And onto Ecuador

Apologies for the delay

Sorry if you missed us but I’ve been taking a bit of a break from the blog. It was starting to feel a bit like a job, so I gave it a bit of time, where my spare moments were taken up with reading and relaxing rather than writing, but now I’m looking forward to getting back to it. The main disadvantage of this choice, however, is that I am now over two months behind. This is substantial period of time but we’re now at the stage of travelling where we’re having to take it all a bit slower. During our time in Peru and Ecuador it certainly felt like we were constantly on the go. As amazing as that was, it was not sustainable and we’ve kind of run out of steam a little bit. So now we’re spending more time in each place we visit to allow more time for relaxing and taking it all in. So I hope to get caught up a bit in the next few weeks. So now let’s crack on with the second country on our South American tour, Ecuador…

The best laid plans…

One advantage of being so behind with this blog is that it makes it easier to give overviews. Our time in Quito is a prime example.

Our plan for Ecuador was to start in the North in the capital Quito, before making our way south in a vaguely semi-circular route, until we got to the airport of Guayaquil. From here we would fly to the Galapagos Islands, returning to the same airport, before flying to Colombia. We thought that this route would maximise the six weeks we would have in this country. This plan, however, fell apart quite quickly for two main reasons.

The first, more minor reason was that we had not properly considered the altitudes of the places we wanted to visit. The geography of Ecuador is ridiculously varied for a country of its size and this also applies to the height above sea level across the country. Given that we planned on doing some hiking and visiting volcanoes at higher altitudes, we would need to be acclimatised to avoid the debilitating effects of altitude sickness. We had not, however, factored this in to our plans, so whilst our route made sense in terms of direction, there was no consistency in altitudes. This would mean we would have to re-acclimatise at various points, taking time that we didn’t have.

The second, major reason for changing our plans had to do with our trip to the Galapagos. We had planned on doing this at the end of our Ecuador itinerary as it would have made the scheduling easier and we wanted to leave the best part till last. But when we got to Quito, the place where we were staying managed to find an amazing ‘last minute deal’ for a Galapagos cruise. It was right in the middle of our time in Ecuador but was such a good opportunity that we had no doubts about rearranging everything to fit in around it.

Quito

So getting back to Quito, the reason that it is easier to give an overview is that we ended up coming to Quito on five separate occasions, as we did our best to tie together the places we wanted to go. So whilst the first visit was the main one where we did most of our exploring and activities, it wasn’t the only time.

So I have written up the main things that we got up to whilst we were based in Quito and if you wish to have a read about them, then please click here.

In this blog post, however, I want to end by writing about the place where we stayed each time we were in Quito and more specifically, about the person running it. The reason why we first stayed at Casa CarpeDM, was that they have a tour agency attached and we had found a blog that recommended them for booking trips to the Amazon. The reason we kept coming back, however, was the caring attitude of the owner. As well as somehow being able to find us an amazing last minute deal for the Galapagos (more on this in a later post), she arranged for a nurse to come to the hostel to administer a blood test when I had a reoccurrence of the parasite I first got in Peru; and when we were in Banos, she called us to let us know that there was going to be a strike happening in Quito and arranged immediate transport back so that we didn’t risk missing our flight to the Galapagos. I’m not in the habit of mentioning accommodation so much, and whilst the hostel itself was very good, it was not the best place we have stayed so far and yet, we wouldn’t hesitate to recommend staying there.