare at my passing. The children were more outgoing than anywhere else I’ve ever been. Perhaps it makes sense that the elders are wary of outsiders, but the children are inquisitive. No doubt this road did not exist when many of the elders were born. It probably was not a very popular decision to place a concrete strip through the small villages, undoubtedly ruining the peace. The children on the other hand have never known anything different than the highway, and a gringo riding a bike through town is quite exciting.

As I got further down the valley the road continue to get more rough. After I descend about 5000 of the 12,000 feet, the road stop being a road entirely. There were soon sections that were just rock and dirt for hundreds of meters at a time. The cracks opened up into mini valleys and potholes loomed just waiting to swallow me up. I could’ve bombed down the thing on a mountain bike, but on my fragile road bike I only averaged about 20 miles an hour down the 60 mile descent. I stopped in a little town, halfway down for some corn, pork, fried plantains, and some dessert of watermelon. As I ate I watched another hog get strung up by the butcher just about 10 m meters from my chair. I guess if I’d been a day later, I would’ve been eating that bad boy instead. I still haven’t seen any live pigs in South America, but there seems to be a fair amount of pork available for purchase. I’m not sure where the little suckers are hiding, but it makes me feel marginally better than eating a cow. There was a lot of fat on this pork, but it was fantastic. It had been slow cooked and was just dripping in grease and fat. I need all those fats. I need essentially anything I can get my hands on. Foods full of saturated fats that would typically be bad for me are now my bread and butter. I am falling short in essentially every nutritional category so there’s really no such thing as bad food for me. Food is food. As long as it’s not going to make me sick, I’ll shove it down.

By the time I got to the bottom of the descent, I was in a whole new world. At the top of the climb, I’d been in high alpine tundra. I’d quickly dropped down into a beautiful coniferous high altitude forest, then a cloud forest, then a rainforest, then a little stretch that almost looked like desert, then back into a forest for the last 2000 feet. This forest looked like it wanted to be a rainforest, but it was just a little bit too dry. Everything was a little crackling and crispy. I think it’s because of the drought. If I’d been here during a wet year it probably would’ve looked like a full on rainforest. The road was been into the side of the valley all the way down. It was fun to watch as not only the trees change, but also the soil composition underwent dramatic transformations. By the time I was at the bottom, loose red clay poured over the road and swallowed up my tires on the sections where the road disappeared. I finally dropped down into the flatlands and for the first time since Cali I was on a truly flat road for more than a couple hundred feet. In the last couple hundred feet of the descent I dropped into a low lying cloud bank. It had been fun to descend out of the clouds and under blue skies the whole way then back into the clouds. It was like a sandwich. Now that I was in the flats and it was cloudy above me, everything started to feel a little clammy and hazy. I was in the Providence of Guayaca, Ecuador. Guayaquil was only about 30 kilometers away. Guayaquil is considered one of, if not the, most dangerous cities in the world right now. In a survey of the Guayaca Providence last year only 11% of residence said that they feel safe walking around alone after dark. That’s the lowest rate anywhere in the world. Guayaquil has one of the highest murder rates in the world, one of the highest petty theft rates in the world, it’s one of the most active cartel hotspots in the world. Human trafficking thrives, kidnapping is not uncommon, pickpocketing is almost guaranteed for a gringo like me. If only 11% of residents feel safe then maybe I should’ve stopped twice and really thought about my safety for a second. My goal was just fly through Southern Ecuador and hope nothing goes wrong. I traveled through a level four do not travel zone as ranked by the US state department. There are not a lot of these warnings out right now. Outside of active Warzones this is probably one of the last places in the world I’d want to find myself in with nothing but a bike and some cash. A level four do not travel advisory is the highest level advisory the state department issues. Pollution from agriculture and cities was trapped underneath the low clouds and as I built a layer of sweat in the humid air, all the pollution began sticking to my skin and it slowly turned a dark black. The sky was a moody hazy mess, but there wasn’t much to look at anyways. As far as I could see, there were nothing but banana and coca plantations. Unsurprisingly, these plantations were owned by Dole and Chiquita. I love bananas, but I’m not a fan of either of these companies. It is no secret that the United States and other western countries used these banana plantations under the guise of actors like Ronald Reagan and the CIA throughout the 70s 80s and 90s to exert control on foreign countries. The term “banana republic” exists for a reason and the colonialist and mercantilist roots still are very evident. In addition to the human rights abuses, and the geopolitical abhorrences these banana plantations represent, you also have to consider the environmental impacts of this monoculture. All of the fields were not that long ago incredibly diverse forests. The rainforest has all been cut down and now for hundreds of miles on end nothing exists but the singular species of banana tree. Not only does that represent a complete loss of the biodiversity, this monoculture is the perfect breeding ground for diseases, which will eventually not only wipeout the dominant species of banana, the Cavendish banana, but also has a potential to create much wider, reaching environmental impacts, genetic bottlenecks, and species islanding. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good banana. I eat tons of bananas. At home, bananas and peanut butter make up a pretty significant portion of my diet, especially when I’m vegetarian. I think one of the main takeaways that I’ve gotten from this trip is that it’s impossible to be a sustainable consumer. I’ve traveled through so many different biomes and seen how humans exploit the land in every way possible. We all know that meat is bad for the environment, so try to be vegetarian. Well, you can’t really eat any tropical fruit because any tropical fruit was harvested from plantation where rainforest used to stand. Don’t even think about eating avocados, I saw the irrigation canals for them in Mexico. All nuts are off-limits. They’re grown in deserts. The irrigation infrastructure for the nut industry is wreaking havoc not just on California, but also on many other regions of the world. Do you like lettuce? Definitely don’t eat that. It was also grown in the desert and the Colorado river doesn’t even reach the ocean anymore because we sucked all the water out of it so you can have your bowl of lettuce. Oh, you wanna eat fish now? Fish is actually the worst thing you could possibly eat. Our oceans are absolutely decimated. You never hear people talking about it because oceans are out of sight out of mind, but we’ve raped the ocean for everything she has. When you eat fish, you might as well go ahead and throw your plastic bag in the ocean afterwards too because there isn’t enough fish stocks left for your plastic to matter. It feels like a losing game. I really do think it’s next to impossible to be a sustainable ethical consumer. Perhaps if you grow all of your own vegetables or have a local farm that you really trust it’s possible, but for the average American it’s pretty much impossible and for the average foreigner, it’s even more difficult. There’s none of that sustainable agriculture or regenerative farming stuff here, and a lot of that, especially the “regenerative farming” claims are just gentrified terms that don’t really mean anything. They are just meant to help the consumer feel less guilty. Farmers grow whatever they can, and there are no regulatory mechanisms in place, or at least non enforced, to prevent them from using whatever pesticides they want. As I rode over rivers today I peered down and through the trash I could see trickles of water running a murky grayish green. The rivers are all choked off by algae, the result of decades of overuse of fertilizer leading to eutrophication. The land has been robbed of its nutrients, and must rely on artificial fertilizers for sustenance.

