Hola todos
Here I am in Guayaquil again, at Kim's house. Today we went cycling, this is exciting for many reasons - the main one being that I didn't bring my cycling clothes and helmet and shoes and pedals all the way to Ecuador for no reason. I borrowed Tyrone's single speed bike, called La Negra, as it's black (and gold), and Kim went on La Flamma, which is the road bike that Tyrone built for her. If you're not a cyclist, this basically means I went on a bike that has no gears, and Kim went on a bike that has lots of gears. We went on a pretty flat route however, so lack of gears wasn't a huge issue at all. Having shunned the idea of getting up at 5am to miss the heat, we set off at 1030ish, meaning we were out cycling in the midday heat, like mad dogs and Englishmen. It was so nice to be on a bike again after around a month of not cycling or doing anything involving exercise, and the traffic was surprisingly calm on the carreterra, which it tends to be on Sundays. We went around 25k, then stopped in a park and ate biscuits and an apple, then cycled back to Guayaquil and drank cups of tea. We didn't take cameras so I have no proof we actually did this, but I'm sure you'll believe me as it would be an odd thing to make up.
We were going to go to the beach tomorrow, to a place called las Playas to see some dolphins, but this would have meant getting up at 5am to get the first bus there, so we could do it all and be back for the night bus to Esmereldas, in the North on the coast. We have however, shunned the idea of getting up at 5am (a theme is emerging), and after our excitement of cycling today, we're going to also cycle tomorrow, to the island in Guayaquil where there are some animals apparently, including iguanas. Then we're going to go to the non-Starbucks-but-very-similar-to-Starbucks cafe as a reward for all our exercise, and then the plan is to get the night bus still to Esmereldas. Kim is a little bit perturbed by the fact that my overriding memory of Ecuador when I get home might be a Starbucks-esque cafe in Guayaquil.
Here's the update since last Tuesday when I was in Latacunga. On the Wednesday I wandered round Latacunga in the morning, looking at the cultural things there. This involved a strange one-room museum, with some paintings and little re-enactments of Andean people dancing round maypoles and things. I then looked for another museum but couldn't find it, and also felt a little bit ill so instead took a few paracetamols to pass the time and drank some tea back at the hostel. The pavements in Latacunga are annoyingly narrow, which I was also finding stressful. I then got the bus back to Quito. This was an adventure in itself. I got a taxi to where you get the bus to Quito, which isn't a bus staion, just a corner of a street where all the Quito-bound buses stop. En route the taxi driver asked me loads of questions, which included 'are there trees in England?'. Yes, I answered, as there definitely were last time I was there. He wanted to know how the landscape compared, so I was explaining we don't really have huge mountains like they do here, and that our tallest mountain is probably 1500m, so not really a mountain, more of a small Andean hill. He was very nice and seemed genuinely pleased I had chosen to spend 5 weeks in Ecuador.
I got out of the taxi and straight onto a Quito bus. A man grabbed my rucksack off me and trotted alongside the still moving bus and threw it on the luggage bit. I then got on and sat down, next to a sleeping man to my right, and a man reading a book to my left across the aisle. The man to my left immediately started asking me questions about where I was from, and what I was doing - the usual stuff basically. He was reading a psychology book so we talked about psychology a bit, and by the end of the bus journey he wanted my number and to be my friend and to call me and talk in English. I told him I didn't know what my phone number was, sorry. The sleeping man to my right woke up during the journey and asked me the usual set of questions too. He was going back to Quito after visiting his parents somewhere further south from Latacunga. He worked as a security guard in Quito, for a factory. I told him I was going to Quito for a few days, to see my boyfriend Danny. He asked me some more questions about Danny and then told me that Danny must definitely be married, as he is 34 and Ecuadorean, and that's just how it is here in Ecuador, it's totally normal to be married and then have lots of girlfriends too. I said ok, and that I'd check when I got to Quito. I asked him if he was married and had lots of girlfriends, but he said no to both. I didn't know what to believe by this point, so we talked about the landscape. I explained (again) that there weren't any big mountains in England, and he asked if it was just totally flat then. Not really, no, I said, but in parts yes.
The little girl on the seat in front of me kept turning round to give me sweets and talk to me too, she was on her way back to Quito as she had to go back to school the week after, she'd been in the countryside, I think helping her family on a farm somewhere, but I might have got that all wrong. She also wanted my phone number but I told her I didn't know it. She was really really sweet and only asked me a few questions, so she was my favourite of the 3 people I was surrounded by. I asked the men what time we would get to Quito, one of them said 1 more hour, the other said 10 more minutes. I think they often just invent things here, when it's to do with time related things. It was around 30 minutes more, so on average they were about right. When I got to Quito I met Danny and we went to look for a Panama hat for my friend Melissa. She bought one here last year and needs one that is a bit bigger, so I said I'd find the same hat shop and get her one if I could. I did find the same hat shop, in Plaza San Francisco, run by Homero Ortega, who wasn't there at the time, but I did find a very similar hat, which I'll go back to get on Friday before I go to the airport there. I then went to buy tickets for the Devil's Nose train, which me and Kim had planned to do on Saturday (ie yesterday) in Alausi. This is a train that goes up a mountain, and looked pretty exciting, you used to be able to ride on the roof of it and then it closed for quite a while due to maintenance etc and possibly because somebody fell of the roof and died. You're not allowed to travel on the roof anymore. We wanted to go on the 11am train, but there were just 2 tickets left on the 8am train, one at either end of the train. They sell out like 2 weeks in advance usually. Eek. I left the shop to ring Kim and check what she thought. In the meantime lots of people went in the shop to buy train tickets, so when I went back in I had to wait for ages, and hope that none of the people in front of me were buying the last 2 tickets on the 8am train. Luckily they weren't, and I got them, and we figured we'd just ask people to move when we got there so we could sit together rather than at opposite ends of the train.
