The Great Ecuadorian Road Trip
Didn´t want to put this up without photos, but these computers are slowly killing me. I´ll shove some photos in when I get to a better connection (could be months!)
After we finally got across the border into Ecuador we set off on our merry way to Quito, the capital. This was originally going to take us 6 hours or so, but we turned it into a week. Just for fun.
First stop was Cuenca. The place everyone talks about over here and tries really hard to get to, but we didn´t think it was all that great. It had beautiful buildings and a few churches but after we´d seen them we felt like we knew the place well enough and moved on after one night. Only realised there I don´t have a single photo of Cuenca. Oops!
My favourite part of our week long road trip was eating! That´s usually my favourite part of any trip or activity but this was different. For these boys had everything you could need to whip up a 2 course meal in minutes. We had noodles, dried fish and enough spices to feed an Indian province. On day two of our trip we headed up to Ecuador´s most important Inca ruin. After driving up 3000 metres in only a couple of hours my ‘used to sea level body’ caved in and I left the Incan decendents a little reminder of me! Only minutes after thowing up, we set up camp at the side of a stream and caused most of the neighbourhood (6 people) to come watch us eat. We also had two pigs whose ropes enabled them to come within about 2 feet of us. Not surprisingly, with our ingredients, we made spicy noodly fish and myself and Marco went off to the stream to clean the dishes while Sharan packed up the vehicle.
We did the same thing the next day, only with some hard bread thrown in. That day it was raining so we called into a farm and asked if we could trade some sweets for the use of their barn for our dinner. The farmers welcomed us in and sent over their children with their English homework. Myself and Marco tended to that while Sharan did the cooking. They even supplied us with fresh cows’ milk and insisted on doing our dishes for us. I refused, saying we were well able to wash dishes. But on seeing how wet my clothes were after only a few plates, the farmer lady took over.
Second stop on our tour was Guayaquil. This place gets a really hard time in all the travel guides, saying it´s a dump and there´s nothing to do here. We really liked the place! Marco and I got to know it well, when we walked for hours looking for a good hotel (it´s how we earned our keep in the jeep!). The city has a great water front …. place. Not too sure what you´d call it but it´s a big footpath, and it has a marina, and a shop. We took a boat ride around the marina and they even let us drive. We were the only people on the boat ride so we pretty much ran the show. I´m guessing the evil tour guides scared people away from Guayaquil.
Our main reason for being there was to take care of business. Sharan had to find a way to get his vehicle to Panama. And he and Marco were thinking of going to Columbia and Venezuela next so we had a lot of embassies to visit. Panama and Venezuela were delightful to us, saying we didn´t need a visa and were more than welcome to come visit. The two lads also got a rapturous welcome to Columbia. So I thought, as I was in there I might as well check out the situation. The lady looked at me like I had just told her of the bomb I had planted under her chair. I got a resounding ´Of course Irish people need a visa´. Why wouldn´t we, being terrorists and all? Her eyebrows got so scrunched up I felt I should tell her I wasn´t really going there, just asking, in case anything happened to her face.
(On a side note, I found out later the law was changed in January and us Irish no longer need a visa. OOo I´d love to find that woman again…..)
Last place on our trip was Baños. We were all excited about getting there. How could we be otherwise, with a place named ‘toilets’? Baños seems to be the party town of Ecuador. There´s a circuit of waterfalls, cable cars, a bungy thing, and the circuit is done by people on quads, go-carts, mini motorbikes. We did it environmentally hazardous style with our 4×4. The lads took along two young Ecuadorian ladies we met on our volcano tour, and I just happily snapped photos for the afternoon. The topic of conversation was the rain, with everyone we met. One of the guys working there said it rains every single day, and the tourists complain every single day. Wouldn´t like his job!
Finally, after a week on the road we pulled into Quito. Sharan went off on his Galapagos tour with a friend who´d just flown in from Malaysia, Marco went off to a friend´s house and I headed off into the main streets of Quito, not quite sure where I was going.
Tags: Ecuador
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