Today we said goodbye to the awesome waterfall filled, cliff riddled, volcano looming landscape of Banos. I went and took a couple of photos from the bridge on the edge of town before we left because I knew we would be on a direct 8 hour bus to Cuenca all day. Or so we thought.
I bought our tickets and was instantly suspicious that our bus wasn’t actually going to be going straight through to Cuenca. The woman assured me that it would and it would take 8 hours. However we were only 2 hours into the trip when we were kicked off at Riobamba station and told we would have to change busses for the extra 6 hour journey. The bus driver took us to the other bus but discovered it was full. So we would have to wait another 3 hours for the next bus.
We killed the hours with a couple from Croatia who had been tricked into buying the same ticket and finally after 3 hours or so we threw our bags under the bus and boarded at 3.30pm. About 1 hour into the trip I noticed a strong garlic smell wafting through the bus, and it lingered for the next 5 hours until we arrived into Cuenca. When the driver opened the baggage compartment it became clear that the garlic smell had been coming from several huge hessian sacks stored under the bus, which our bags had been sitting on top of for the past 6 hours.
Everything we own now smells like garlic. At our hostel we couldn’t even leave the bags inside the room because of the super strong odour. At least the Vampires won’t be getting us.
