Well now that I have been here in Vilcabamba Ecuador for 14 months, I decided to take short travels around Ecuador to explore more and write about within this travel blog. I have much more information to pass along to you readers. Starting off with the very recent visit to Cuenca being Ecuador’s third largest city with a population of under 400,000. It was just a 4 day get away for me, but I liked the visit a seen much. Firstly I stayed at a hostal called Hostel Restaurant La Cigale one of the reasons being is because I took a shuttle bus that leaves Hostel Izhcayluma Vilcabamba right to the front door of La Cigale and back again to Vilcabamba, a good set up between the two hostals charging $16.US each way for the 5hr/200km ride. 

Now if you plan a visit at Hostal La Cigale which appears to be very popular as the play music and/or have live music there, supposedly until 11pm, but there were two nights the loud music and patrons were going until midnight one night and 1 am the other, so if your looking foe a quiet night sleep and you are in bed early this may not be the place for you, but breakfast is included and one does get 4 choices of what to eat with coffee and fresh juice.

Being in the old historic downtown of Cuenca with its colonial architecture buildings, was beautiful as I walked everywhere seeing many hostals, bakeries, restaurants specialising in Indian, Thai, pizza, local foods and coffee shops, I even found a vegan/vegetarian joint that served good portion bowls of salads for $1.50. I really liked the vegan/vegetarian restaurant so I will put their website here, its called the El Funky Sauce https://el-funky-sauce-vegetarian-restaurant.business.site Many, many shops and stores selling dress shirts, shoes, clothing, eye wear, hats, health stores, belts, boots, you name it, stores and shops everywhere. Then there’s the city double decker bus tours, I took the tour to the Turk outlook view point, to take overall photos of the city from above, the scenic tour was $8.00 for a 1 hr and 40 min. tour, hop on and off with your ticket, which allowed me to take daylight photo of the city and wait for another bus to come to allow me to take the night time photos as well.

Within Cuenca there is a area called Banos which has hot spring water pools to soak and relax, with mudding available to put all over your skin to dry and then cleanse off, I also went into the saunas. The cost of this was $8.00 and only about 15-20 min. from downtown historic area of Cuenca, by transit .25 cents there and back by taxi no more that $4.

There are so many churches in Cuenca and many of then are impressive in size, I also went to a photographic museum and saw many old photo collections on the walls with the old cameras on display. They do have a central market called Mercado 10 de Agosto where one can buy all the fresh fruits & vegetables one desires or fresh meat hanging in the open, which to me is an unpleasant smell of death, plus a few eateries serving very cheap local meals.

One night I went out to a free symphony by the high school students it was a very good performance as they played Beethoven & Mozart, it appears that Ecuador is promoting the symphony music and musicians of all ages with free performances which I must congratulate the so called government on for promoting such events.

Now here in Vilcabamba again I recently went on a mountain bike ride with Chino and his bike shop Chinos Bikes Vilcabamba, a group of us went by taxi with bikes uphill to Parque Nacional Podocarpus where we were dropped off at its highest peak to have a great view of both cities being Loja & Vilcabmaba, then we got to ride all the way down to Landangui which is just outside of Malacatos, what I enjoyed very much seeing was tiny villages with 2, 3 or 7 homes and usually a church coming down the mountain side of this ride, it seemed amazing people living in no man’s land so to speak. We had a few flat tires but Chino was successful at repairing them all so that we could keep on continuing the journey, he likes these tours to show off the beauty of nature and country, thus he knows many bike trails to take groups on for exercise and photo ops. I recommend going on a bike tour with Chino as he can supply bikes and helmets if one is interested in a mountain bike adventure, he is fluent in Spanish but Chino also speaks some English too. He likes to collect foreign bills from around the world, so if you have some foreign bills you’d like to donate to his collection I’m sure that would make his day.

Living the dream as a unemployed homeless traveller