This weekend is carnival in Ecuador, which means people throw water, flour, foam and eggs at you…..
This is also a 4 day weekend. I was told by many people that Zamora was a cool place to go. So I took the bus 1 hour up, 1 hour down to the nice little town. After walking around it twice, I sat down and figured out what to do….I was bored.
I was looking at the beauty of the lush mountains and trying to figure out how to get up into them….walking was not the answer… I didn’t want to get lost… A tour might be cool, but the tourist office was closed. Oh well.
I went to the bus station to work out my return to Loja, when a saw these trucks with covered wooded bench seats on the back. The had padded seats and backs… They looked interesting.
I asked the driver where they were going, and if they did a round trip. He told me where ( and I promptly forgot) and said it was a round trip. Time 2 1/2 hour ( one way or round trip…. Don’t know)
I climbed up and in. The adults glanced at me,but some kids stared.
Did I mention the sides were open… And it was carnival. Before we left town,we were bombarded with water balloons, water pistols,and one sweet little girl had a hose going full blast.
I wrapped my backpack in a tarp I keep just for this.
As we travelled I wondered what I was getting into… The roads were very rough and primitive, but the view was great.
Every once and awhile someone would bang on the side to be let off. They would collect their goods, ( food, chickens whatever) and then go up to the cab to pay.
People knew each other…and several times, foam and water fights broke out. … It was interesting seeing a 65 year old lady throwing foam at a lady a quarter her age.
Every once and awhile we would pass a house that knew we were coming….they were lined up on both sides with buckets….and except for one earnest looking young man, we were all enjoying ourselves.
I will leave my pictures to describe what I saw.
After 2 hours we reached the turn around point, were we retraced our route.
We were not on much of a schedule, at one point the driver stopped for about 15 minutes to help someone bled the brake lines on their motorbike… With a crowd.
At the end my butt was tired, I was wet, I had a lot of bad pictures..( the shaking was so bad that they were blurry) but I enjoyed myself. Cost of the tour…$3
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