Riobamba was the next stop after Baños.

We arrived on Friday evening, allowing the saturday to explore the city before leaving early on Sunday morning to ride the famous Devil´s Nose Train. We visited a big market where ecuadorians from the region came in traditional dress to buy and sell all manners of produce and hand made crafts. There were all sorts of fruits & veg (some of which we did´t recognise) as well as many things being cooked on open flame grills in the food hall including several whole pigs. We made a brief visit to a viewpoint at the top of the city which offered superb views of the surrounding mountains including four volcanoes (two active but fortunately not erupting) and a large tiled wall depicting the history of the city.

After being informed that the train wasn´t running from Riobamba to Alausi where the Devil´s nose part of the track is due to poor track conditions we woke up at 4.45am on the Sunday to catch a coach to Alausi. Upon arrival at Alausi a couple of hours later we were then told that the train wasn´t running at all due to a landslide which was extremely annoying!!

We therefore decided to get another coach straight for our next stop Cuenca, a decision made by most of the other would-be train passengers! Cuenca was a small attractive city that had most of its colonial architecture still intact including the old cathedral and its cobbled streets. It also had a nice river running through it and a hat museum where we watched people making hats and were shown the different parts of the process by a really nice guy who worked there. They made a wide range of hats including traditional Panama straw hats, which of course Ashley insisted on modelling the vast majority of (fun times for Tim). To top of our visit to Cuenca we found a quirky little cafe specialising in chocolate, where we tried their pièce de résistance - a chocolate pizza!!

Cuenca was also the base for the nearby Ingapirca ruins. The site is considered to be the most important Inca ruin in Ecuador, with the foundations of a number of buildings still visible and a ´temple of the sun´ still in relatively good condition. There was also a small walk that took us past a number of objects linked to the site including a throne carved into a large rock and a large human face in a cliff that is believed to be an unusual natural formation slightly modified by the Incas to resemble a face.

A special shout out should be given to a couple called Mike & Becky who told us about this brilliant website, we met them properly in Cuenca after repeatedly bumping into them since the bus journey from Riobamba.