Saturday 28th June. We arrived back in Quito last night and were determined to eat outside of our hotel, for at least one of our nights in Quito. We set of for the New Town or, Mariscal Sucre area. We dined at an upstairs café/restaurant called 'Altrio' in the Plaza El Quinde, a square full of Latino life with craft markets and musicians competi...

Middle Earth, crack heads and church bells We left Otavalo around 9:30am on a 4hr bus to Quito, the capital of Ecuador. Upon arriving, we were both in awe of the size of the city with seemingly endless views of small, old houses. As we drew closer to the city centre we saw what is known as 'new town' with bundled high rises and modern buildings....

I wanted to explain more about Campamento Esperanza (Camp Hope) now that I have a better understanding of it. I´ll first start with the school. In Ecuador, the government provides public education through the sixth grade. Officially, it is mandatory to attend through this age. However, the kids must have uniforms and school supplies or they are ...

After a very early start I managed to catch my flight to Miami. The plane was quite empty so I had three seats to fall asleep on. Not quite fold flat business class, but better than it could have been! Unfortunately when I arrived it wasn't exactly welcome to America. Fingerprints and photos were taken and a thorough look at my passport. I've ne...

Who knew I'd arrive in Bogota for a 3-day weekend. Anyway, Tuesday morning it was back to business in the Colombian capital. The streets were packed with men in dark suits, women in skirts and heels, and kids rushing off to classes. The city streets jammed with buses and cars...all of them honking. It looked and sounded like NYC at lunchtime. Yo...

I had managed to wangle a few days away from the boat, so I decided to make haste for the highlands of Ecuador. My first stop was the capitol, Quito. It happens to be the 2nd highest capitol in the world at 2800m. It's surrounded by extinct volcanoes and hills and makes for spectacular views. Since I spend pretty much all my time at sea level (c...

arrive Ecuador by flight, first country in South America

Hey guys! Well,it has been about 5 days since I have arrived and Ihave really learned a lot already! My classes are going very well, and I am quite surprised at how much spanish I can actually understand,and speak! I can definitely understand more than I can speak-but hopefully after 8 weeks I´ll be good to go! Quito is a pretty little city righ...

After a harrowing night in Cusco, where other people routinely got up and left the building every two hours during the night, and where I thought I'd lost the master keyring that has all the keys to my rucksack's padlocks on it, I got up at half five in order to catch the ten past eight flight to Quito. As it so happened, Luise from Amauta schoo...

Hello All, So finally made it to the Mitad del Mundo yesterday and the volcanic crater which was nothing like what I had envisioned. The middle of the world or where the equator line was discovered by a frenchmen is a bit lackluster but I still took a picture of one foot on one side and one on the other for tourists sake. We had a snack there an...