THROUGH THE DEVIL’S NOSE; WORKING WITH THE CHOIR; PLANS FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS
Riobamba, Ecuador, Thursday, July 06, 2006

Through the Devil’s Nose

We nurture images of the great transcontinental railways across the U.S.A. or Canada. For myself, I always picture these railway projects being laid across the Great Plains or the Canadian Prairies. Of course, that was the easy part. The really tough part was blasting the lines through the mountain ranges that run north-south parallel to the Pacific coast. (I leave aside the superhuman effort required to lay tracks through the rock and muskeg of the Canadian or Precambrian Shield north around Lake Superior.)

Like everybody else, Ecuador started a railway in the mid-nineteenth century to unite its disparate cities. A narrow-gauge line was laid between Guayaquil on the coast to Quito in the mountains and eventually beyond to Otavalo and the Columbian border. But forget images of coolies laying track across the bald prairies! Once away from the coastal plain the line had to be punched through the Andes and reach an altitude of 3,000 metres by the time it got to Riobamba in the centre of the country. Not that it actually got any easier after that; there were still lots of mountains and valleys to get through. The modern highway that we travelled by pickup truck last Saturday to here from Quito with Gerardo frequently parallels the old mountain-gauge line.

Like Mexico, Ecuador seems now to have abandoned railways nearly altogether in favour of highways and busses. Highways and trucks are more flexible though, if all the costs are included, perhaps not really that much cheaper. If the automobile industry was going to become significant, there had to be highways. Once people had cars they didn’t use public transportation to the same degree. Revenues therefore began to fall off. Some governments, too, grew heartily sick of the frequently extortionist wage tactics used by politicised labour unions from monopolistic railways and wanted alternative transportation. In Mexico, finally, the government has essentially given up on passenger rail service, gone for long-distance highways financed privately as toll roads and put up cheap loans for long-distance bus services to be formed. The result is a nationwide network of expressways and quality bus lines.

Ecuador seems to have adopted the same attitude. In 1998-99 non-stop El Niño rains washed out a large part of the line between Riobamba and the coast. That, I guess, was the last straw. Now, although the lines still exist around the land, only the stretch between Riobamba south towards the coast is open as far as “The Devil’s Nose”, the spectacular set of switchbacks near Alausí a few hours away. And the antique mountain-gauge steam engines have been replaced by a diesel locomotive.

This line is now frequented basically only by tourists and runs only three days a week. The train leaves from Riobamba’s quaint but essentially unused 19th Century station downtown at 0700, is made up of a locomotive, three or four boxcars and a passenger car. Yesterday, when we travelled the road, we were also had a flatbed car, which carried rubble and workmen with shovels for part of the journey and a caterpillar front-end loader for another. A few cautious souls found seats in the unheated passenger coach. But one of the interesting aspects of this train is that you are allowed to sit on top of the box cars and get an unobstructed view on the mountains and passes as one rattles and sways along the unwelded track.

Up at five in the pre-dawn, William, Antonia and I get dressed and trudge off through the nearly deserted city streets for the railway station. Arriving twenty minutes later, we find the place abuzz with backpackers and other foreigners, street sellers and ticket-takers. We pick up a bottle of drinking water and redeem the little handwritten chit I had received yesterday when I went to buy the railroad tickets; the chit gave three cushions I had rented for a dollar each for the journey. We had already bought bread rolls from the panaderia last night.

Up the ladder we go on the side of the boxcar and along the centre ridge until we find some space. Handrails have been welded all along the sides of the cars so you don’t fall off when you are sitting. We drop our cushions and stake out our spots while more and more people arrive. No one goes into the boxcars themselves though some do toss in their large backpacks before heading up top.

At seven the diesel locomotive revs up and we are off through the city streets. As usual, the valley where Riobamba is situated is covered with low morning cloud. It seems to burn off as the day progresses, the skies opening up to puffy clouds against an azure blue backdrop. The mountain peaks appear slowly as the day goes on and two days ago we actually had a terrific, clear, late-afternoon view of Chimborazo, at 6,310 metres above sea level, the second highest mountain in the world after Mt. Everest.

