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 Reading our trusty (if a bit outdated) Rough Guide we discovered that there was a beautiful a volcanic lake not too far away from our route that we decided was worth a visit: with that, we made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.

The nearest town on the Panamerican Highway was Latacunga and, arriving here in the afternoon, we decided it was best to stay the night rather than get a bus straight to Quilotoa and arrive late.  Thus, we had the pleasure of staying in the town, which is not only inexplicably closed for business most of the time but is also utterly devoid of any culinary delights in any shape or form.  Indeed, there were some shapes and forms on offer – those of roasted guinea pig and of chicken foot soup for example – that I was most definitely not tempted to try.  The best meal we could muster there was Italian, Ecuadorian style (which means an Italian made with very wheaty pasta, very few herbs and mysterious cheese).

You can get a package tour to Quilotoa of either a day or longer, but we decided to go on the public bus.  I was expecting a small minibus for the mountainous journey but it was actually a full size coach, which added to the authentic ‘are we going to plunge down this ravine’ experience.  We had reserved a place for the night in the tiny village, which has pretty much sprung up in order to cater to backpackers and other tourists visiting the lake.  Ours was a room reached across a small courtyard, that inside felt like being in an episode of Little House on the Prairie.  There was a wooden stove for heating the room, two beds downstairs and a small wooden staircase leading to another little bedroom.  The main room of the hostel was sparse, but had a welcoming wood burning stove, benches and long tables for dining and, we were pleased to see, four or five other people in.  I had read about people having really lovely evenings in these places, sitting around the fire chatting and having a beer or, for the more sensible, a tea or hot chocolate.  In our case, our fellow hostel dwellers were French and decided that although they could speak English, they would prefer just to talk amongst themselves in their own language.  I tried really hard that night to be sociable, translating what I could for Paul and feeling positive when one or two of them showed signs of making an effort, but ultimately it just felt like they had no time for us and in the end we gave up and went to bed really early.

We took off the next morning and ensconced ourselves in another hostel in the village – not because of the French people but because we could save five dollars a night each – before setting off on our circuit of the Laguna.  We had read that this easy walk should take about five hours.  Before the sun had set the night before we had taken in the view, which was absolutely spectacular, and even though I could see the sharp peaks rising around the edge it didn’t occur to me just how difficult the path would be.  Half way round, I really did feel like I could not go on!!!  The steep climbs were made more arduous by the altitude and the terrain, not to mention the vertigo-inducing ridges we had to walk across.  We periodically met up with some Antipodeans who were doing the same walk, and I was slightly relieved to find that they were all finding it quite hard too!  It was, however, a very beautiful walk, great exercise and of course a fantastic feeling to complete the circuit and walk back into the village.  It took us five and a half hours which I thought was pretty good going.

Back in Latacunga after a much delayed bus ride – we sat on the bus whilst the bus waited over an hour for some ‘tourists’ who never appeared – my stomach had decided that the food in Quilotoa was in fact unacceptable and we got delayed there for a day whilst I revisited it and laid in bed feeling rough.  The hotel were great, bringing me hot tea and checking whether I needed a doctor.  Interestingly, the next day the lovely lady who ran the place remarked that everyone gets poisoned in Quilotoa.  I wish I’d known that beforehand!!  Although Latacunga is not really a stimulating place to stay, I enjoyed chatting to this lady and practising a bit of Spanish, and even did a bit of translating for her when a British person rang wanting to make a big group reservation.  She obviously enjoyed our visit too because as we finished our breakfast on the morning we left, she presented us with two Ecuadorian scarves as gifts – I was really surprised and touched by her kindness.

I was feeling better after a day’s rest and so we hit the Panamerican Highway again, this time heading to a town called Banos.  Again just slightly off our route, Banos sits at the foot of the (active) volcano Tunguraha and is famed for its hot baths (banos means bathrooms), but we’d heard good things about it and decided to check it out.  Unfortunately, a return of my stomach problems and almost perpetual rain meant that we didn’t do much there (we didn’t even visit the baths, which is pretty poor) and certainly didn’t take advantage of the many adventure sports on offer.  I rested, we found some pretty decent food and we just hung out at our hostel for a couple of days before heading south to Cuenca, Ecuador’s third city.  Rather annoyingly, as we waited for a connecting bus about a third of the way into our journey, I saw a news story on the television that showed plumes of smoke rising from Tunguraha – I’m not sure if it had just started erupting or had been for a while (we couldn’t see it through the cloud in Banos) but it was a shame to have missed it.  I should clarify that the crater sits on the opposite side of the volcano to Banos, and the worst that normally happens is that it gets covered in ash, although there are big signs marking the evacuation route throughout the town.  In fact, rather than people evacuating during an eruption Banos’s population swells as people come to see it!

