The drive from Guayquil to Cuenca started easy enough, driving through
the countryside, seeing hills here and there with houses or necropolis
high rises (really, the tombs were built like multi story apartment
buildings), and farther out flat marshy extremely green pastures (there
were actually a fair number of cattle, but very spread out, picking
their way through the swamplands). There were small, run down towns
along the way, with long roadside fruit and vegetable stands and
primitive housing dotting the road.
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Along the way, we stopped at Hacienda
Cacao Mango for lunch and a demonstration of how they make chocolate
(although this was a farm, with most of their cocoa beans going to a
brand called Pacari, who like to support the small farmers).
Below, you can see the different types of cocoa they grow (Forastero,
Criollo, Trinitario, and one other one I didn't catch).
These pods contain the seeds covered in a white, sticky substance which,
as it turned out, is cocoa butter (haven't you always wondered what
cocoa butter is?). The beans are extracted and air dried for a
while, which is where the farm normally stops, selling the dried beans.
For us, they went a bit further. To turn the beans into cocoa, you
heat them (which they did in a ceramic bowl over a propane burner), then
grind them up, then boil the resulting semi-liquid paste. They
gave us hot chocolate in the gourd shells and pieces of chocolate
distilled down from the paste, both of which were delicious.
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We left Hacienda Cacao Mango and the flatlands gave way to
foothills and then mountains. It was a long and winding road that
provided amazing views when the mist wasn't so thick you could barely
see the side of the road. The mist was a bit disconcerning at
times because the driver was cruising along at a fairly high speed and
seemed confident that there were no obsticals on the road ahead
in the form of cows (frequent), on coming traffic passing slow drivers heading in the other direction (frequent), areas
where rockslides had covered most of the road (frequent), or areas where
the road itself had been washed away leaving a giant gaping void over
thousand foot falls to sharp rocks below (twice).
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We learned an important spanish word
on the trip, "Desvio," which means "the road, it is gone." But we
made it, and the scenery was beautiful when you could see through the
mist (more on the back half of the trip, approaching Cuenca), with
grazing animals dotting the steep inclines of the mountains.
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The "high water mark" elevation wise |
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And so we arrived for our
first day in Cuenca.
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