Down the Devil’s Nose

Riobamba, Ecuador
– One of the true jewels of adventure tourism, and an unforgettable experience
for train buffs like the Dowbrigade, has been off-line for over a month
and is in danger of disappearing forever. We are referring to Ecuador’s
only rail line, stretching 200 kilometers from the Andean redoubt and
market town of Riobamba, through a narrow pass over the spine of
the mighty Andes mountains,
and swiftly down to the major port facilities outside of the country’s
largest city, Guayaquil, on the Guayas river. The route is known locally
as
"El Nariz del Diablo” – The Devil’s Nose.

Long an obligatory section of the famous Gringo Trail, this spectacular
railway has been derailed not by natural disaster or alternative transportation,
but by the inability of the government to keep the tracks in decent enough
shape to make it an acceptably low-risk trip. Reading a recent
article in El Universo concerning the problems of this train brought
back memories of the last time we
were aboard, almost 20 years ago.

We awoke before dawn, in a cheap dive near the bus station in Riobamba.
Riobamba lies in the shadow of Mount Chimborazo, a 6,310 meter (over
20,000 feet) high volcano, the
highest mountain in Ecuador. The top of Mt. Chimborazo has the lowest
specific gravity on the face of the earth; thanks to the earth’s midrift
bulge, it is the point furthest from the exact center of the planet.
Even back then, the train track was in a deplorable state, and the departure
was
scheduled
from
the tiny
mountain
station
of Aluasi,
a few dozen kilometers down the route
from
Riobamba. A taxi to the Aluasi station cost all of $2. We were lucky
enough to find one at that hour.

A few people were abroad at that early hour; domestic servants on their
way to cook breakfast for middle class families, street sellers racing
to stake out prime street corners and market stands, night watchmen, workers
at all-night eateries and bars on their weary ways home. The Aluasi railroad
depot was not even properly a station.  A small office with attached
ticket window and a covered waiting area to protect passengers from the
elements during the rainy season. A spectral mist was rising from the tracks
as we crossed them to buy our tickets. The steel rails shone a wet gun-metal
gray as they disappeared into the mist before even leaving the rail yard.

The ticket window was just a hole in the worn, weathered and warped
wood of the office, 7/8 covered by rusty iron bars with just a slot at
the bottom to pass over money and tickets. There were two classes, which
we knew from experience meant "With livestock" or "Without" We passed
over the equivalent of $4.85 for the ten-hour trip, barring landslides
or derailments (first-class, of
course). Pocketing the change, we joined the 40 or 50 Indians waiting for
the train to pull in. Most were poor farmers, returning to small villages
and hamlets within walking distance of the train route after selling their
potatoes and onions and yuka root at the market. Since passengers were
allowed to bring apparently unlimited baggage, and the railroad was cheaper
hiring a truck for moving merchandise, there were also crates of chickens,
cases of beer, big boxes of soap and noodles and sacks of cement.

Many of the Indians had sleeping babes in their arms,  The smallest
tots were strapped to their mother’s backs wrapped in intense colored
mantas (woven shawls) in the Andean fashion. The adults were sleepy but
seemingly happy, as though waiting for a party or a show to start.

The train pulled in at around 6:15.  At first, we thought we were
still dreaming – the entire train looked like something out of Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid.  The locomotive was an original steam job,
one of the last in regular service anywhere in the world. It was huge
and black, a giant boiler on wheels, a mechanical mass of creaking, whining
metal shrouded in steam which seemed to be leaking out from every angle.
The engine was followed by a coal car, piled high with dusty black nuggets.

The passenger cars also brought to mind western movies of our youth,
wooden floors, sides and benches, with ancient cracked leather cushioning,
taped and patched and sewn so thoroughly it was hard to guess its original
color. All of the windows were open, and the Indians leaned out passing back and forth
ears or toasted corn, corn cakes, hard boiled eggs and some nasty looking,
steaming cups of viscous liquid to relatives on the platform. The party was starting.

We pulled out of Aluasi station at 6:30. We decided to begin the trip
in a normal seat, and climb up onto the roof of the car, as was the Gringo
drill, after daylight gave us something to see.  We didn’t have
to wait long. A few kilometers out of town, and the sun started peeking
from between the peaks, dissipating the mist.

