Tuesday, September 28, 2021

Advice For Cuenca

One person's advice for visitors or new expats.

Weather here can be coolish to chilly, especially if cloudy all day and clear all night (mostly July/August though). I'd say that winter here is like early spring and summer here is like early fall, compared to western Washington state. Others say it's like spring all year. If you're prepared for a little coolness you'll be fine, though if you're from the U.S. southwest or Florida, you might not like it. And when the sun is out, it's REALLY out, and you can overheat quickly.

Overall, things have been mostly normal here, despite the pandemic. Get vaccinated, wear a mask, avoid crowds, keep your hands clean, be nice, and you're set.

Some possibly handy tips.

• If you have a small folding umbrella and room for it, bring it and you'll have it at the ready. Always handy. Also available to buy here cheaply after you arrive.

• A good place to buy things like the above (and food) is "Coral Hipermercados". The downtown location is "Coral Hipermercados San Blas". Map

• Also near downtown is "Supermaxi el Vergel" for food and sundries, recently remodeled and huge. Maybe worth a look as a tourist attraction. Map

• Find earplugs that you can live with, figure out how many you'll need for your stay, then double the amount, if you expect to sleep while here. You never know when some dog, some hand-grenade-sized firecrackers, or some car alarms will go off. And they do. All too often. Personally speaking, I'd rather sleep at night than be up swearing. Maybe you too.

• Plan on needing sunscreen too. On a clear day you can get the worst sunburn of your life in 20 minutes. Lubriderm hand lotion with SPF15 sunscreen in it is widely available here for $5-$6, or else bring a bit to get started with. Regular sunscreen can be quite expensive here, but the Lubriderm works for me, so hey.

• Check your bank and see if you can grab some dollar coins before you arrive. It's really hard to use paper money to unlock an airport luggage cart if the machine takes dollar coins. Anyway, the coins are used here in place of paper dollars. With them, you don't have to pull out a wallet, fumble around and maybe lose it - just reach into your pocket for coins. I've gotten to like them.

• There's a branch of Banco Central del Ecuador at the intersection of Calle Larga and Huayna Capac. Map

• Small change is handy, and may be hard to come by here. It wouldn't hurt to bring a roll each of pennies, nickels, and dimes to get started.

• ATMs are all over but to avoid lines I shoot for Tuesday through Thursday shortly after 9 a.m., or maybe between noon and 1 p.m., or mid-afternoon around 3 p.m. as a last resort. It depends. I carry my debit cards only when going to get cash, and go straight home afterward. I've had no problems with Banco del Pacifico (they have a $4 fee per transaction), unlike Banco Pichinca whose machines have hosed me more than once. Others have different favorites.

• Google Fi works, though I'm looking into another solution which doesn't involve paying $30/month just so I can authenticate while logging on to my financial accounts and maybe make one or two calls a year related to them.

• Safety: There are lots of loose dogs here, and some dodgy people too. The TSA allows you to have a container of pepper spray in your checked luggage. I read that as one per bag. Never had a problem. I bring it in its sealed packaging. Last time heading south I must have mis-counted, because I brought two in each of my two duffel bags. Still no problem. Recommended products, see: www.sabrered.com They make a spray that's hardly bigger than an oversized tube of lip balm. Almost disappears in your hand, if you want to hold it and be ready but not obvious, and I have small hands. It definitely stops dogs immediately. Recently a woman was attacked by a pack of them up at Turi. She got badly ripped up. Think about it.

• Going out onto the street is like entering a perpetual festival. Whenever I'm back in the U.S., one of my first thoughts is "desolation". Everyone there is in cars, the streets are almost too wide to cross on foot, and the sidewalks are empty. Here there may also be a lot of traffic, but the streets are narrow and full of other people walking too. Always something or someone to see, smell, hear, or even avoid.

• Also, dogs, again: loose, stray, crapping, barking, attacking. Pepper spray works wonders, but won't keep you from stepping into a pile of fresh shit while out walking, though that in turn is better than being treated for rabies, which is why I always carry pepper spray. Dogs here can get dangerously aggressive with no notice whatsoever. Sometimes just showing a folded umbrella or bending over to pick up some rocks is enough to make a dog shy away, but don't count on it.

