Cañar got loud after I cloistered myself in my tiny room last night. It sounded like people cruising around in muffler-less cars, drinking and yelling. Eventhough I didn't bother to look, I'm pretty sure that my assessment isn't too far from the truth.

***

Cold. All night I was cold. I was woken up in the middle of the freezing night by two men yelling at each other in the hallway outside my room. I didn't pick up much too much of what was said, what with the drunken slurring and language barrier, but I did make out that one of them had some rather firm opinions about the mother of the other.

***

Roosters at 6:00. This is beginning to become a pattern. Oh well. I got dressed in the cold, tiny room, hit my head on the low frame of the bathroom doorway and went down to the highway to catch the bus. This time only one bus and five minutes passed before mine came along.

Apparently it costs a dollar more to get from Cañar to Riobamba than it does the other way around.

Time to eat. I brought extra cheese buns for breakfast. Yum.

***

This is seriously some of the most amazing scenery I have ever seen. What a difference it makes to take this ride in the morning instead of in the dark. The canyon this road follows is sparsely filled with fog. The road clings to the hillside which inclines steeply and for a long way, up on one side, down on the other.

This is truly an amazing ride. Picturesque towns perch on ledges and mesas overlooking spectacular vistas. The only things marring this trip are the poor condition of the road and the somewhat daredevil attitude of the gus driver (who decides, in the midst of a windy, rock strewn highway on the edge of a cliff, to pass a slow moving dump truck around a blind corner at 50 km/h? I thought we were all going to die - however, no one else seemed bothered by it in the least, if they even noticed).

***

Well, the bus ride was pretty uneventful after that. At points it was crowded, at others empty. There was a brief period of time where I was sitting next to this one woman who made a point of crossing herself every time the bus passed a roadside shirne to Mary (and there are quite a few). When she wasn't doing that, she was reading my book with me while trying to look inconspicuous. She never said a wored so I don't know if she even spoke English (most of the people in Ecuador don't), but my book was clearly fascinating to her. It was a little odd.

***

Got back to Riobamba at 10:30 am. The bus ride home was way better than the bus ride out. It was worth the extra dollar.

***

The rest of the day consisted of constructing a Harris Matrix for Ross (I'm not going to explain it here - if you're curious, look it up), internetting it up with Laura and having dinner at Pepe and Elva's.

***

After dinner, Ross and I ended up staying up late, drinking beer and talking about archaeology and how it affects one's life. It was highly enlightening and I know way more about what it will take to be an archaeologist. It'll be a lot of work, but it's what I want and I'll keep going until I can't anymore.