I didn’t go through Guayaquil, but I did get pretty close. I skirted the city to the east. I didn’t feel that unsafe around Guayaquil, but as the sun began to set I started working my way through bigger and bigger towns, and I did start to feel very unsafe. I went through town about 30 minutes before dark, and it was one of the scariest experiences of my life in terms of safety. The streets were packed full of people. The town was all rundown, and the trucks stood at a standstill on the road. It was utter chaos, but it seemed to have very little rhyme or reason. I saw two fights break out. In each one spectators had formed in a circle and were cheering on as men beat their heads against each other. Every single store had bars over the front. If you wanted something you had to ask the owner to get it for you, there were no walk-in stores. I didn’t see many police. In fact, I only saw two the entire time through the city, which is very unusual in South America. Men walked about with their shirts off with tattoos, clearly displaying their criminal history and gang and cartel affiliations across the chest. I almost hit a man stumbling in the road, and when he looked up at me, I counted five teardrop tattoos on his face. It was straight out of a cartel movie from Hollywood. I did not feel safe in any way shape or form. All these motorcycles buzzed around me and I knew it would be so easy for them to knock me off and take my stuff. Very dangerous, but so is all of southern Ecuador. Guayaquil gets more screen time because it’s the big city, but the smaller cities have just as many problems, if not more because there’s less policing. According to my research, the police can’t be trusted here. A lot of them are corrupt and wouldn’t do me much good if I needed them. I wanted to get all the way to Aranillas for the night, but I stopped about 20 km short. I rode in the dark for over an hour. That was probably a pretty stupid idea. Only 11% of residents would walk outside alone at night and my ass had decided to bike by myself at night. as I was pulling into the town of Santa Rosa, a motorcycle tailed me the last 10 km. First it was one motorcycle, and then another one joined.  I was worried for a split second, but then I realized that the first motorcycle had been a good Samaritan and the second motorcycle was a policeman. The police followed me into town, and when I got to my turn off, he pulled up next to me. I didn’t catch everything he said to me in the wind, but he essentially said “you’re really stupid. Go check into a hotel and don’t do this again. You’re going to get robbed.”

I went to several hotels, but none of them had power. I haven’t been able to charge my electronics since I got to Ecuador, so I was really hoping to find a place with power. I had no luck though and resigned myself to a dark hotel room. I was about to go to bed, but at 8 o’clock the lights came back on. I knew I should get my seat fixed so even though I just wanted to go to sleep, I took my bike bags off and started working on the post. I pulled it out of the frame and used my sandpaper to clean out the crack. It doesn’t look like the crack has gotten any bigger from when I first noticed it. That’s good at least. I then took my paintbrush and epoxy and applied the epoxy. With the remaining epoxy, I poured it down into the hollow end of the seat tube. And then lay the tube flat so it would dry. The packaging claimed that it would harden in five minutes, but after an hour it didn’t seem to be setting at all. I just propped it up and went to bed, hoping that it would harden by the time I woke up.