The first half of the approximately five-hour train ride is cold and dusty. The early-morning air is cool enough to chill one and soon my fingers are feeling rather numb. At our first stop William cleverly buys one of those Andean wool hats with earflaps. He is wearing a fleece jacket and tennis shoes. I have on a sweatshirt under my fleece jacket and am wearing shoes and socks too. Antonia is the hardy one! She is wearing jeans and a T-shirt and a very light knitted pullover. For footwear she has on sandals. I am getting colder and colder in the breeze and seriously consider going to the passenger coach at the back of the train when we make our stop around 0900. Antonia however says that, other than her toes, she is actually if not warm at least warm enough. She convinces me to stick it out up top. And I am glad I did because soon the sun has burned off the clouds and people are beginning to strip off jackets and ponchos and sweaters. The sun is high in the sky and, in the dry mountain air, warms us up fast. William, ever the gentleman, buys a second woolly cap and lends it to Toni.

We chat with the eclectic band of fellow travellers atop the boxcar. Next to us is an Ecuadorian who emigrated to Los Angeles, California, and is now a fire-fighter. He is shepherding a family of American friends around his home country. We also meet a Norwegian university history student who is backpacking around the Andes for the summer vacation, a family from Washington, DC. and two ANZAC couples on vacation in Ecuador, Peru and Chile. All the while vendors keep tightrope-walking up and down the centre pathway with baskets of snacks and drinks. At the one or two stops we make, people in indigenous costumes are selling hot food (empanadas, waffles, soups and drinks or the usual Ecuadorian textiles and souvenirs with a slight leaning toward woollen gloves, scarves and headgear).

At first the train climbs to three thousand metres. We pass through wide upland plains, all cultivated or pasture land. There are plenty of people out in the fields planting or harvesting. We see no farm equipment more modern than a wooden plough towed by a pair of bullocks. Many of the cultivated land is in patches so small and/or so steep that there is no way that such land could be “modernised”, i.e. where capital in the form of equipment could be employed. Some of the tilled land growing maize, wheat, barley, beans, etc. is smaller than the foyer in our small family-run hotel. Some of the fields have been ploughed but we only once see a plough in use (the above wooden one as introduced by the Spanish in the 16th Century). Otherwise see lots of people using mattocks to break up the sods or till the soil. Here in the mountains water is in good supply. We spy lots of sloped gardens laid out in a downhill serpentine system to allow water diverted from a stream or irrigation canal to water the crop. We spot women standing in the cold mountain streams to do the washing against rounded stones and laying the clean items out on bushes of grass embankments to dry in the dry air. The housing we see near the railway is usually small, built of cement brick with corrugated iron roofing. Almost everywhere we see one, two or three black or Holstein milk cows tethered near a house or on the verge of tilled fields to graze. Every house seems also to have at least one, two or three pigs and a big old black sow and a couple of dogs. Woolly sheep are present too usually tended by a child or an adult. Only once however did I se anything that could be considered a large herd; a shepherd on foot was watching about two dozen animals. Mostly we saw herds of well under a dozen sheep. They don’t dock the tails here either the way they do in Canada. From what Gerardo told me in the car on the way to Riobamba, the land reforms have broken up some of the big haciendas. But nobody can get a big enough piece of land to keep a large family. Overpopulation on the land has led sometimes to the cultivation and grazing of marginal pieces of land and, as we saw, the tilling goes on right up to the top of some fairly high peaks. This, Gerardo says, has led to bad habits of overgrazing and the tilling means the mountain rains are not retained and is leading here and there in Ecuador to water shortages.

I could imagine that if the population left the land in the same degree that they have in industrialised countries much of this land would be turned into grassland for beef and/or large dairy herds. Much of the small acreages and marginal surfaces would be left fallow and only where farm machinery could be operated would tilling and machine harvesting take place. Statistically, most of these small farms (by far the greater number of farms in the country) are not economically viable at present and the country people look poor. You see it in their houses (small and with few amenities that I could spot), the standard of dental care (a lot of very toothless people including children and old people), the amount of backbreaking human physical work, not only in the fields but the carrying of extremely heavy loads as well. We see some burros but, except for once or twice where I spot someone riding a donkey and when we saw the two bullocks pulling a wooden plough, the burrows are simply tethered out and are grazing.

After Alausí, we head steeply down through long narrow valleys with untimbered, grassy slopes and a straight and long drop to a rushing stream. Eventually we spot other railway tracks running parallel to us much farther below us. We are approaching El Nariz del Diablo, The Devil’s Nose, the spectacular set of switchbacks that drop us I estimate a thousand metres into the valley. At times the train is running backwards. Looking over the side of the boxcar is a little nerve-wracking. On three boxcars there are brakemen positioned next to the big wheels that might be necessary to turn if the locomotive brakes fail and the train begins to run downhill out of control. Comforting thought!

