Driving in Ecuador

We were planning to go to Santo Domingo today, but Tom had some work to finish and his ankle is still sore. We’ll go tomorrow instead.

I drove into town with Tom (my first experience of Ecuadorian roads from the driver’s seat). It’s not too bad. No-one signals (just like Peterborough) and when you’re stopping or slowing down, you flash your hazards. Some cars have flashing LED lights connected to their brakes and some have red, blue and white lights at the back.

The biggest challenge for me is knowing when to be in the left or right-hand lane. If you stick too long in the left, you’ll get stuck on a left filter at the lights and if you stick to the right lane, you’ll get blocked by parked cars. There’s a lot of lane-changing.

Roads in Ambato are pretty good. Just down from the hospital, where we have to turn left to get into town, there’s a big junction of two roads, a railway crossing and then another road and a roundabout. The crossing is controlled by lights, but every time the train goes through (once or twice a day) the lights pack up. Sometimes they are fixed quickly, sometimes, it takes days. I think they’ve been working three or four times since I’ve been here.

The biggest challenge is the threat of a chapa echado (chapa is a slang word for policeman, possibly Quechua, and echado is lying down, echar also means to throw). These are monsters. Hit one at speed and you’ve lost an axle. They are placed on all roads, not just in town, and around 20kph is the optimum speed. Sometimes, there’s lot of warning, sometimes not (or I miss it) and sometimes they paint a thick yellow line across the road and I brake like mad for no reason. The locals all know where the chapas are and which lane to be in to avoid getting stuck behind left-turning traffic.

The trip to town was to get two pairs of trousers made by this old chap who Tom highly recommends. He made Tom a couple of pairs, but Tom asked for them to be so tight on the leg, he can’t get his foot through, so they’re sitting in the UK. We managed to park up on the street fairly close to the shop and I’d taken the precaution of bringing a pair of comfortable trousers with me (that also met Margaret’s specification of looking OK). He took measurements from those and I chose a couple of types of cloth – one a dark burgundy and another a darker brown. They’ll cost me $70 and should be ready on Friday.

I also had a mission to buy an Ecuadorian felt hat, possibly in the Simiatug style. Tom had been to a hat shop for his and paid around $25, so we went there. All the hats were too small, except one which was made from rabbit fur. That fitted nicely, but turned out to be a $100 hat – ¡mucho más caro!

In the evening, we watched The Trench, a film about soldiers in the trenches leading up to the first day of The Somme in 1916. It borrowed a lot from Journey’s End, but didn’t develop the characters as well. Tom and I had a lively discussion about whether WW1 generals were idiots who should have been sacked/court martialled or the best we had and a product of the system.