Zula Fun

Sorry it has taken me so long to get around to this, but I've found some time and decided to post the rest of the pictures and movies I have from Zula. However, I'm not sure if I can fit it all into one post, I love to take pictures and video of everything, if that makes me look like gringo tourist, so be it. I am a gringo after all and the two months I've spent here are not enough to bump me from the tourist category. The irony is that Zula is definitely not a tourists destination. Nobody knows it exists, even Ecuadorians looked at me strangely when I told them where I was going, no doubt thinking it was some foreign town in the States.

The first pictures of many, these are of La Nariz del Diablo, the Devils Nose. It is called such because of the perilous journey a train has make to descend to the bottom. The train has to go down the face of the mountain slowly, going forwards and backwards in a see-saw motion to reach the river below. I was surprised by the large flocks of Gringos around, we almost outnumbered the Ecuadorians! This place is a huge tourist attraction and I highly recommend the tour.



The scenery on the way to Zula was fantastic. Photos that I took to prove this fact do not exist due to the condition of the roads and the need to have a stable shot to take pictures. I had been told these roads would be the steriotypical mountain roads that every traveler of the tame Appalachian Mountains to the Himalayas describes with similar terms of horror, praising the God who saw fit to grant him safe passage. Narrow, "just a few feet from the cliff's edge", and winding curves are used by all to describe their expeditions. This is what I expected and it is what I got...but a bit more extreme than I had imagined.

The roads were narrow, but that wasn't the problem so much as the huge potholes that made the trip a constant slalom. "Just a few feet from the cliff's edge" did not apply as there was no grassy strip or median between the road and empty space. There was the road, and then there was no road, and if you swerved to avoid a potentially axel-bending pothole while close to the edge you were in trouble. My friend who drove has nerves of titanium and got us there safely, the only moment of true panic I felt is when I fell asleep and awoke to the violent convulsions of the car. To the front I saw a solid wall of fog and to the left a foot of road, everything else was white.

We actually got lost for hours once we got to the more gentle plains of the sierra. We passed family after family of men and women leading slowly-plodding donkeys while the children drove a small flock of sheep or rode the donkey itself. The road here got so bad that the vibrations actually made parts of my friend's car fall off. No joke. After we hit some holes in the road that threatened to break the car in two the family realized that we were on the wrong path to Zula.

The countryside of Zula and the surrounding areas.