• Expenses. I don't have a life. I pay rent, buy lunch and some food to keep at home, and that's about it. I do a lot of walking. Never use a bus, the tram, or taxis. Costs are somewhere between $700 and $750 for a typical month. Maybe $800, tops, if I buy some stuff that month. Someone recently said $2000 a month for them, which I can't imagine, even for two people, but no matter where you are there is no upper limit. You can check the link below for info on the place I stay at, which could be a good place to start.

• And if you don't yet have a place to stay, check out Hotel los Balcones. I have an apartment there. They're friendly and completely, thoroughly, absolutely professional. Disclaimer - I have a financial connection to them: They allow me to stay as long as I pay my rent. Hotel web site.

Random possibly useful resources

• CIA Factbook

• City-Data (U.S. info only, to compare where you are to what you can expect in Cuenca)

• Holidays: Holidays and Observances in Ecuador (and other countries)p

• Cuenca Weather

Weather.com

Weather Underground Cuenca

Keep in mind that what you see on each of these sites is forecasts and that aside from temperature, the forecasts are largely wrong. If people could make accurate forecasts, then we wouldn't need anyone making forecasts because we'd all be able to do it ourselves without thinking.

• Mail Forwarding Services

Lots of these outfits are oriented to RVers, especially those in TX, Fl, SD, due to location and state laws. (That's not necessarily either good or bad - just saying.)

I personally use USABox. They charge $10 per month plus $9.99 for each scan. Forwarding a piece of paper is around $30 via DHL, which takes about 36 hours from Miami to my door in Cuenca. Some outfits include scanning costs but have signup fees and higher monthly rates. There are lots to choose from though.

To have mail delivered to your forwarder from the USPS, you'll need to submit a notarized USPS form 1583 when signing up for one of these services.

Blank 1583 form (PDF)
Sample 1583 form (PDF)

Climate

Whenever I want to go somewhere I check out the climate. A good place to start is Wikipedia. Try this for Cuenca. See if it matches your needs. You can get a rough idea in about a minute.

I check the average highs and lows, the record highs and lows, and the precipitation. That way it's pretty easy to get an idea of how a potential new place compares with where you are.

I especially like this little chestnut: "The rainy season...is characterized by bright sunny mornings and afternoon showers." That really says all you need to know. That's as bad as it gets.

For more detail than Wikipedia has, try WeatherSpark. Look up whatever locations you want, and compare actual facts, one to another, though the graphs and charts require a bit of squinting and close reading to make sense of them.

Not long ago, a gent in Seattle wrote in to GringoPost, twice in fact, virtually wringing his hands and moaning about how weather sites like Weather.com and Weather Underground always showed Cuenca weather as clouds and rain, day after day. Clouds and rain, clouds and rain, and he had had too much of that in Seattle.

Obviously, he didn't care enough to do his own research, but those sites give only a rough, sketchy, blurry summary of what might happen during a given day. So he wrote in and asked a crowd of random strangers to reassure him without specifying what information he actually wanted or why. Many wandering replies in scattered degrees of vagueness ensued.

But anyway, let's take a look. January 10, 2022, when I started writing this here weather bit, for example, was sunny and a little too warm, but breezy too. Lots of clouds in the sky, but also a lot of blue, and more than enough sun to get a good burn on, but Weather.com said "Muy nublado" and "Lluvia, Las tormentas continuarán."

Nope. It wasn't so. Not at all.

Not "very cloudy".

There was no rain.

The storms were not "continuing", because there were no storms.

Weather Underground had the same report: gloomy and wet according to them.

Completely false. Totally, absolutely false in both instances.

We did have some rain the previous night, but that's the beauty of it — falls while you sleep, doesn't become annoying.

Based on my personal, non-quantified, unofficial experience over 10 years, at least 80% of rain here comes as afternoon showers, especially mid-February through mid-May. That's the "wet season". I don't call it a rainy season because it isn't, not to me.

You're more likely to see afternoon rain most days during this period than to not see rain. Maybe five or six or even seven days out of every seven, but 20 minutes or an hour or even an extreme two hours of rain in the afternoon, somewhere between noon and six — well, not bad. And often, things get sunny and beautiful after the rain, and it's all dry again within an hour, actually. Dry. Dry everywhere except the bare ground, and except for a stray puddle or two. All dry. Over and done.