At the bottom we come to the end of the track still in use. The conductors announce a ten-minute break before we start back up to Alausí. Passengers swarm off to walk along the river bank or to take photos of the train itself and the switchbacks that are visible on the cliffs we have just descended. We stop at the bottom of the valley for the locomotive to be placed at the other end of the train and soon we are moving back up the mountain. Indeed, I estimate we are actually travelling faster uphill than when we were moving so cautiously downhill. An hour later we are back in Alausí.

Everyone piles off. You can buy a ticket back to Riobamba on the train for $3 (the fare down was $11 for adultos and $5.50 for Señores or Majores). It takes more than three hours. The bus, on the other hand, costs $2 each and is back in town in about two hours although it follows along the railway line for much of the journey. Nearly everyone opts for the bus.

If you really wanted to save money, I suppose, you could catch the bus to Alausí, get on the train there for El Nariz del Diablo, and then take the train back to town for a couple of bucks.

The bus is warm and packed and there are lots of local people aboard as well. We meet Blair and Susan, a retired English couple from Bristol who are backpacking around for a year. While waiting for the bus to start, we discuss how various people react to our strange and peripatetic ways of life but after we get rolling and the bus begins the half-hour zigzag climb up the mountainside, we all drift off in sleep.

The day has been long and we are weary and hungry. We are also dirty from the dust that the train puts up all along the way and from sitting outside. Our noses are also quite red from the equatorial sun. But it has been a worthwhile day. I think this railway is not quite as spectacular and certainly not as long as the famous Copper Canyon Railway between Los Mochos and Chihuahua in northern Mexico. But Andean scenery here is also very beautiful and equally as awe-inspiring. It was an added adventure to be able to ride on the roof of the boxcars for an uninhibited view of the mountains and valleys. Well worth the effort!

Working with the choir

Back at the Terminal Terrestre bus terminal, we shuffle wearily into the downtown area. It is already 1630 and I have a rehearsal in town at 1800. The kids hop in a taxi that brings them to the Hostal Puerto del Sol on the north side while I find a cup of coffee and an internet café. At 1800 I meet Kathleen at the Casa de Cultura.

The same core group of young men and women are already assembled in the hallway while somebody looks for a key to the rehearsal room. Each day there are a few new bodies and Kathleen is testing a few of them for matching pitches and voice range. This choir is made up almost completely of eager beginners. It appears to be open to everyone so in a sense I guess it direction is to become a type of “community choir”. Very, very few, if any, can read music and, although perhaps as Latins, they have a great sense of rhythm, many cannot match pitches very reliably or even at all. So Kathleen is teaching the four and even five-part songs to them. There is a lot of basic work, in other words. Frustrating as this is, it might be a seed planted that will grow into something bigger. Certainly the people are absolutely delightful and seem to be willing to work steadily for two hours every evening. For my part, I am exhausted from the long day and dehydrated from the sun and fresh air. Bed is beginning to look very good.

Plans for the next few weeks

Tomorrow, Friday, I shall be travelling with William to Quito for him to catch his flight home. It departs late on Friday evening, stopping in Guayaquil before returning to the U.S.A. via Atlanta. It’s a real “red-eye”. I shall stay overnight in Quito and bus back down to Riobamba on Saturday.

The choir gig lasts another week in Riobamba and Kathleen needs to be in Quito for the following two weeks to train choir conductors at one of the conservatories in the capital. Antonia had wanted very much to go and stay/volunteer/study Spanish at Rio Muchacho, a really interesting and innovative organic tropical farm down near where the boat is anchored at Bahia de Caráquez on the coast. As interesting and fun as this might be, it is likely a little too expensive for our blood. It will be financially better for her to stay with us in Quito and take twenty hours of Spanish at a language school for two weeks. Her foreign language training in the public schools at home has been very spotty, the taxpayers apparently not being willing to hire language teachers. Three weeks of concentrated Spanish (we shall try to get a spot for her here in Riobamba for next week too) ought to be a big push up for her.

After the two weeks in Quito, we are free of engagements for a while and we shall likely head back down to the Vilisar. She needs her bottom painted and her zincs replaced, the topsides painted and one or two repairs made to ready her for sea again. Quien sabe cuando! Who knows when!