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!-- @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } -->After the life threatening 22 hour bus ride to the boarder crossing of Columbia to Ecuador we find the whole town of Ipiales in complete darkness, all the power was off. It was a scary experience but luckily we were with 2 lovely girls that could speak good Spanish and they helped us get across the border. The next bus ride was much nicer, the buses in Ecuador are a lot older and therefore (to Adam´s liking) a lot slower.
Arriving in Quito only 5 hours later we checked into the Secret Garden Hostel, very cool hostel but the owners know it and charge accordingly ($20 per night) & then you have tax on top, after 2 nights we moved on to Hostel Bamboo a really social hostel with roof top terrace. The manager is a sweat lady who is happy for tourist to practice the Spanish with her.
Quito was more of a hub for us while Adam underwent some rapido Spanish Lessons. It is a beautiful city @ 2850m above sea level with lots of places to go out and meet fellow travelers. We tried our luck at some Salsa dancing, Rachel definitely has it over Adam on this one or maybe it was the potent Mojito´s that made Adam look like he was about to fall over, we only had 3!. You can pick up a lunch or dinner special for anywhere between $1.50 and $5 but unless you can speak fluent Spanish you need to be prepared for some weird food like chickens claws as we discovered in our soup.
After Spanish lessons were over we traveled south to the Quilotoa loop two houts from Quito. The bus ride around the loop was quite a ride through amazing scenery of the Andes, need we say the ride was quite scarry at 3000m on the bumpy unpaved roads only wide enough for the bus. Quilotoa is an extinct volcano that boast a beautiful Green lagoon in it, the Volcano is around 4000m high and there are 6 towns that form a loop around it. We stayed at Chugchilan @ Mama Hilda Hostel and as there are no restaurants in the small town they include home cooked breakfast and dinner just like mum´s home cooking. We got up at 4am and caught the bus to Quilotoa lagoon, hiked down to the lagoon in the Volcano and then back along the valleys and canyons back to our hostel in Chugchilan taking a total of 7.5 hours. The country side was very beautiful and different, it was more about the canyons than the mountains that made for spectacular hiking and scenery.
Banos is the adrenaline town of Ecuador, with mountain biking, water falls, hot springs, Cannoning you can hire buggies, motorbikes and cruise around the city or simply hike and trek to the surrounding mountains. We hired some bikes and road to about 6 different waterfalls, we were trying to get to a town of Puyo but about an hour out we decided our bums were way too sore from the hard seats to continue after about 50kms. We tried Canyoning and was absolutely awesome, it is abseiling down waterfalls of different heights, and dropping in the pool of water at the bottom, the highest was 45 meters and the water was freezing. We also went out quite a bit as there are heaps of bars and we found the food really nice especially the Jugos (fruit juices)
From Banos we made the trip down to Riobamba but as it was poring with rain we decided to keep moving all the way to the boarder crossing of Peru at Huaquillas, this is a boarder crossing experience we will never forget. We were warned about getting ripped off and still did! Its chaos and they take advantage of the fact you need to travel quite a way between county'sl.
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