You're out and about, some rain falls, you open your umbrella and keep going or you wait, and then a bit later it's done. Meh.

And if it isn't an afternoon shower, it's something overnight.

Very, very occasionally, maybe an average of one day a month, there is light rain all day. Calm winds, slow, episodic waves of mist, or drizzle, or light rain. It's a nice change of pace. Refreshing. Breaks the routine, and does not happen every month. It's an average. Some months in the wet season have two or three all-day wetness. Other months have none.

And there is no "rainy season" here, no monsoon, no dead gray dripping skies for months on end. In western Washington, for example, the rain begins the last week of October and quits when the calendar reaches mid-July. Depending on the year, you get eight to nine months of leaden skies and brain-eating endless rain, rain that sometimes continues for actual days without a break, but not in Cuenca.

No sleet, no freezing rain, no snow, no black-ice-covered roads. No storms here either, none that I've seen. No real storms. No "pineapple express", or "atmospheric rivers", of any kind, no "high-latitude hurricanes" like you see in western Washington. No winds that blow down entire forests. It's pretty mellow here overall, and the air is even dry most of the time. Too dry for some, in fact.

Even in summer, western Washington is humid, and then it's damp all throughout the fall, winter, and spring. There are those who have moved away from Cuenca because the air is too dry here. True. I can handle that. But it is cool here all the time. Pleasantly cool. I can handle that too, and even better, I love it. Good walking weather. Good sleeping weather. Cool and dry. No bugs. And sunny a lot. And lots of interesting clouds blowing through. And a few rip-snorting thunderstorms, especially in the summer and fall, but not many at all. Nice, nice variety. Not overwhelming in any dimension.

I personally call Seattle's weather "mid-latitude marine", and I call Cuenca's weather "tropical alpine". Seattle is located halfway to the north pole, at zero elevation, on the shore of an inland sea, on flat, boggy, estuarine land, full of lakes, just a few miles downwind from the Pacific Ocean, the world's largest.

Cuenca, on the other hand, is less than 200 miles south of the equator, so almost on top of the equator, 8000 feet up (2400 m), in the north-south "Inter-Andean Alley", very near the tippy-top highest ridges of the Andes Mountains. The city sits in the bottom of a well-drained, U-shaped valley plowed smooth by a long-gone glacier, and it has a nice little one-degree to two-degree slope to it, so the city is well-drained. At times a thunderstorm will get ahead of the natural drainage and there might be a bit of water in some streets, but Cuenca's three little mountain rivers take care of that pretty quickly.

Cuenca is on the opposite side of South America from the Atlantic Ocean, where the weather comes from. Any weather that does make it here has to first cross the whole continent, and then climb up the mountains to get into the city. It loses a lot of water along the way, but since this is mountain terrain, it's fine. We have mountain weather. How appropriate.

People refer to Cuenca's weather as "changeable". I disagree. I call it "unsettled". It's never strongly one thing or another. In a day you can have sun, then clouds and sun and then different clouds and more sun or less sun and maybe thunder and some rain and whatever, all in one day, and yesterday and tomorrow will each be similar but different too, with the pattern being some-of-this and some-of-that, randomly changing. In case you were wondering, a cloudy day in Cuenca is about equivalent to a sunny day in Seattle, and a sunny day in Cuenca can take your skin off while giving you the worst sunburn of your life in a quick 20 minutes.

So then, the weather is never just one thing or another, except that when the sun is out, it feels a whole bunch warmer than the air temperature says it should be, and yet it's always cool here. It's always cool, even when it's hot, because the air is cool, and if things feel hot, it's because you're in the sun.

So too hot in the sun? Try the shade. Might be too cool over there though, unless you're exercising. It happens. Since I walk a lot, I prefer cool dry air, and handle the sun by putting on a lot of sunscreen and sticking to the shady side of the street when I need to, when I can. Others can't handle the cool? OK by me. It's your call. Just pay attention to what you might be getting into by coming here, and then act accordingly. There are other places.

 

Have extra info to add?
If the commenting system is out again, then email sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Recently nominated for this year's Doofus Awards. (Next year's too, maybe.)

At 9/28/2021 08:17:00 AM
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