Under the Northern Star: Road Trip

Driving in Ecuador can be a pleasure.

The country's winding mountain roads weave through spectacular and varied scenery. In the

course of an afternoon you can pass from the lush jungle of the Amazon basin to steep valleys where Holsteins graze on emerald pastures beneath snow-capped volcanoes (see left, and the magnificent Cotopaxi, above). Drive a bit further and you're certain to come upon a dry valley whose encircling mountains keep out the rain clouds, giving the land a rich golden brown color and turning the trees a dusty, olive-drab (see below, landscape near Quilotoa).

It's as if you are passing from the jungles of South East Asia to Switzerland and then on to the goldenrod

hills of California in the space of just a few hours. I've never visited another country that can boast such variety in so small an area. After all, at about 270,000 sq. miles, Ecuador is only the size of Pennsylvania, New York, and New England.

But for the most part, driving in Ecuador is pure terror.

What makes it so bad? Well, let's start with the narrow, precipice-hugging roads themselves, festooned with white crosses to remind the driver that certain death lies just a few feet to right?

This stress is not fleeting. It lasts hour after hour. I recently drove from Quito to the

country's third largest city, Cuenca, in the south, a distance of 432km (268 miles), a bit longer than the distance between New York City and Washington, DC. The trip took 10 hours. The country may be small, but when you're averaging 30 miles an hour, it can feel like Siberia. (See an exhausted me at hour five. "Next stop, Novosibirsk?")

Generally, the main roads are more or less smooth. But almost all the problems result from their narrowness. So far, I've only seen two places in the country where the highway is two lanes in each direction. Most of the time there is one lane each way without any median. If this isn't hard enough to deal with, every few miles the road goes through the center of one small town or another. In town, all traffic slows to a crawl. Even late at night

you have to slow down because you never known when there will be a speed bump just waiting to jar your spine.

They love speed bumps in this county. Sometimes these speed bumps are marked. Sometimes they aren't. It only takes hitting one of these once at 40km/hr. before you become very alert to their presence.

Trucks are a constant menace on the roads. When laden, these only manage a few miles per hour on the steep mountain roads, causing long backups. No one can take the pain of driving 10 miles/hr for long so eventually you role the dice with fate and dart out into the oncoming traffic to pass. (See below, trucks in a work zone, on the main road east of Quito.)

The only thing worse than the trucks are the buses. In Ecuador, when you want to insult

someone's driving you say they drive like a busero (bus driver). It's not that the buses go slow, far from it. They barrel down the road--generally the middle of it--at high speed. The problem is that they stop whenever and where ever there is a fare. Or a potential fare. And, of course, they don't pull over. They just stop. This, unless you are very far behind, will cause you to 1) slam on your brakes to avoid rear-ending the bus or, 2) pull out into the oncoming traffic to pass it. Your choice.

For a while I thought I could just stay safe in my lane and not pass anyone, even if it meant taking all day and all night to get to my destination. But this doesn't guarantee safety either. There you are, minding your own business in own lane and what do you see up ahead in the distance? A bus, in your lane, in the process of passing someone, and heading right for you. And what's the bus driver doing? Why, he's laying on his horn, warning you to get out of the way.

Another problem are the work zones. These pop up without warning. There you are, finally barreling down the road at speeds approaching 40mi/hr, happy to be making good progress and then--just around the curve--you come face to face with a bulldozer. As you slam on your breaks, the car lurches over the bumps and pits as the smooth asphalt road you were driving on disappears into dusty gravel.

There are very few road signs. And when there is a detour, there are even fewer. The message I took from this is, if you don't know exactly where you're going, you shouldn't be driving. Basically, you have to ask a lot of questions. The problem, however, is the iffy quality of the directions. My favorite was the woman in Salcedo who, when asked where the road to Quito was, pointed to her left and said, "It's just up ahead, on the right."

And did I mention that at night, people here like to drive with their high-beams on?

The highways of Ecuador are the great melting pot of the nation. All aspects of society meet and mingle on the roads. The poor hawk fruit and candies from the shoulders, rushing into traffic whenever it slows. When the poor travel they tend to pile into the backs of pickup trucks and seeing eight to ten people--sometimes with livestock--huddled in the bed of a small truck is not uncommon (see left). The lower middle class--commuting to work or traveling to visit friends and relatives in other cities--prefer to ride the endless stream of smoke-belching buses. It is vacation time and the upper middle class, their cars crammed with kids and gear, choke the roads to and from the beach in their Chevys and Toyotas. Meanwhile, the wealthy, in their shiny, silver SUVs speed past, arrogantly zipping in and out of oncoming traffic to pass the slower-moving vehicles, confident in the German-engineered performance of their cars.

But driving in Ecuador isn't all white-knuckles and adrenalin. I want to take a moment to pay tribute to one of the great pleasures of driving in this country: traffic circle sculpture. Every small town seems to feel the need to erect a piece of attention-grabbing art in the middle of their traffic circles. Sometimes the sculpture reflects local pride (like the giant ice-cream cone in Salcedo) but most of the time the subject matter seems utterly arbitrary. Regardless, they are all fascinating.

Here follows a portfolio of my favorite pieces of rotary art.

Maize. The ear of life.

A big faucet.

This one is fantastic. It looks like the moon is concentrating on trying to get some rest amidst the traffic of Riobamba. I can't tell if that bird is helping matters.