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A Month In Cuenca

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Seven months after our first two weeks in Ecuador, in October 2010, Shirlee and I returned.

We flew into Guayaquil, took the bus to Cuenca, and found an apartamento turístico, with kitchenette, for $12 a night.

We tramped the cobblestones of El Centro and the concrete of the greater city, checking out the hotels, hostals, and other apartamentos, the gringos and their haunts, the restaurants, markets, churches, museums, buses, mall, and more. We also ventured up to the national park and down to the ranches and farms.

And we liked it. Though Shirlee still couldn’t imagine herself living there full-time, she could certainly see visiting for several months a year. I could easily imagine living in Cuenca and I started making serious plans to move.

All the while, we were gathering information and images and impressions. The Articles in this Category introduce the topics and themes around which we're constructing this website. The travel practicalities, such as Sleeping, Eating, Sightseeing, Touring, and Partying, are being built out in the guide, Access Cuenca. And the deeper background information is expanding under Access Ecuador.


Articles

  WHY LEARN SPANISH?
You can get by traveling or even living in Ecuador without knowing Spanish. You can. It’s like traveling to any country where you don’t know the language. You can’t know every language in the world, even the major ones.
  LIQUIDATING PART ONE

After returning to Reno from the first trip, I was all fired up about Ecuador. And I took steps. I started getting rid of stuff and telling everyone I was moving in early 2011.
  GUAYAQUIL
Several months before our trip, I booked our flights through Priceline and got a great deal to Guayaquil on Avianca Airlines through Bogotá.
  THIS IS WHERE I WANT TO MOVE TO?

On the cab ride from the bus from Guayaquil to our hotel, I peered out the window and felt something unexpected and disturbing: This isn’t the way I remember it.
  AN OVERVIEW OF THE MONTH

So there we were, settled into a nice apart hotel with all the necessities for $12 a night, in a nice central location, for our 24 days in Cuenca.

  APART HOTEL EL PUENTE

Only four facilities in Cuenca (that I know of, and I looked around pretty hard) offer the kind of medium-term lodging we needed in order to stay for a month. We tried two; I found the other two and saw rooms -- two- and three-bedroom apartamentos -- at one. (The other was fully occupied.)

  CUENCA ACCOMMODATIONS
Ecuador's Minister of Tourism has been quoted as saying that Cuenca receives approximately 100,000 out-of-town visitors annually. If this is accurate, that averages out to a little less than 300 per night.
  WALKING AROUND EL CENTRO
As Calvin Trillin wrote in the November Condé Nast Traveler, the central colonial section of Cuenca “doesn't look like a sixteenth-century city that has been preserved; it looks like a city that has been in use since the sixteenth century."
  A TALE OF TWO ALMUERZOS

Four doors up from Apart Hotel El Puente, where we lived in Cuenca in October, is an almuerzo called La Niagara. Naturally, it was our first meal out the day after we moved into our studio. 
  WANDER INTO WUNDERBAR FOR LUNCH
Wunderbar, located off the Escalinata, the wide 100-step staircase that climbs from the Tomebamba River across from Parque de Madre up to Calle Larga at Hermano Miguel, is known for its $4.50  lunch especiales del día.
  FAST FOOD

We didn’t sample either of the two American fast-food operations in Cuenca: Kentucky Fried Chicken and Domino’s. (Nope: no McDonald’s or Burger King, Taco Bell, or even Starbucks.) 
  GRINGO HAUNTS PART 1

In our month in Cuenca, Shirlee and I made it a point to visit the four gringo-owned hangouts, along with two locally owned restaurants, one a tradition and the other a hit with gringos. In Part 1, I cover Raymipampa, Café Eucalyptus, and the Inca Lounge and Grill.

  GRINGO HAUNTS PART 2

In Part 2 of Gringo Haunts, I write about La Vina, Kookaburra Cafe, and the California Kitchen. 
  GO TO GODA FOR DINNER
Goda, on Gran Colombia just east of Luis Cordero, is the restaurant attached to the six-story El Dorado, one of a handful of business hotels in the heart of downtown Cuenca.
  MUSEUMS
Cuenca has a dozen or so museums that introduce visitors to historic, cultural, ethnographic, and religious aspects of the city and the nation and deepen the experience of residents. Here are four of the best.
  CHURCHES
Reportedly, Cuenca has 53 churches in El Centro alone, one for every week of the year and one for good measure. You can see the oldest, the largest, and the most ornate within three blocks of the central plaza. Another two mark the east and west boundaries of colonial El Centro.
  MARKETS
The market scene in Cuenca is lively, vibrant, and bountiful, with large bustling produce and meat markets scattered around town, along with an organic coop, clean and bright supermarkets, micro-mercados here and there, family tiendas on every block, vendors on bicycles, and squatters selling their produce on the street and even from wheelbarrows.
  GIFT SHOPS
The famous indigenous outdoor market in the town of Otavalo, a two-hour drive north of Quito, is the best place to buy Andean art, crafts, textiles, jewelry, and more. But if you’re visiting Ecuador and your trip is limited to Cuenca and environs, you’ll find plenty of places to partake in retail therapy and souvenir hunting.
  SOME PRACTICALITIES

In case you're curious about money and media in Cuenca, here's some info on ATM machines, U.S.-dollar-denominated coins and bills, maps of Cuenca and Ecuador, public computers, two bookstores, and two newspapers.
  EL CAJAS NATIONAL PARK
A couple days before we were scheduled to depart for home, I woke up to what, here in Nevada, we call a "blue-bird day:" a picture-perfect sky without a cloud in it. And since I'd only seen El Cajas on the bus from Guayaquil, it was now or never to head back up to the national park, located a half-hour from Cuenca, under a rare blue sky.
  DAY TRIP PART ONE -- TO GIRÓN
And then, on the last Sunday of our month in Cuenca, Shirlee and I joined Dave and Chela for an impromptu tour southwest of Cuenca on the road down to Machala and the coast. Our tourguide and driver was Carlos Lara, a young Cuencano who learned his English in the U.K. and has a distinct British accent, which was lovely to listen to the whole day.
  DAY TRIP PART TWO -- HIGHWAY PORK AND PURO
The Yunguilla Valley is beyond and lower than Girón, so it’s a little warmer and drier, prime orchard country. You take dirt roads off the highway down into the hollows and up into the hills where the properties are measured in acres and tropical fruit trees abound. A few gringos own houses and land up and down these hills; one has been here for decades.
  BACK TO GUAYAQUIL
Through the gringo grapevine, we heard about OperAzuayTur, a non-stop van service to Guayaquil. Since we took the diesel dog to Cuenca, we thought we’d try the van from.
  FLYING OUT
Guayaquil’s airport is named after the Ecuadorian poet José Joaquín de Olmedo. Formerly known as Simón Bolívar International Airport, it was renamed to mark the opening of the new 165,000 square-foot domestic and international terminal in mid-summer 2006. It was named Latin America’s best airport by BusinessWeek in 2008.