Thursday August 30, 2012

Thursday August 30/12 update

The Boys are doing good and gobbling up everything I put in their sight.   Today I will be spending most of my day getting this blog prepared as there are many photos involved.

There are many things I didn’t have time to mention yesterday.   Tuesday, on the way up we stopped in Alausi, (yeah I know it’s a lousy name), which has a great statue to San Pedro (St Peter) dominating the town, and it is the hub for the train ride up the Devil’s Nose Mountain.  It was $20 for the train ride which zigs and zags, backwards and forwards, up the mountain at an incredible grade that defied most predictions.  Many people used to ride atop the train but we believe that practice was stopped after a few people got killed.   We opted to just tour the town instead.

The hotel in Riobamba was pretty neat with a few great decorations and lovely cacti growing in the restaurant window.  There was a bakery next door where I bought a huge banana loaf for $3 to take with us on the trip to see the volcano.

There is a military base in Riobamba with a couple of really old tanks at the entrance.  Miguel explained that there is a lottery now for military service between the ages of 17 and 19.  If chosen, you have to serve a year at no pay, and you get menial duties of guarding things like new sewer pipes waiting to be installed.

Miguel enlisted the aid of a local friend, Bolivar, to help guide us to the local sights and to the best view of Tungurahua erupting.  The trip was complicated, so we were glad to have his expertise.

On the way we stopped at this town called Guano, which loosely translated means Manure, or colloquially, Shit.  So now I can honestly say I have been to Hell (in the Cayman Islands) and I have in Shit (in Ecuador).  Actually this was a decent town with many craft stores, apparently known for leather goods, and a beautiful central park.  Another point of interest was a small museum behind the church which held an actual Mummy that was just incredible to view.

Beside these buildings were the ruins of an old monastery, built between 1550 and 1560, and destroyed in an earthquake in 1797.   We just don’t have that kind of history in our country.  These ruins were guarded by a young llama that didn’t look real, and a big sheep.

I am including a few links to these following mountains so you can familiarize yourselves with them.

On Wednesday, we were up early and waited on the others.   Anne and Michael came down at 7:30 and Miguel at 8, so we had a nice $3 breakfast, packed up and headed out at 9:30.  On the return to El Altar we took more shots of the area and its people.   Crossing the one large river we discovered another “broken bridge” that is now abandoned as a tourist attraction, just like the one in Cuenca.  In the town of Penipe at the base of El Altar Michael paid an indigenous man in a yellow hat and poncho 50c to take his photo and asked him a question.  Then the man began reciting information non-stop until we drove away.   As we rose up the mountain it was odd that the lower part was just a dirt track, dangerous in the rain, while the upper part was oiled or paved.  We could see patches of blue sky for a while but the higher we rose we just encountered more cloud, fog and drizzle or rain. 

We had no view of Tungurahua which had had quietened down over the last few days but there was no independent confirmation of visible activity due to the cloud cover.   We hung around for a while, hoping again that the wind would magically blow this cloud away but the weather got progressively worse.  Like I mentioned yesterday, we amused ourselves photographing the locals going up and down the road with their soggy animals delivering milk to some depots.  It seems that we do not have people living high up in our Rocky Mountains like they do in the Andes, with fields right to the summits.  The differences in climate and composition of the mountains are the difference.   Volcanic mountains are incredibly fertile, so that is why the locals risk their lives to farm in this danger zone.

It was a little frustrating to see the weather again get clearer as we descended.  I took many shots of the high Andes through the van window while in motion and also many shots of the mountains covered with patchworks of farm fields and some of the greenhouses.  The indigenous people are always doing something along the highway and carrying loads on their backs so we get a few shots of them always.   I am amazed how many shots turned out.   There are so many I won’t post them all, otherwise there would be over 100 of them.

We stopped at one town that normally has a clear view of Chimborazo but again today we are out of luck.  We picked up some snacks and kept on motoring.

One of the features we did not like seeing were all the blue “death hearts” painted on the highways to show where people had died, mostly after a long downslope to a hairpin turn.  One location had many, many hearts and that was very sad.  I didn’t even realize until I was processing the photos that I managed to catch some indigenous ladies putting flowers at one of the markers.
We are unhappy that our mission was not fulfilled, but we are certainly happy with some of the other photographs that we managed to obtain, especially in the rain on El Altar.

Today I received an email from NetTalk wanting us to pay to renew our NetTalk in a month.  Here is my second (third?) response to these bozos today:

Further to the email below I decided to call your support phone and was on hold for 90 minutes.   I just started relating my tale to Giovanni about all our prior problems with the two NetTalk Duos and suddenly I am talking to a busy signal.   Since I was not being rude or abusive in any way, just giving the background of our odyssey with NetTalk, I really doubt that he hung up on me but I am flabbergasted that he has not had the courtesy to call me back to finish our conversation!!!!    I'll be damned if I am going to wait another 90 minutes on hold just to have the same thing happen again.

We have nicely requested a fair extension on our expiry date for this unit that was not properly activated until March 12, per the emails below.

We have been nice about this and have had absolutely no response from you folks.

So now you should give us ONE good reason why we should renew???????  

Needless to say, I do not recommend that anyone get involved with NetTalk.   Spread the word.

That was today’s excitement.   Please see all photos at souvenircuenca.blogspot.com.  Hugs to all.