I realise I’ve been more than a tad slack in the old blog updates recently, but quite frankly we’ve been having far too much fun and had a serious lack of decent Wi-Fi to even begin to attempt it!
We had a very quiet week or so after leaving the party town of Mancora in Peru and took a monster journey across the border into Ecuador. It was all a little dodgy to be honest – we booked one ‘trustworthy’ bus company and they just threw us on another one we’d never heard of! We’d heard lots of stories about ‘gringos’ getting robbed on the buses crossing the border, so we were keen to keep our bags under close surveillance, but the bus conductor was being more than a little odd about where we kept our backpacks…We weren’t allowed to store them overhead in the luggage storage but instead we had to put them on the floor…which is where people generally got their valuables stolen from. Needless to say we spent most of the night alert and holding onto our backpacks for dear life!
A lot of people we’ve met on our travels hadn’t bothered with Ecuador, or if they had travelled there it hadn’t been for long and they didn’t have much to say about it, so our initial instinct had been to skip it and hot foot it to Colombia. I’m glad we decided against our original plan though as we stayed longer than intended and we loved it! The people were welcoming and friendly, the countryside, although a lot of it surprisingly like England, was lush and green and everything was pretty cheap! Our first point of call was a little hippy village in the South of Ecuador called Vilca Bamba that was famous for its hallucinogenic cactus (though we saw no sign of any!) and its picturesque walks. We stayed in a lovely hostel, Izhcayluma, (whose name I can’t for the life of me pronounce!) up on the hill overlooking the village with great views of the valley and fab breakfasts everyday.
View from our hostel
We found ourselves with a stowaway too, Rose from Birmingham, who was supposed to be heading South but we convinced her it’d be far more fun to come along with us instead. We did some fantastic hikes around the local area, one of which felt like we’d just stepped into a scene from Lord of the Rings with incredible views and narrow, windy little paths up and down the hill side. After a week of lazing about on the beach 3 days of hiking came as a bit of a shock to the old legs I can tell you!
Beautiful views from the top
After a week of walking and a lot of movies at the hostel, we forced ourselves to leave Vilca Bamba and set off to Quito, Ecuador’s capital city. Generally speaking we’re not such fans of the bigger cities but Quito was very picturesque with lots of old colonial buildings, large squares and hidden courtyards perfect for spending lazy afternoons enjoying good coffee (finally!).
Quito’s cathedral
In one of Quito’s plazas
We visited the Equator whilst we were there too; there are 2 options here and one is like a Disneyland-esque theme park, only without the rides (aka tacky and overpriced)
…and the other option is a little museum exhibiting shrunken heads (and how they are created, which is disturbing!), large snakes, spiders, the quite frankly terrifying penis fish (no peeing in the amazon rivers or you’d be in for a nasty shock!)…
The Penis fish!
…as well as offering a variety of weird and wonderful experiments on the actual equator line. Some of these experiments involved balancing an egg on the end of a nail…
Balancing an egg on the head of a nail
…attempting to walk along the line with arms out and eyes closed (impossible!) and observing how the water swirls down a plug hole in different directions according to which side of the equator line the sink is on. Clearly, as the picture shows, I was quite perplexed by this revelation!
Clearly in awe…. or just very confused!
We also went to the Otovalo market just out of the city – reportedly the biggest and best market in South America – which was crammed full of as many llama jumpers as you can imagine, all things alpaca, local jewellery and art. Despite our backpacks being far too full already, Helen and I ended up coming away with 2 rather large (and lovely, and definitely useful for British winters..!) alpaca blankets…did we have room for them in our backpacks? No of course not, but we found a way…at least until mum came along and took them back home in her suitcase! Ha! Sadly we had a bit of a dunce of a driver who didn’t seem to know where anything was and we spent quite some time trying to find a waterfall near by and he couldn’t even find the way to the enormous lake (which you could see from miles off!) and our travelling buddy Rose got quite frustrated – what’s the point in being a tour guide if you don’t know where anything is?!
After Quito we set off for Baños (meaning bathroom/ baths) as we heard there was an erupting volcano close by and we, naturally, fancied a closer look! Sadly there was so much rain and storm clouds we didn’t even spot a wisp of an ash cloud – curses! We did have a nice bike ride though along an impressive gorge surrounded by jungle to a huge waterfall which I climbed up behind and proceeded to temporarily break my camera – turns out its not waterproof!
From behind the waterfall
We had a very enthusiastic Finnish lad with us who kindly played photographer for the day (though I can’t pretend I didn’t notice the amount of pictures of our behinds that he took!). We took a little trip to the towns namesake, the local natural hot baths one evening, which was situated at the foot of a waterfall and we got given these very fetching hats to wear!
Human stew!
Helen thought she was being cooked alive in one of the hotter baths and I have to say that I did feel a little like I was sitting in a human stew – it was packed!
Following our brief trip to Baños we had intended to head straight into Colombia but we were swayed by our newly engaged friends, Tash and Matt, so instead of heading North we set off South West (in completely the wrong direction) and met up with them on the coast in Puerto Lopez – famous for it’s whale watching at this time of year. We took a tour to the ‘poor man’s Galapagos’, as sadly our budget just didn’t quite stretch to the original Galapagos, and en route we saw humpback whales, pelicans, a little gathering of giant turtles floating past our boat, different varieties of strange looking birds….
and lots of boobies! Blue footed boobies that is…
Blue footed boobie
We did a spot of snorkelling, until someone mentioned sharks and I shot out of the water quick sharp!
Helen bringing snorkels back into fashion??
On our bumpy way back to shore we saw a little family unit of humpback whales, mummy, daddy and baby which was truly amazing.
Humpback whale
Sadly as we’d gone in the complete wrong direction it meant another huge bus journey and we took 3 buses, 4 taxis, spent 5 hours in a bus station and 36 hours later we arrived at our final destination – Colombia! We’d been looking forward to this for months!
Westlakes Abroad in South America!! 