A few more hours on the Panamerican led us to Cuenca, where we stayed a night in a pretty nice hotel, one that actually felt like a hotel rather than a hostel.  Unfortunately it was full for the next night, so we moved to another hotel; we were treated to a corner room on the top floor, although it didn’t feel much like a treat when we had to climb up four floors with our backpacks on.  We had a view over a small square that housed a clothing market, which failed to yield any warm trousers, and until lunchtime on our second day found ourselves lamenting the lack of decent food again.  Then, we stumbled upon a little gem called Di Bacco…here I had a fresh green salad (I never thought I would be so grateful for one!), a beautiful fillet of Tilapia fish with more vegetables, and the most gorgeous chocolate mousse I think I have ever tasted.  All this was served up by a charming owner who spoke excellent English, in a beautiful restaurant; and rather embarrassingly, the three courses and drink were sold at the princely sum of $4.50.  Total.  We left a generous tip and wondered whether this restaurant was worth staying on an extra day for.  As wonderful as it was we decided it would be better to head for the border, and caught a bus early the following morning that would transport us to Mancora, Peru.

Before I sign off I feel I ought to apologise for a couple of fairly dull posts – ‘and then I got ill and we didn’t do anything’ – and just offer a closing thought on Ecuador.  I wouldn’t say it blew me away, with the exception of the warmth and kindness of the hotel owner in Latacunga, which did.  Laguna Quilotoa was spectacular and I know there are many more sights like that around the country; we decided against staying longer though and probably didn’t see the best that Ecuador has to offer off the beaten track and the Panamerican Highway.  I am, however, very glad we chose to stick to the highway and not simply fly over Ecuador, which has shown us some of the most stunning Andean scenery we’ve seen so far on our trip.  And we can say we survived Quito!

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.

The actual formalities were very straightforward, but we did stupidly get ripped off by a money changer at the border (we knew he owed us eight more dollars, but for some reason got confused and let it go).  We were then slightly perplexed at the sound of gunfire outside; no-one seemed to be in the least bit bothered by it, and we found out why when we went outside – it was actually fireworks being let off around a small religious shrine.  As you do.

We boarded a tiny minibus that took us, for an equally tiny sum of money, into the town of Tulcan and to it’s uninspiring bus depot.  We quickly got our tickets – we were told the bus was waiting to leave – but were a bit concerned that we were going to get hungry on the five-hour journey.  We asked the conductor (or, as I prefer to call them, the bus wrangler) if we had time to grab a snack and he told us in no uncertain terms that we did not.  He then mumbled something about not needing to worry, we’d be okay.  It turned out he was right, as a steady stream of food sellers boarded the bus, parading their wares in the aisle even as the bus started to pull away.  It was actually quite extraordinary the range of food you could buy; from handmade crisps and ice creams to meat (no, I don’t know) and potato kebabs.  Having suffered a bit of a bad tum for a couple of days we opted for the safe options of crisps and yoghurts and again we were both surprised and cheered at how cheap Ecuador was shaping up to be.  There is a travellers’ adage that bus travel in Ecuador will cost you $1 per hour and in fact our experience wasn’t far off this – our journey to Quito was indeed five hours long and cost just $4.50 each.  It was pretty uneventful, and we arrived in Quito without incident.

As I said, we had heard pretty much nothing but bad stuff about Ecuador, and as is often the case the bad stuff centres mostly around the capital.  We had timed our journey well and had arrived during daylight, which is a big bonus, but even so we had read that the bus station is not somewhere to hang around so we quickly jumped in a taxi.  Even this, though, was with a bit of trepidation on my part, having heard stories of travellers being robbed either at screwdriver-to-the-neck point, or with a good old blast of pepper spray from the driver.  The guy that pulled up in front of us had a cute girl of about six in the passenger seat – surely he wouldn’t want to rob us with her there, and how many would-be carjackers would make an attempt on a car with a little one on board?  It turned out he did seem to want to kill us, and the girl too, but not with an offensive weapon – with speed.  Our $10, twenty minute ride through the suburbs of Quito was literally the most hair-raising car ride of my life.  It should have taken at least twice that long, but traffic was pretty clear and this driver was not hanging about.  I should probably mention at this point that while the driver slung his seatbelt over his left shoulder to give the impression it was on him as we passed some cops (yes, he sped past a Police van!) there were no belts in the back and perhaps more alarmingly his little girl was not belted in either – she was just chatting away to him happily about her day and showing him things that she had in her little rucksack.   As a good father he was very attentive; to her, and not the road, as we sped through at least two amber lights and one red, nearly getting t-boned by an oncoming vehicle in the process.  Against all the odds though we were delivered to our hotel each in one piece – we paid him and thanked him and were glad that we had survived our first half hour or so in the capital intact.

