Firstly, thank you very much for footballupdates:) Very happy that we won! even is it was by the skin of our teeth!!

Bob thank you for your drinking advise....only thing is I´m already getting fat from all the blinking carbohydrates they feed you here..I´m not sure I want to add to that!!

Despite the advise went out on friday night with my coordinator and then on to a club called "Van Gogh" afterwards. Didnt drink cocktails...jus an Ecuadorian spirit instead. The clubs here work strangely....when you go in you get given a card between a group of you and you have $10 each on it, so you have to spend a min of $10. With this card you then can buy drinks and youcan buy over that. Some how we did...I´m not sure how I think the guys bought some beer...so when we wanted to leave we realised we didnt actually have enough money on us. So we had to go round begging people for a couple of dolars in order to get out of the club!! Was rather amusing.

We arrived back at Shona´s at 4.15am and set our alarms for 5am rady to get the bus to Otavalo. When my alarm went off I decided to try and bargain with it to be quiet..! After I managed to shut it up I fell back to sleep...needless to say we didnt make it to Otavalo!!

Instead, Stef, Shona, Jess and I took a day trip to Papallacta. It was a 2hourbus journey through some beautiful mountains. Was a little scary at times as driving through the cloud disenabled us to seee...I have know idea how the driver made it through, we also saw an over turned and crused oil tank on the side of the road- from the sight of it I dont think the driver would have made it out alive. Eventually we arrived and we climbed 2km to the thermal baths, here we relaxed late into the evening. We played a ball game with an Ecuadorian family where if you dropped the ball or it went out of the bath you had to climb out and do a dare in the freezing cold! I had to hug a tree for 30 seconds (a very slow 30 seconds) lay in the grass. All was a painful experience.

After transforming ourselves into prunes we dried ourselves off and ate the bread and cheese we´d scraped our cents together to afford and then went on a hunt for hostels. We discovered that the hostels were pretty much inexistent and the hotel was $120 a night!! So we asked the security guard if buses to quito ran all night and caught the taxi back down to the bus stop. We waited for an hour, flagging down every bus that camepast only to find it was going else where. We wrapped ourselves in everything we could find, including towels and pyjamas, until eventually wwe saw a bus in the distance and we could make out the words QUITO, we ran into the road flagged it down and jumped on cheering andthanking them!! We got some very strange looks.

The cold oldticket man gave Shona and I a wooly blanket to wrap ourselves in as we looked so cold. He said ´he hoped we could get some sleep.´ How lovely:)

Stef and I laidin today...was a nice luxury. We made some yummy scrambled egg and dreamed of home. Smoked salmon and scrambled egg breakfasts for birthdays and xmas:)

We then took our books outside on the patio and soaked up the first appearance of sun in Quito! Was a really chilled day! Sorry to here you´ve got rain Mum and Dad!! Sounds like you´re having a good time tho, glad you arrived safely.

Sounds like you´ve had a good week Nanna, will be interested to see more amazing work when I get home!

Gillie glad you had a nice time with Caro, send her my love when you next see her.

Back to work tomoro, and plans for Otavalo next weekend instead:)

Hope you all have a good week, and all our well, thank you for you comments:)

Much love,

P.S. To look at photos go on to Stef´s blog because she has the interenet at home so can load them easier than I. www.statravelblogs.com/fannyanne