We Get Around

 We Get Around  by Locke Beesley

Lots of transportation outside of the market

   We don’t have a car, so we have to find other ways to get around. There are lots of ways to get around in Cuenca. We walk a lot. We take taxis, mixtos (truck taxis), the tranvía (light rail), and lots of city buses. When we leave town we mostly travel on long-distance buses.

     The first vehicle I'm going to write about is a mixto (truck taxi). It looks like a white pick-up truck with a back so you can put stuff in it such as a bicycle, plants, or a table with dad on it because he does not get to go in the car (hahaha, just kidding, dad gets to ride inside). You have to call these ones and they cost more than a normal taxi. And if they happen to come by, you can’t just hail them. And sometimes it is kinda squished because it only has 4 seats but we’re 5. The truck can go on rough roads while the normal taxis can’t. This is what we take to places outside of the city when there is not a bus that goes close.

Mixto

    The second one I’m going to write about is a city bus. There are more than 40 different bus lines that make a web through the city. There are hundreds of bus stops that you can stop by to travel, but the busses don’t all go to the same place. Most bus stops have at least three buses that go to them. The bus stop that we use to go to school only has the #27 because it is not close to the center of the city. The busses usually have plastic seats. 

    The maximum capacity for seating is 27 and the maximum capacity for standing is 40. To ride, most people have to pay $0.30, but you cannot pay with coins or bills. You have to use a bus card and if you don’t have a bus card, you have to pay someone on the bus to let you use their bus card. Students have special bus cards and only have to pay $0.15. Older people also have special cards and for them, the bus is free. When most people get on the bus, they scan their card and it says “Gracias,” but when a student gets on, the card scanner says “estudiante” when you scan your card, and when an older person gets on it says “bienvenido.” When teachers get on the bus, the scanner says “professor” and I think they pay the same as students.

    The buses go really fast and if you are standing up you have to hold on tight. They also sometimes don’t fully stop at the stops, and you have to get on or off when they are still going a little bit. Sometimes, the drivers are angry and if they get cut off by a car, they yell bad words in Spanish.

City bus 

A mixto, 2 city buses, and a taxi all outside the market

City bus

Me on the way to school

    The third one I’m going to write about is the Tranvía, the light rail. There is only one route that has two tracks, each going in the opposite direction, that goes through the city. It passes about 0.5 miles from our house and goes through a series of stops through downtown and to the bus terminal and the airport. There are 8 tranvías total, and they come every 7-10 minutes. Like the bus, people have cards (different than the bus cards) that they can swipe through a sensor and get into the Tranvías. Most people pay $0.30, but kids and older people pay $0.15. You can also buy a single ride if you don’t have a card and that costs $1.00. There are tranvía drivers at the head of the train and there are people that work on the train that go around with a thing that looks sort of like a taser but is actually a scanner, and they swipe your card through it to check if it’s validated or not. On the tranvía, there’s a recording of a woman that always says, “sujetese debídamente,” which means, “hold on, the way you must”. It took us a while to figure out what she was saying, but now we know.

Tranvía 

Tranvía 

On board the tranvía on a quiet day

    The next type of transportation is a taxi. There are a lot of yellow taxis around and you can hail them by putting out your straight arm and moving your hand quickly up and down with the palm facing the ground. Sometimes even if they are free they don’t stop for you, and sometimes they honk at you to say that they are free. Taxis can be lots of different types of cars, but they are almost always small. We have to squeeze into them, usually with dad in front and mom and all of the kids in the back. They have a “taxímetro” that tells you how much you have to pay. After you get in the driver clicks it on and it starts at $0.55 and goes up while you drive. Most taxi rides in town cost about $2.00. Almost all of the taxis have a plastic wall between the front and the back seats with a little window to pass the money through. They installed these when Covid started to make a barrier between the driver and the passengers. Some taxis don’t let dad ride up front, even with a mask, but most of them do. And even in the back, behind the barrier, you always have to wear a mask.

Taxis

Taxi and tranvía 

Taxi in front of the tranvía 

    The last type of transportation I want to write about is the long-distance bus. These are the buses that go from town to town and have cushioned seats that recline. They go to close by towns like Azogues (40 minutes away) and far away towns like Lago Agrio (14 hours away). There are lots of different companies and different lines for this type of bus. Some of them are comfortable and new and some are really old and smell really bad. My sister can’t stand these buses because of their smell. On our overnight 14 hour trip to Lago Agrió, the guy in front of my mom threw up in a plastic bag, and on our way back from Lago Agrio, Robin threw up in her mask. 

Terminal terrestre in Cuenca

Waiting for the bus in Baños 

The bus back from Vilcabamba