We got up this morning to be dosed with a cold - the room last night was freezing. We went to a really nice bakery for breakfast and heading up the town to see if we could arrange some sort of tour. We arrived just in time to get a tour of the indigenous communities with two guys called Claudio and Romano. We stopped by a hotel to pick up a group of 2 american families. Some of the group were quite interesting, some boring with nothing to say and some just plain...

We finished packing and brought small rucksacks to the bus station. The bus stations in Ecuador aren´t really stations, more like random places on the side of the road that aren´t even marked out. It´s like by word of mouth they become stations. We wandered around for ages trying to find one and then by sheer fluke got a taxi driver who used to work on the buses. He brought us to someone out in the middle of nowhere where we got on the bus that took us here. T...

Heylo Today we wandered around the old town for a bit. We went to the basilica santa catalina which included a museum with loads of really gruesome religious art, e.g. sheep lapping up Jesus´s blood. It was all a bit disturbing, there was a creepy bed for no reason but conveniently a box of medicine that reminded us to take our malaria pills.. and has now reminded us again. The woman working at the museum showed us out a curtain into a garden which is tended to...

Got up at 5 o'clock to go to Cotopaxi national park. We got a taxi to the new town and met the tour guide..Fernando. There was another couple doing the tour with us from Israel. They had just finished their term with the army which everyone must do at the age of 18, the girl was an officer - the guy wasn´t that committed. Talking to them on the way up they were saying about the dodgy old town in Quito and the stares, and dodgy taxis. This was hilarious as they h...

Got up and had a very pretentious breakfast in the hotel courtyard with a fountain in front of us. Although hostals can have no fan and no hot water, we kind of wish we hadn't decided to treat ourselves to a hotel. We went to the tourist information and found out which bus to take to the equatorial line, the middle of the world. We took two buses, an hour and a half, and it was funny because people kept jumping on to sell stuff. They would deliver this really ent...