You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, but please don´t pick the Devil´s Nose.

If I believed in divine retribution, I might think that the events of this past Sunday were my punishment for poking fun at the Our Lady of the Holy Waters in Baños last week. Or maybe for willingly associating myself with an activity named for a diabolical facial feature. Or maybe both.
Our reason for travelling to Riobamba in the first place was because I had read about a highly recommended train ride that begins there. It sounded good - the most difficult railway in the world, switching back and forth down an almost vertical cliff face, and even better, you can ride on the roof! Sounds like an adventure, right?
Here is a list of things I didn´t know ahead of time:
1. The train leaves at 7 a.m.
2. You have to get there at 6 a.m. to get a seat on the roof.
3. By "seat," they mean square foot of cold metal space upon which you can sit.
4. There are approximately six million other people sharing the cold metal roof.
5. There are no bathrooms (could have figured this one out, had we thought of it ahead. We didn´t.)
6. There is no shade, and once the sun comes out high in the Andes it is absolutely blazing.
7. The train ride is not five hours long, as the book claimed, but approximately nine.

That said, the scenery was amazingly beautiful. For the first few hours outside of Riobamba, we passed through lush green farmland, where children ran to the train to wave and women washed bright-colored clothes in the streams and laid them out on rocks to dry in the sun. Sitting on the roof was fun, once we warmed up a little and got over the fact that our particular car didn´t have a railing around the edge.
As the hours passed, we climbed higher and higher and the farms around us got drier and drier. Instead of fields of crops, the people we passed were tending small herds of sheep or goats, and instead of waving, the children ran to the train to beg for candy, coins, or whatever else we might feel inclined to throw down to them. The landscape looked as dehydrated and sun-baked as I was starting to feel. Eventually the farms stopped altogether. We tried to hide from the sun, but by the time we got to the bottom of the Nariz del Diablo (Devil´s Nose) itself, we were totally fried and over sitting on the over-crowded roof.
Going down the Devil´s Nose was pretty crazy, and in defense of the multiple guidebooks which recommended this particular trip to hell and back, it is a unique and insane feat of engineering, especially since it cost so many millions of dollars to build and doesn´t actually go anywhere. The planned track to Guayaquil was never completed, despite the fact that the remaining section would have been far easier to build. The tracks are so steep down the Devil´s Nose that the train can´t turn around - instead, every few minutes, we stopped, they disconnected the engine, moved it to the other side of the train, and inched a little further down the mountain going the other way...we´re not sure, but we think they were having trouble getting the cars to connect properly, and the whole process took a lot longer than it ought to have taken.
We climbed down while the train was stopped at the bottom and hopped into the boxcar below. There weren´t any windows in the boxcar, but both doors had been left open, so we still had a bit of a view, plenty of shade, and much more space. It turned out to be a little too much space, actually, because when the train came to an especially forceful stop we were both thrown through the air and landed hard on the grease-coated floor. It was gross and it hurt and we were sure at first that someone must have fallen off the roof, but apparantly everyone was fine and the crowd factor provided a lot more cushioning for them than we had...
By three o´clock, when we pulled into the train station at Aluasi, we were more than ready to leave the train far far behind us and take a bus back to Riobamba instead.
We stopped to soothe our parched throats with a beer along the way to the bus, however, and by the time we got the counter to buy our tickets, we were too late - the bus was full. And here we experienced another classically Ecuadorian moment in the history of transportation. We are standing in line. The line is not moving. Will decides to run up to the counter and ask the guy what´s going on. He returns grinning, and I know this means trouble. "The bus is full." He reports. "Okay," I say, and point to the schedule painted on the wall. "Let´s get tickets for the next one." "There may or may not be a next one," Will says. "We´re not sure where that bus is."
Awesome. We´re hours from home, home being the eclectically decorated hostel room where our stuff is, we´re sunburned, we´re bruised, we´re covered in grease, above all we´re TIRED, and we have a total of sixteen dollars between us. And there may or may not be a bus. We´re not sure.
But then it occurs to me - when is a South American bus ever full? Busses which are packed with people - people in the aisles, people sharing seats, people sitting up front with the driver - will inevitably stop and pick up more passengers anytime anyone might wave from the side of the road and look like they have a dollar to pay. What did they mean, the bus was full?
What they meant, apparantly, was that there were no more seats, and as gringos, we obviously wouldn´t be interested in standing...but of course, if we wanted to stand, there was plenty of space in the aisle. And so we did, for the second time in two days, on a road to Riobamba. At least we made it home.