Hotel Sun Beach Salinas

... the bus back to Latacunga. more spectacular highland roads, also got a good view of Cotopaxi in the distance. Snow capped volcano over the top of Latacunga, pretty cool!<br>I had planned to stay the night in town, but the festival was on during the day, so I took plenty of photos (probably better because night ones would be terrible), caught up on some net rubbish i needed to go, lazed around town and planned to head off to Banos as 5pm. I had heard that there will be strikes ...

... have prevented him opening for weeks, if ever (the gas boiler hanging off the side of the building looked a tad dodgy). The room directly below us had a wood burner, and the flue went up through our room and out through the roof, and the flue was lovely and hot, so we stood around that for the first 20 minutes trying to defrost. The only hot water was in the room below (with the burner) so we had our showers there and got hot by the stove. <br><br>dinner was ...

If Janice Ruelo were a Superhero, she would be able to do the following after living in Ecuador for 1 1-2 months:<br><br>1. Develop an extra good lung capacity due to the high altitude of Quito<br><br>2. Have a high threshold for awkwardly physically close situations, especially due to Troles (buses)<br><br>3. Fearlessness of heights, after climbing to the top of cathedrals, craters, around mountains&#8230;who knows, maybe I'll even join yall in skydiving, Paul (hehe, I know I better be ...

Damn... it seems my post just got erased... wahhhh Anyways... in short... today I didn't do much, but I bought my ticket for the Train to Nariz del Diablo (devil's nose) for 6.30am tomorrow morning (ouch). Costs $11 and runs Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays... you want to buy your tickets the afternoon before the train runs. Gah, I'm tired... Have to wake up early tomorrow... till' next time.. hopefully I'll have some decent pics for next time. word

... simple but my appetite was greatly diminished. I mentioned to Wilson that I was maybe getting a little sick but that overall I still felt pretty good. By the time we left the next morning though I had resorted to merely pushing my banana around on my plate while Wilson gave us a bit of a briefing for our climb. During the long drive out to Chimborazo I tried to get some rest and focus on the task that lay before us. As we pulled into the ...

... Kind of sucked since Salinas was this tucked away little town that seemed really nice. Some Swiss dude apparently came here a quite a while (I can see why, it reminds me a bit of Switzerland) and he taught the locals how to manufacturer several varieties of Swiss cheese. They created a small factory and sell cheese now (really small operation), but it was pretty sweet to get cheese ...

... and halfway to the boat the reel quite working! We could only get a couple inches of line in at a time. I had to haul it in by hand, and even with the drag set hard we couldn´t get the the reel to wind properly. We finally got the dorado up to the boat, and just as we were getting ready to gaff it the fish took off and busted the line! It was a disappointment to all of us. Oddly enough a bunch of dolphins showed up next to the boat right as we were ...

... the professors, surprisingly, marching along as well! (I haven´t seen that in the U.S.) Yesterday, Juan´s mom organized and hosted a Christmas party for about 40 children in the neighborhood whose families don´t have a lot of money. There was food, music, dancing contests and games and each child received a gift at the end of the party. We were able to help out by getting gifts for 11 kids--it doesn´t feel like Christmas to me if we aren ...

Finally i took of direction south, heading to San Lorenco . In San Lorenco i was the only tourist. i had shrimps on the beach and as the weather got ugly, i went to bed early. next day i drove on . along i passed Montanita (13 tourists there), which is a nice beach town halfway to salinas. finally in salinas, i met some folks from germany and us. spent 2 days there. salinas has big appartment houses all along the beach and is the weekend getaway for the Quayaquil haute volee.

... that looked suspiciously like sharks lazing about following us. "Don't worry, I'm sure they're actually dolphins" was the common consensus. Just before we crossed, we looked ahead and saw two huge pods of dolphins (no mistaking these ones) coming towards us on either side of the boat. We relaxed a bit cos everyone knows dolphins are friendly &amp; don't hang out with sharks. Just as we crossed, we jumped in and paddled across the ...