29.6.09 Quito, Ecuador

Cuenca is the first town in South America where I've seriously thought "I could live here." The Eucalyptus Cafe (actually a top-drawer pub) is the centre of activities, and it bullets its way into the Top Five Pubs In The World* within 24 hours, despite only selling small bottles and charging a nostril-flaring $4 for a packet of fags ($2.25 elsewhere). As always when one finds oneself in a bar in some lunatic part of the world, it's the mix that clinches it; 50% locals, 25% each of tourists and expats seems about right.

Cuenca, outside the four walls of the Eucalyptus, is just dolly. Inside it's even better. Sit at the bar for 2 minutes and you'll be there for five days, laughing, soaking up the live music, gambling on either the next hand of Hold 'Em or the biomass of Mama at table 7, and scoffing excellent burgers. Perhaps even being passed charming little notes from women with daughters old enough to be your niece.

Off towards Quito, and people are pulling up alongside me, waving and thumbs-upping. The message is plain - they love Ecuador and they're glad you're visiting. Magic! One woman nips in front of me at the lights and hauls her clapped-out Datsun Cherry to a stop one inch from my front wheel. I'm just about to start calling her a cloth-eyed trollop when she jumps out, smiling, lines up her two kids next to the bike and asks if she can get a photo. All is forgiven!

I stop in Chunchi for the night because the road ain't all it could be, and receive a delicious and surprising breakfast for my trouble. Some of it involves stewed steak, and then 2 perfectly hard-boiled (ie soft-yolked) eggs floating in some sort of Paradise Gravy. Does it sound a bit gruesome? It's not. It's phenomenal.

And still no interest from the police on the way north to Latacunga. (Somewhere on the way Michael Jackson throws a seven. Ho-hum. He was amazing when he was a kid; then he was mightily impressive up to 1983; then he was a whiny bore; then he was an oddly-unconvicted alleged tot-toucher; then he was a skint, Vicodin-munching, small-nosed whiny bore; then he was a dead bore. Float that down the Thames on a barge.)

A 24-hour head cold turns into quite perturbing earache in Latacunga, so I ride it out in a 4-star hotel ($20), stuffing myself with sickening quantities of roast chicken and watching fourth-rate Hallmark Channel movies about the politics of deafness, in which the deaf characters describe losing one's hearing as "achieving deafness". No comment.

So here's Quito - A jewel! If you believe the guidebooks, you are definitely going to get murdered here, so don't. The dartboard to the left of the bar in The Turtle's Head could do with an overhaul, but the drinks are cheap and Albert's got Rush on the jukebox. Good man Albert - even though you weren't actually there. If you're off to Quito, be sure to get in a breakfast at the Colibri Cafe - it'll keep you going all the way to the Northern Hemisphere (about 45 minutes away) and beyond. And say hello to Walter the German owner; he seemed to be fighting off a bout of Weltschmerz the other night. Maybe he felt bad about beating me at darts with his injured left hand. *fume*
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I wonder if Douglas Bader ever took to describing having his legs cut off as "achieving shortness"? I suspect - without possibly being able to know for certain - that he didn't. I suspect (and I'm open to counter-argument) that he would have described anyone who used the phrase "achieving deafness" as either an incalculably fat-headed bounder or a rat-eyed shitbox.
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*That Top 5 in full (excluding UK and Ireland):

1. The Gibraltar, Buenos Aires (despite the fact that you can't smoke)
2. Norton Rats, Cusco, Peru
3. Champs, Accra, Ghana
4. Eucalyptus Cafe, Cuenca
5. Ruperto's, Puerto Natales, Chile.

Bubbling under:

The Dublin, Tokyo
The Dublin, Ushuaia
McSorley's, Manhattan
The Colonial, Punta Arenas, Chile
Oliver's Travels, La Paz