Dos Montañas: Part One

I picked up my motorcycle on Friday the 9th sans paperwork, but with reassurance that I could ride around Ecuador solely with a bill of sale. My matricula would have to be routed through one of the salesman’s friends, who worked at a smaller ANT (Ecuadorian DMV) in a town two hours north called Ibarra, where the administration is a bit looser. On the way from the lot to the hostel, the bike stalled numerous times. Spoiler alert: China is not the new Japan (detailed explanation in part 2, to come).

Saturday morning I set about upgrading the headlight with a high-powered LED unit I’d flown over with from the States. I rode around Quito a bit that day and the stalling only got worse, plus another symptom revealed itself: sometimes the starter motor wouldn’t even turn over when I pressed the ignition switch. Aha! Electrical problems. Bane of my existence.

Saturday also saw the arrival of another guest at Kingdom Kichwa, a New Yorker named Andrew who’d come to Ecuador for two weeks to climb some Andean peaks. He had an engineering background and a crazy uncle who liked rewiring things, so I commissioned him (them) to help me sort the bike out. If we did, I promised, we could ride two-up down to Iliniza Norte the next day and do that popular acclimatization hike.

We got up early on Sunday morning and began to poke around under the headlight cover, where I’d had to mash a good bit of the wiring harness into a tight spot to fit the larger headlight the day before. Then, a gift from the gods: as I took the headlight cover off, a fuse dropped to the ground, which, once reconnected, got the ignition firing again consistently. Time to hit the mountains.

" Dos Maricones, " the owner of Kingdom Kichwa lovingly dubbed us — “*Dos Maricones,*” the owner of Kingdom Kichwa lovingly dubbed us

Chugging our way out of Quito involved a fair few climbs up winding city streets, and the bike’s 250cc engine felt woefully underpowered with a passenger plus luggage. Still, it handled the load admirably, and we were able to cruise south to El Chaupi without incident, save for the brief downpour that left us both sodden. The plan was to overnight at Refugio Nuevos Horizontes, but when we arrived at the entrance to the park, a ranger stopped us and told us the park was closed. “We just want to stay the night at the Refugio,” I implored, to which he replied with a look of utter bafflement and alarm. “No.” We turned around to the town of El Chaupi just a few kilometers back from the entrance and poked around until we found what appeared to be the only hostel in town—La Llovizna Lodge. As we pulled up, I spotted two familiar faces in the window: Michi and Fabian, an Austrian couple I’d met during the Quilotoa loop.

The plan was to summit Norte in a day, which we’d read was easier from the Refugio, but doable from El Chaupi, suffice to say we’d have to wake up early. We told the proprietor of Llovizna our plan, and he arranged an earlier breakfast as well as a ride to the parking lot—apparently, there are no motorcycles allowed in the park, which explains the ranger’s confusion the evening prior. We made it to the parking lot around 9 a.m. on Monday, a bit later than we’d intended, but with plenty of time to go out and back. The trail to the Refugio was mellow and afforded some beautiful views of the surrounding mountains and the climb to come.

As we made it further up the mountain, a crystal clear sky revealed glimpses Iliniza Sur and Cotopaxi in the distance, a volcano Andrew had plans to climb later in the week, an expedition I was considering joining on for.

The final push from the Refugio to the 5,126m summit involved a bit of scrambling up somewhat steep rock faces, but nothing too dodgy, and there were enough guided expeditions ahead of us that we were able to follow the trail. Unfortunately, clouds obscured much of the view from the top.

On our way up we’d noticed an alternate, more direct route that Andrew had read was a popular descent, so we chose to head down that way. While it was less rocky and a heck of a lot faster, the terrain was steep scree, which meant the gravel’s angle of repose was disturbed with each step, the ground beneath our feet disappearing from under us in a rather perilous way. This was by far the hairiest part of the climb, and Andrew even accidentally dislodged a larger stone that picked up terrifying speed and narrowly missed a tour group below. Thankfully we were past that section after only half an hour or so.

Down at the parking lot, our driver was nowhere to be found, so we hitched a ride with an Ecuadorian family in the back of their pickup truck. By this point, I was pretty tired and dehydrated.

Pretty tired and dehydrated, a running theme

Nearly back at El Chaupi, the truck turned onto a tiny road and into a driveway. We hopped out expecting to walk to town, but the family explained apologetically that they’d just be a minute and then would take us the rest of the way back. “Pescado, pescado!” the mother repeated. Andrew looked at me quizzically. “Fish?” I translated with hesitation, and we concluded that we were stopping over for a late lunch. No complaints on our end—we were famished. But after following the family down a tiny trail we arrived at a kind of man-made, makeshift fishing hole, and an older Ecuadorian couple passed out rods which were actually just sticks with a few feet of line attached to the end. “Comida?” I asked the older gentleman, and he shook his head.

Like shooting fish in a barril — Like shooting fish in a *barril*

With little patience for this bizarre scene, we said goodbye to the family and hitched another ride to town. We grabbed some snacks at Llovizna, hopped on the bike, and were back in Quito before sunset on Monday evening. Stay tuned for part two, which includes preposterous Chinese engineering, challenging dirt roads, higher ascents and more!