Panamericano Norte Heading for Colombia
Added on Monday, September 8th, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
Mountain scene by the Panamericana, Peru
Arrive in Cuenca in the rain. Don’t feel happy but put this down to the stress of the project and the speed needed to keep on schedule. Parallel World is about the meek and the strong, the big and small as well as the fast and the slow. What was a considered journey is now a fast adventure racing to meet a deadline. I have been ambling and now it is not like that. Bad days are part of the adventure. The hotel helps but being alone all the time is beginning to affect me. The next day I ride to the border with Ecuador, past the beaches south of Tumbes, past their gentle shabby chic show.
That night I am in a small hotel in Riobamba and the next day the ride from Riobamba to Guachala, by the equator, is splendid. Instead of suffering a road surface in which you can grow vegetables, the four-lane highway to Quito pulverises my time problem and keeps the project on schedule. The traffic is not fast and the pattern of driving easily deciphered. Ecuadorean motorists are quite polite, conservative even and move over to let me pass.
The weather is cool and there is no sun. I pass Quito quickly and on the Panamericano Norte head for Colombia. Short of Cayambe there is a text on my phone and a problem with the design of this book needs to be addressed. In Cayambe I look for a hotel with internet access but there are none. Someone suggests the Hacienda Guayacha back down the Panamericano and past the Mitel del Mundo (middle of the world).
The equator is a kilometre before the turn off for the Hacienda.
I am eating filet mignon con champignons by an open fire in the dining room of Hacienda Guachala. Legend states that when someone asked for something and was not given what he wanted, would insist and argue, “I am not asked for Guachalá.” Guachalá is famous for being one of the most important farms in Ecuador. Here I sit, a wide field away from the trucks and their steaming radiators and their belching exhausts. It’s not all bad!
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