Cabanas San Isidro and Guango Lodge Quito

... return journey was as smooth as the
journey out.




On returning to Otabalo we quickly had
to find a restaurant that showed the Spanish football, Real Madrid
were playing Barcelona in what was the most important match in the
Spanish footballing calendar and Ruben supported Barcelona... Well
after lots of false leads and dead ends we ended up in a rather nice
hotel were some smiling and persuasive begging from Ruben they opened
the bar and ...

Noch mehr Fotos von Quito :-)

Wir haben uns sogar auf den ach so gefaehrlichen Huegel El Panecillo gewagt...:-)

Von dem billigen Essen sind wir immer noch ueberwaeltigt. Wir dachten eigentlich, Vietnam sei preisbezogen nicht zu uebertreffen, aber Equador gibt sich alle Muehe. Fuer 1.50 US$ bekommt man einen frisch gepressten Saft, eine Schale ...

... But never before have we noticed that we are the tallest people alive!
- They love sweet stuff here - especially ice cream.

Peru next.

PS: Andrew now wants to withdraw anything that may be perceived as negative in this blog as he has just found Ecuadorean tablet at a stall in the street! This possibly makes Ecuador the only country in the world other than Scotland to make the brittle sugary treat. Still not as good as Grannie's obviously.

... the way back we saw an iguana eating a cactus greedily – they are very prickly!

That night it was Joanne’s birthday so we had another mini party and a cake. Jimmy pushed Joanne’s face in the cake a little bit which he said was an Ecuadorian tradition, and a chase around the boat with some icing ensued which made everyone laugh.

The next morning was an even earlier start for what was unfortunately our last day in the Galapagos. We were on the island of ...

... to say I was not that impressed. Sure the streets are narrow, and some are cobbled and what not, but there are a million cars zooming round and there isnŽt really much to see, though the Iglesia de San Francisco looked beautiful all lit up in the early evening. We are still hoping to do a walking tour in between our Amazon & Galapagos tours to learn more about the history of the area.

We spent 2 days in Quito to check out the old part of town which is where all the historic buildings and stuff are and which is quite pretty and to see the "centre of the earth", the equator line about 20km outside of downtown Quito. They built a whole park around the line and the big monument that marks the line but apart from that there is only tons of souvenir stores and restaurants in it unless you pay extra for the museum thats not supposed to be ...

... br>Quito is much, much bigger than I expected. We have to get taxis everywhere as we have been warned that walking through certain areas can be dangerous even in the daytime. The old part of town with the colonial buildings is very striking but you are soon out of that into poor, shabby areas. We are in the new town which is as you would expect full of much more modern buildings as this is where the commerce is situated.

I ...

... red scanner to check we werenŽt disease-ridden feverish swine-flu carriers) and then after a hunt for our bags got into our taxi transfer to the hostel. First impressions of QuitoŽs traffic: mental. Once we arrived we were shown to our room which is pretty good actually, dumped out stuff and went off in search of something to munch, being starving by this point. We wandered down to the New Town (which weŽd passed ...

... After i passed about 10000 people i ran into two white people. They seemed just as surprised to see me as i did them. Anyways, i left my backpack at the hostel, and headed out for the city again. Mostly looking for a nice knife, but ended up only seeing 100 cell phone stands. They love their cell phones more than americans.

The driving is hectic. And when i mean hectic just imagine new york city with no rules. For ...

Post 66 - Arrival in South America

Having overstayed in Guatemala and decided against the option of travelling overland and through Colombia, it was with some relief that our travel arrangements came together and we finally boarded the plane in Guatemala City that would take us to Quito in Ecuador.

On the journey we were able to observe some of the landscape as the plane made its way down Central America. We stopped in Panama City, which, from the air, was merely a promontory of ...