the devil's nose.

We finally arrived in Cuenca today. We thought that we'd be here 2 days ago but things didn't go exactly as planned (of course). We left Banos with 2 other couples, 1 that we had already traveled with some and another that we met in Banos. We missed the direct bus to Cuenca from Banos by 30 minutes so we jumped on a bus headed in the direction of Cuenca to see how far we could get. We decided to stop in a town called Alausi, partly because we didn't want to arrive in Cuenca really late and partly because there is a famous train ride (The Devil's Nose) that departs from there. Since we've been traveling I've heard of tons of people that wanted to do it but no one had actually made it on. A game of cards decided that Dave and Charlotte, one of the couples we are with, would be the ones to stand in line at 7 in the morning to get the tickets. It was much more popular than we thought so they ended up standing in line for 3 and a half hours. The train was supposed to leave at 2, but didn't leave until 3. It was much less impressive than we thought. For starters it was a bus on train tracks. They used to allow people to ride on the roof which would have been amazing, but they don't do that anymore. Anyways, we tried to be enthusiastic since we had gone such a long way out of the way to get there. By the time we got off of the train it was too late to head to Cuenca, 4 hours away. I really didn't want to stay in Alausi another night, but that was the best option. This morning I woke up, turned on the light, and discovered a HUGE spider on the wall of our hostal room. It was seriously bigger than the ones we saw in the Amazon. I FREAKED out. Kyle ran and got our friend Barry, he sent me out of the room, and they shoooed it away. Barry said it was harmless and didn't want to kill it because it "took years to get that big". Whatever. I was so ready by that point to just get the heck outta there. We got to Cuenca without issue and had a lazy day today. I'll post more pictures this evening. We finally have internet that works!