The road is never clear! There's always anothe critter around the corner!

 

Why would today be any different from any other of our current totally unpredictable journey. And so it proved once again a day full of the unexpected, unplanned and downright challenging!

 

We departed our excellently located, if a little weird, AirBnB in central Cuenca after an early morning search for coffee and croissants. The one thing we have discovered is that the opening times published on google have very little relationship with reality. None of the bakeries which supposedly open at 07:00am showed any sign of life whatsoever. We departed in good spirits if a little hungry and a little short on coffee. This was remedied at the first service station.

 

We then began to rise, Cuenca being at 2350m and the highest we reached being about 3800m. The weather was crisp, sunny and crystal clear. We rose above the clouds to experience stunning, ‘Swiss” like scenery. The hills are well populated with what appears to be the most extraordinary agriculture, producing product on the steepest fields you can imagine. I can only assume that they are ploughed by hand because I cannot see any machinery being able to operate on such gradients.

 

Having had some tlc in Cuenca, and despite a surprisingly cold start for the Rolls the cars purred up the hills like kittens. Ham’s Lagonda which had really suffered on the climb up above Cuenca on Saturday, running at boiling most of the way up, never got above 85C. The Rolls which had struggled first thing seemed to get comfortably in her stride and Nigel’s Lagonda never broke a sweat, eating up the kilometres and the climb without difficulty.

 

And then disaster struck. About half way to Ambato at the highest point of the journey the locals had closed the road due repair work. Quite what this was I’m not sure but we were diverted off the main road and down into a neighbouring town. The traffic was backed up and we sat and waited for well over an hour. The plan was to divert the traffic onto the old road. The challenge was that the old road is single track and most of it isn’t tarmac’d. Having waited patiently for the grader to do its job and having been told by numerous locals that cars like ours won’t make it  we set off along the track. Single lane, bumper to bumper traffic, dirt track, we set off in first gear and kept in it for the next hour. The cars got hot, the drivers hotter, the fuel began to vaporise and the plugs got sooted up. And on we ground, remorselessly moving forward, getting closer and closer to the original road to Ambato.

 

Finally after about an hour we were there back on the main road, heading down towards Ambato. The reality was that all three cars were running like a bag of nails. The plugs were all sooted up and we were still well over 3000m but we had no choice but to crack on.

We arrived in Ambato definitely the worse for wear. All the cars were running rough, a combination of the off-road crawl and the altitude. The AirtBnb also proved extremely tricky to find which is less than optimal when your car can hardly get up the hill.

 

Fettling involved cleaning the spark plugs and leaning off the carburettors (sh! Don’t tell David )We are once more ready for anything Ecuador can throw at us tomorrow.