March 18, 2017
restday Vilcabamba: meeting up with travellers
A restday to organize for Ecuador.
Started with breakfast of scrambled egg and toast at the hotel restaurant, and very nice coffee. Then laundry which might be risky to get dried but necessary, a walk around the square and a trip to the French bakery for gooey cinnamon rolls. We meet three cyclists from Colorado; Michelle, Evan and Ellen who are bikepacking down to Ushuaia. They are headed out today to make for the coast and wait out the rainy season before heading further south. https://fort2fuego.wordpress.com/2017/04/21/southern-ecuador/
At the plaza we find a Mexican restaurant for a nice lunch of fairly authentic (for us Americans) tostadas and burritos. A short walk out of town brings us to Craig's bookstore where we meet a lady who lived in Victor Idaho for a while and now makes here home here in Vilcabamba. This town featured in a Readers Digest article a long time a go as having more centenarians than anywhere else. That brought about a wave of retiring gringos, mostly Americans, that wanted to live longer. With them came modern day hippies and today it is solidly on the Lonely Planet backpackers trail. It has its advantages, like a French bakery, German restaurant and an English pub. It also brings bare chested, dread locked gringo backpackers and a couple of modern day hippy families with long-haired children hanging out in the central plaza.
For dinner we meet up with Dylan and Lawson Reid, the Australian brothers riding motorbikes we met at the border yesterday. We take a taxi to the German restaurant about two kilometers south of town. The hotel here seems like a very nice place to stay and it is reasonably priced. We go for the German "spatzle stroganof" and some nice locally brewed beer. A nice evening with fellow travellers.
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