Quito

We had to leave Miami even if we could have happily stayed another week and here we are in the second highest capital city in the world, Quito.
Arriving at night we swooped in low over the city to land. It sits in a natural bowl amongst the mountains and looked absolutely beautiful with orange streetlights twinkling in all directions. We also got a relatively stress free taxi to our hostel (they didn’t even try to rip us off!).


Upon waking we realised Quito wasn’t quite as beautiful as she seemed the night before, the whole area around our hostel smelt of stale urine to start with (Ahh the city smell of Sunday morning), and the New Town where we are stationed is quite charmless. It’s locally called ‘Gringolandia’ as it’s full of tourists, café’s bars, tour operators and so on but the buildings and streets are concrete and functional.

However, slowly over the course of a few days we have began to relax into it and I think it may well be one of the nicer South American Capitals. The Old Town is certainly very pretty, even if all the museums are closed on a Sunday. We have taken an interesting, if over hyped trip to the equator which was fun for a while, and also climbed the Basilica which was great and had amazing views over the city. Another highlight has been the food. We’ve been getting set lunches that costs around £1.50 for 3 courses with a juice drink, and it’s all really tasty. We can't get a good cup of coffee for love nor money though. In one local cafe we were brought 2 cups of hot milk, and we had to add our own liquid coffee essence to taste. Even the trendy western places can't do it right. Maybe Panama city wasn't so bad afterall.

Another thing that has taken up much of our time is planning a trip to the Galapagos! We had no plans to go when we left but were persuaded by an Aussie couple weeks ago in Nicaragua. The more we looked into it the more special it seemed, so we decided to part with the (considerable amount of) money for this once in a lifetime experience. We have an 8 day cruise booked starting tomorrow and we are both very excited by it. We’ll be without the Internet for a while now, but we hope to update you afterwards with tales of beautiful scenery as well as ridiculously abundant and tame wildlife.

MandB