Quito, Ecuador

  Quito, Ecuador
Saturday, March 3, 2007

Quito... ECUAAADOORR!

South America at last and the final leg, a big feck off leg, of our journey!

The flight from Panama was only 1 hour long so it was a doddle. Also, both Panama and Ecuador have the US Dollar as their offical currency, which was nice and handy.

To put it nice and simply, Quito is defo one of our favourite cities in the world. Initially we found it difficult to adjust to the altitude (nealry 2000 metres above sea level), but after 3 days we easily found our feets. The city is divided into two areas, well, the areas with something to see, the Old Town and the New Town.

The Old Town, well, is... Old, and it was real cool just wandering around the streets and seeing all the old buildings alongside all the old woman in their traditional gear, felt hats n all.
There are buckets of little shops, from the flag making shop to the little shop selling reels of thread.

The New Town is really the place for the tourists, its the place with all the fancy restaurants, internet gaffs, fancy hotels and tour agencies. Its a nice place, but to be honest not much of interest unless you want to eat, surf the net or book a tour.

The transport system around the city was real easy to use and real cheap too, we went from the city centre to the Equator line, Mitad del Mundo (28kms away), for only 80c each. That kind of value certainly beats the bus fare on the Number 3 to Ballyphehane any day of the week.

04 The Ecuator line...Mitad del Mundo

The Equator Line was really brill. They have a big monument thingy (see pix) erected, but this is not actually ON the line, its about 250m off!!! Down the road from the "tourist attraction" is a cool museum, that really is ON the equator. They had nifty little experiments, like balancing an egg on the top of a nail (apparantly you can only do this on the equator line, could somebody please try that at home and let us know), and we also got to see the water going down the sink in different directions... it was wierd n trippy seeing that one in action.

So, our first impression of Ecuador .... tis a cool gaff, like!