The view was staggering. As much time as we have spent in the Andes,
we are still stunned by the first light of day turning the snowcapped
peaks into a kaleidoscope of colored ice, blue to red to pink to white,
towering above a rich pallet of infinite greens, outcroppings and ridges,
chasms and rivulets all choked with growing things in a proliferation
of life right up to the snow line.

The train was chugging upward for the first stretch, the highest point
in the route being about an hour out of Aluasi, where a narrow pass led
out of the Riobamba valley and down toward the coast. The railroad itself
is over a hundred years old. It was built by 19th century President Garcia
Moreno, a wealthy landowner from the highlands, and was designed to simultaneously
assert the centralized power of the capital in Quito and provide a passageway
out for the produce and particularly cacao, at that time Ecuador’s chief
export. Of course, the main beneficiaries were the rich hacienderos with
huge ranches in the mountains.

The construction began in Guayaquil in 1899, and the construction team
crossed the coastal desert, drove upward through rain forest, navigated
frozen lava
flows and boulder fields, crossed raging rivers and somehow climbed sheer
rock walls half a kilometer high. This monumental feat was accomplished
by a team of American engineers, who got very rich, and thousands of
Indian workers, none of whom got rich and dozens of whom died by the
time the tracks reached Quito in 1908.

Near the entrance to the pass the train stopped at the first of the
major villages on the route. People and animals got on and got off. Food
sellers with pig and chicken sandwiches, meat and cheese pastels, Andean
tamales wrapped in corn husks, cakes and candies on trays held above
their heads did a brisk business through the train windows. We grabbed
our backpacks and climbed a steel-rung ladder to the roof of the car.

The ride from that point on was mind-blowing, Tropical vegetation flew
by, giant ferns seemingly prehistoric, eucalyptus overhanging the tracks,
the occasional wind-blown branch whipping into the awed gringos scanning
the surroundings. The horizon was a jagged jigsaw of ice etched against
a sky of blue so thin and spatial it was hardly a color at all.

If the view was spectacular, the ride was spectacularly uncomfortable.  The
wooden slats on the roof were encircled by a low metal rail, no more
than six inches high. Hooking your boots under this rail was the only
protection from being flung fatally down a half-mile ravine. In the States
a ride like this could never get insurance.

About three hours out we came to the namesake stretch – the Nariz de
Diablo  It is a sheer vertical rock face almost a kilometer high.
Experts reckon the route could have detoured around this obstacle but in
an engineering tour de force the American designers decided to take it
on straight up. In a series of ingenious switchbacks famous among train
aficionados and engineers around the world, the train ascends (or in
our case descends) in a seesaw backward and forward, ever lower, to enter
another in a series of lush valleys leading to the coastal plain.

We were lucky; it was the dry season. We only had to stop twice for
relatively minor landslides, and wait no more than 30 minutes while the
train crew cleared stones and trees from the tracks. By the time the
daylight started to fade we were on the dry, flat costal plain. Our butts
felt like we’d been booted from every bar in New Orleans and we retired
to the relative comfort of the "first-class" cabin.

The last of the steam locomotives was retired about ten years ago, to
be replaced by sturdy diesels (see photo) of Korean war vintage. The
article in the Universo says the current stoppage is due to general deterioration
of the tracks; 80,000 cross-ties need to be replaced along the 100 kilometers
of the route still in operation. These are two-meter wooden ties, and cost $20 apiece. The government pleads lack of resources
– it owes the railroad over $9 million and last month the 174 railroad
employees were only paid half their salaries.

This is a travesty and a tragedy, sadly typical of third world countries
unable to develop or maintain even their basic infrastructure. The railroad
is a major tourist attraction – people come from all over the world to
ride the Nariz del Diablo. It’s a shame some smart foreign operators
don’t take it over and turn it into a first-rate attraction. Given the
current political uncertainty and risk-aversion in investment circles,
this is probably a pipe-dream.  They probably couldn’t get decent
insurance coverage anyway.

article from El
Commercio