Latacunga, Laguna and laying in bed
Beautiful Laguna Quilotoa. Click on the photo to see my Ecuador album.
Ecuador had been pleasant enough so far, the were people friendly and Quito was not as universally threatening as I had let myself believe. We were, however, basically just on a mission to pass through the country. Reading our trusty (if a bit outdated) Rough Guide we discovered that there was a beautiful a volcanic lake not too far away from our route that we decided was worth a visit: with that, we made Laguna Quilotoa our next stop. Continue Reading »
Walking the line
Me walking the (equatorial) line. Click on the image to see my Ecuador album.
We didn’t really want to go to Ecuador. Although it was somewhere I’d seen on a documentary as a child and wanted to visit in a vague, ‘that’s a faraway place’ kind of way, we’d both been seriously put off the place as we’d heard pretty much nothing but bad stories about it. We had looked into flying over it, in the same way that we had avoided the bandit-heavy desert in Mexico, but flights were too expensive here – they can be worthwhile and sometimes even cheaper than taking a (decent) bus internally, but as soon as you cross international borders by plane here the price shoots up. So, we braced ourselves and headed off in the taxi towards the Colombia / Ecuador border. Continue Reading »
Medellin and beyond
Santuario de Las Lajas, near Ipiales. Click to see my Colombia album.
Both Medellin and Colombia’s capital Bogota share a pretty shady past, with violence between rival drug cartels blighting their history and making them no-go areas for many years. Both have managed to shake off this association to a great extent and although we skipped Bogota in the end (capital cities never really appeal, with the obvious exception of London and the possible one of Bangkok) we decided to see for ourselves in Medellin, which is known as the City of Eternal Spring. Continue Reading »