Quito has two main districts where tourists might stay; the old town and the new town.  The old town is quaint and nice in the day, but practically shuts down at night leaving the hungry visitor in need of a change of scenery in order to get some grub (for which a taxi is required for safety).  The new town has lots more going on, with shops, bars and restaurants aplenty, and a similar reputation for being rough at night.  We opted for one right in the middle of the two, which we had found a business card for in Popayan (travellers leave them in other locations as a sort of ‘recommendation’) and which we were careful to book to avoid being stranded anywhere in Quito.  Our room was simple and a bit chilly, but by far the best thing about L’Auberge Inn was the Swiss Bistro restaurant downstairs.  Decked out with cow hides and Swiss flags, this was our first taste of proper food (read: not fried chicken with rice, chips and kidney beans) in what felt like an age.  Sure, it wasn’t the cheapest place but it was convenient – no walking the mean streets for us – and the food was gorgeous.

Buoyed by our lovely meal, our next day of activity was a trip to the Equator parks.  Not only is Quito the world’s second highest city (at 2800m you do feel it on arrival – even fit Paul was breathless climbing the stairs to our room), it also sits conveniently on the Equator and some years ago a monument and ‘theme park’ (it has no rides) were established.  Called ‘Mitiad del Mundo’ (literally: middle of the world) the park is really just a miniature town with old colonial style buildings, lots of souvenir shops and cafes, and on the Equator itself a huge monument.  One can go up to the top in a lift (bliss) for a view over Quito, and then make your way down through a museum of Ecuadorian culture.  Although I don’t mind museums, my attention does wander quite easily and I must say this was not the most exciting one I’ve been in.  Likewise the park itself held little for the traveller who can’t carry hats / bags / wooden sculptures / hammocks / you name it in their rucksack.  Still, we made the most of the photo opportunities, jostling with other tourists to get a picture of the line, and of me standing on it.

I don’t know when Mitiad del Mundo was built.  It was, however, before the days of GPS.  I can’t imagine, therefore, how annoyed the owners were when, four hundred metres down the road, another park opened up claiming to be on the Equator as confirmed by GPS. It was only by a chance conversation with our friend Henning (from our sailing, and Paul’s Lost City trek) that we even learnt of the existence of the second park!  He said that both were worth a visit, so we strolled off up the road and found it.  The park is quite small and, like Mitiad del Mundo does try to combine some cultural education with the traditional Equator stuff.  Thus, we had a guided tour and learnt about indigenous culture (including head shrinking, which we have concluded is cobblers) whilst also seeing water swirl in different directions through a plughole, trying to walk along the line with eyes closed and – my personal favourite – balancing an egg on the head of a nail.  There are photos in my album as evidence of our outstanding feats that day, and if that was not enough we even have official certificates to prove our balancing credentials!

Although we did have a very lazy day catching up on emails and hanging around our hotel, we were keen not to linger in Quito for too long.  Our final day’s activity was attempting to find some warm trousers that are better than my linen ones, for walking in and generally preventing my legs from falling off due to frostbite.  In the grand scheme of things I don’t suppose Ecuador was that cold, but it was a pretty sharp contrast to the stoking heat in northern Colombia and I needed some clothing assistance.  We trooped around a mall (unbelievably expensive) and some other shops and eventually I found a pair of jogging bottoms that were too long but pretty much did the job as a stop gap.  As we made our way around Quito we had spotted an Indian restaurant that was recommended in our Rough Guide and vowed to go back there in the evening.  We had realised that our Australian friends from the boat would be arriving in Quito that day, and so we messaged them to let them know that was where we’d be.  After a fairly disappointing curry we were delighted to see them arrive outside, jaded from the journey from Ipiales (they had done the same one we had a couple of days earlier) but otherwise their usual cheery selves.  We chatted about our travels – they had no idea that Quito had such a bad rap for crime and had actually been mugged themselves in Bogota – and enjoyed catching up with them while they too tucked into sub-standard passanda.  It is always great to catch up with travellers you have met before, not just for the stories but for the great reassuring feeling that comes with seeing a familiar face.  After saying our goodbyes we all hopped into taxis back to our hostels.  We arrived to find the streets dark and quite empty, which meant we were less than pleased when l’Auberge Inn’s night receptionist appeared to have decided to take a doze.  We stood for more than twenty minutes ringing the buzzer, hammering on the door and shouting before a bleary eyed man came and let us in with a mumbled apology.  My anxiety levels were pretty high during that time as I felt like we were pretty much sitting ducks…as it happens we were fine and whilst I insisted Paul wait until we were well outside the city before declaring that we had ‘survived Quito’, I was happy that that was the worst situation we had encountered.  Well, that and the Grand Theft Auto taxi ride.

