Cuenca is not Perú: yes, we are alive!!

We heard about yesterday's earthquake in the news and we wanted to clear it out that we are not in Peru anymore and that we felt nothing, Ecuador is too far. Nevertheless we hope that nothing happened to any of our peruvian friends and that their houses did not fall off...

We are now in Cuenca, the second city we are visiting of Ecuador. Less european than Guayaquil, still it impressed us. The interesting thing about Cuenca and what differentiated it from the other cities we visited so far (besides the garbage bins on every street and the electric stairs in the market) were the Panama hats. They have a tradition in making those gangster look like 1920's hats. As the hats are not in fashion anymore, the craftmen and the shops still exist due to the tourists that still buy them as souvenirs. A dying art that seriously, I am not sure if it worths crying for. Even though the hats suit Borja divine ( he made me say that!!!!???)

Cuenca is really nice, located in a valley, sorrounded by mountains at 2500m altitude. We did not visit all the touristic objectives, though, we prefered crafts to that... So we spent some time in our nice hostal that reminded us of Cuzco and created some bracelets and earings (I will not tell you which is which, we will make a competition for that).

We are now heading for Riobamba, where we will spend the night in the house of Victor, our friend from Hospitality. Hopefully this will be an experience as nice as our first host, Mauricio from Chile.