We thought we had left our troubles in the jungle behind us. So far, we had avoided getting stuck in the mud like the Germans, and we had successfully patched together wiring for the engine with gum and a foil wrapper. We were well into the day and had left the low Oriente and were ascending the mountains on the way back to Quito. If you don’t know, Quito is at 10,000 feet.

I have no idea where we were, but at some point we hit… a traffic jam. Yes, a traffic jam in the mountains. Apparently, this road was also used by everyone returning from a weekend on the coast back to Quito, or field-hands returning from cutting bananas and pineapples or going to points in-between and beyond. At first, it was just an annoying slog of stop-and-go driving. But eventually, our forward progress stopped almost completely. We made it to one turn which enabled us to see the traffic both behind and in front of us. All along the zigzags, cutbacks, and hairpin turns we could see an endless line of cars. We had no idea what had happened.

The late afternoon turned into dusk. We could see people getting out of their cars to answer the call of nature, or in some cases to vomit from a combination of stress, fatigue, and altitude sickness. I could hear babies crying and people shouting. Then, dusk turned into night. We had made little progress in hours. As I mentioned in Part I of this adventure, we were driving Jeeps, and our drivers were very skilled and aggressive drivers, which is necessary in Quito where rockfall is as common as rain. This is where the capabilities of the Jeeps and our drivers put us in danger by getting us way to close to the problem!

Antonio became very impatient. There was no way to pass on the narrow mountain road. Well, there shouldn’t have been a way to pass. The upward mountain side next to the car wasn’t a 90-degree cliff, it was sloped, maybe 30 to 40 degrees. Antionio kept two tires on the road and the other two on the side of the mountain. We drove, tilted to the side in this way, in the dark, until we reached the front. It was terrifying. I kept thinking we were going to flip over. But Cousin Antionio, and the driver of the other Jeep behind us, managed to get us to the front. But this turned out to be the worst place to be, for us. You see, an American oil company, Chevron maybe, was moving a drilling rig, and it was stuck on a hairpin turn. I had never seen a truck this long before. It was a flatbed truck but so long that it had an oil rig, or part of one, strapped down laying on its side. I couldn’t even count the wheels of this monster, but I believe it was something like 14 wheels! So, why was this a worse position for us?

First, we had a front row seat to the truck team trying to inch forward and backward to get around the turn. It was breathtakingly suspenseful. The truck could barely move in any direction, and it had to go to the edge of the cliff every time it made a move. The truck was able to turn not by degrees, but by fractions of a degree with each maneuver. My heart was in my stomach, and my stomach was trying to flee my body. In the middle of all of this, the Ecuadorians had become very upset.

A mass of men had assembled and marched to the front where we were, carrying flashlights and lanterns; they were also waving over their heads the machetes they used to harvest bananas and pineapples. All of them were shouting, “GRINGOS VAYANSE A CASA!” – gringos go home!, and sometimes just, “GRINGOS, GRINGOS, GRINGOS”.

We were thankful that it was dark but still we were in the front of the line of cars and potentially very visible. Being as light-skinned as we were, it would have been easy to pick us out for gringos had the mob not been focused on the truckers. We were riding in the back of the Jeep which made it easy to get below the window and cover ourselves with whatever we could find. Nobody felt like being sacrificed to the mountain / volcano gods of Ecuador. Now we could only hear as the big rig repeatedly shifted gears and ground its tires into the dirt and rock as the driver spun the wheel right, then left, then back again, over and over. Finally, a cheer erupted as the truck squeezed around the curve, and then there was the sound of dozens of boots on the hard scrabble racing back to their cars and trucks.

After many more hours, under a thankfully moonlight ride, we reached home to the neighborhood of San Rafeal, in Quito. There was one more small thrill on the way home. We passed warning signs to stay clear of dynamite blasting areas, which was very spooky to see on our now empty road!

That’s all for our adventures leaving Misahualli, but there are more stories to tell of our time in the jungle, other parts of Ecuador, and the Galapagos Islands!