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.

We took a cab to our chosen hostel – in a good part of town and near lots of bars and clubs – and it certainly did appear spring-like; Medellin is a very green city and our area at least was immaculately kept, with grass verges and flowerbeds and little park areas dotted around.  Our hostel was one of the most popular (and probably most expensive) in the city, having both a super modern wing and a run-down one, which of course we were in!  We did have a television and I found it hard to contain my excitement when I found a television channel showing the British Grand Prix (even if everything, including the team radios, was dubbed).

In either a moment of inspiration or a terrible organisational faux pas, both Silverstone and the World Cup Final were scheduled for the same day by the sporting gods.  Therefore, after watching the race it was important to find somewhere decent to watch the match.  This was slightly easier said than done as a lot of places were packed and we were hoping to watch with some other travellers.  Some bar-hopping later, we settled on a tiny bar down a walkway off the road, where we watched with a load of Colombians who screamed every time the ball went anywhere near the goal, at either end of the pitch.  It was always hard to gather whom Colombians would support – in this case I think most of them were for the Netherlands.

Later on that evening, we found a bar that sold fairly cheap booze and we decided to drink some Aguardiente in order to celebrate my dear friend’s birthday.  She had done the same for me back in November and it was only fair to repay the compliment.  Several shots later I was really enjoying the music in the bar and decided to go and ask a group of Colombian guys what it was called.  Paul joined me, and we joined them, and had a very entertaining evening speaking broken Spanish and simple English.  It was a fairly late one by our standards, and when we got back to the hostel the Aguardiente certainly caught up with me…and not in a good way…  For once, my appeals to Paul to stay another day for recovery worked and we spent the next day feeling fairly sorry for ourselves.

The following day we checked out of our room and hung around for most of the day, feeling sure we had made the right decision not to do this with a stonking hangover.  We had a small wander around the surrounding area of Medellin and sadly this was pretty much the only sightseeing (if you can call it that) that we did.  The hostel did run a popular tour of drug overlord Pablo Escobar’s haunts, but this was full when we asked, and tripping across town to see anything else didn’t really appeal.  So, we wandered and waited for our night bus to Popayan.

Popayan is an old colonial town famed for having lots of universities and therefore lots of fun young people around and lots of good places to eat and drink.  I can only assume that both the students and all the restaurant owners were away on holiday because, like San Gil, Popayan certainly suffered from a shortage of decent eateries, and was not particularly lively.  Once again our plan to do something active failed when our hostel had run out of spaces on a mountain bike trip they offered.  To top it all off I got sick and stranded us there for an extra day!  The main highpoint for me, then, was the hostel’s dog Ally who was absolutely adorable and who rummaged through one of the pot plants for a stone to play with.  Whilst we were eating our breakfast she insisted we keep kicking it across the floor and throwing it for her – simple pleasures!

Our next and final stop before the Colombia / Ecuador border was the town of Ipiales.  We arrived at our hotel – chosen from the Rough Guide – to be greeted by an owner who seemed utterly flabbergasted to actually have a guest.  Upstairs, our room was cold and basic but was absolutely enormous – we had the choice of two double and two single beds, all in the same room.  Our stop here really was just to break the journey – we had travelled from Popayan by day as advised (it is FARC territory, although even if they do bother to hijack a bus they are known to politely allow the passengers to disembark and collect their belongings before torching it).  Border towns rarely have much to offer the tourist but Ipiales does have one place worth visiting, which is the beautiful Santuario de Las Lajas, a grey and white gothic-style cathedral built into a valley a few kilometres outside the town.  We got up at a reasonable hour the next morning and went to visit, walking down the market-lined path and enjoying both the scenery and architecture (a bit of a surprise really, since we don’t normally go out of our way to visit churches).  On our way back up to get a taxi back to the town we had our first taste of what is actually an Ecuadorian dish; Salchipapa is a mix of French fries (or in this case roasted new potatoes) and little bits of sausage.  Throwing caution to the wind we bought some froma  street vendor and it was delicious, setting us up nicely for our trip to the border.  After collecting our bags we bundled into a taxi and headed for la frontera, ready to cross into Ecuador.