That was both tasks achieved for the day, which was nice. On Thursday I went to el Museo de la Ciudad (the museum of the city), as I wanted to see if I could learn some things about Quito and had heard it was a good museum. It was a good museum in fact, and I tried really hard to read all the information, especially as it was all in Spanish. It's hard to read fluently when you have to look up every 10th word, but I did learn some new vocab, including gremio=trade, and cofradia=brotherhood, and prendas=garments. There was a reenactment of a hospital, as the museum was on the site of an old hospital, and there were lots of interesting black and white pictures of the hospital back in the days. This made me suddenly think a lot about death and illness and how precious life is, so I was grateful to that section of the museum for reminding me about the shortness of life and how important it is to do things you enjoy/that are useful for the world. I can't remember any of the factual things I may have read about whilst there, but overall it was nice to be in a museum and momentarily feel like I knew some more things about Quito.
After the museum, me and Danny went to la Mitad del Mundo - the equator. This was such a touristy experience, it actually made me feel a little bit sick. That's not a fair thing to say really about an interesting tourist attraction that's also an important part of Ecuador's heritage, but I have been trying to avoid doing anything that makes me feel like a tourist here, and here it was utterly impossible as I was in a group of tourists from New Zealand, on a little tour in English, around a very touristy tourist attraction. The start of the tour was all about the Amazonian tribes, and the animals that live in the jungle, like snakes and tarantulas. The longest ever snake found in the jungle was 12m long. Our tour guide showed us some shrunken heads from the Amazon too - some of these used to sell for 50,000 US Dollars. The Amazon tribes have a secret recipe that means the heads they shrink and the most shrunken in the whole world. This was all very interesting, apart from I didn't understand why we were being told about the Amazon tribes, when we were in the mountains at the equator. Anyway, then we got to the equator, and our guide explained some things about the equator and how gravity doesn't apply there, and you weigh 2.2 pounds less. Ho ho, everyone laughed, let's go and live at the equator. Then we did some eggsperiments, such as balancing an egg on a nail (because the yolk goes straight down in the egg, it therefore can stand straight upright), and watching some water go straight down a plughole instead of swirling to the right of left, both of which it did on either side of the equator. I got my passport stamped with an equator stamp and bought some postcards, and then promptly left. There's a 2nd equator museum, just down the road, which is the first ever place they found the equator, but then they decided it was a bit up the road, ie where I had been. I couldn't bring myself to visit this 2nd touristy place so just looked at the monument from afar, and then we got back on the local bus back to Quito, which at least cancelled out any more touristy activities for the day.
On Friday I didn't do anything touristy, but we did sit in the square and drink coconut juice from a coconut. Coconut juice is really really good for you, if you ever get a dodgy stomach you should drink it. I then got the bus to Alausi to meet Kim for our train ride. Getting to the bus terminal in Quito was really stressful as all the buses and taxis were full, as it was Friday afternoon, so I got really stressed thinking I was going to miss the 5.30 Alausi bus, which was the last one, and then not be able to do the train ride and then the world might end etc. I managed to find a taxi that wasn't full, so everything was fine, as usual. There was a sleeping man to my left, he did wake up at some point, but he didn't ask my any questions. The bus took 5 hours, and then I got stressed as I couldn't find a taxi that knew where my hostel was, but I did in the end, and met up with Kim at the hostel down the road, which is also a really lovely farm. Alausi is a really nice small peaceful town in the mountains, with lots of painted colourful houses. It reminded me of a wild west film, kind of like the place where that person ends up from that famous Western film, thought I think that's in Bolivia somewhere - is it Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where they steal all that money and go to Bolivia and there's a huge shoot out at the end? I pictured myself living there and sitting outside on the pavement smoking cigars and playing the guitar and watching tourists arrive and get stressed trying to find where to get a taxi from ha ha.
Saturday morning we went on the Devil's Nose train, which was pretty cool, but not as thrilling as you would expect, maybe because you can't sit on the roof, or maybe because it goes pretty slowly, or maybe because we were exhausted as we'd stayed up chatting until about 1.30 and had to get up at 6am. Talking of which I have to go to sleep now as I'm exhausted, but will write more soon.
Adios for now pepinilllos xx
Here I am in Guayaquil again, at Kim's house. Today we went cycling, this is exciting for many reasons - the main one being that I didn't bring my cycling clothes and helmet and shoes and pedals all the way to Ecuador for no reason. I borrowed Tyrone's single speed bike, called La Negra, as it's black (and gold), and Kim went on La Flamma, which is the road bike that Tyrone built for her. If you're not a cyclist, this basically means I went on a bike that has no gears, and Kim went on a bike that has lots of gears. We went on a pretty flat route however, so lack of gears wasn't a huge issue at all. Having shunned the idea of getting up at 5am to miss the heat, we set off at 1030ish, meaning we were out cycling in the midday heat, like mad dogs and Englishmen. It was so nice to be on a bike again after around a month of not cycling or doing anything involving exercise, and the traffic was surprisingly calm on the carreterra, which it tends to be on Sundays. We went around 25k, then stopped in a park and ate biscuits and an apple, then cycled back to Guayaquil and drank cups of tea. We didn't take cameras so I have no proof we actually did this, but I'm sure you'll believe me as it would be an odd thing to make up.
We were going to go to the beach tomorrow, to a place called las Playas to see some dolphins, but this would have meant getting up at 5am to get the first bus there, so we could do it all and be back for the night bus to Esmereldas, in the North on the coast. We have however, shunned the idea of getting up at 5am (a theme is emerging), and after our excitement of cycling today, we're going to also cycle tomorrow, to the island in Guayaquil where there are some animals apparently, including iguanas. Then we're going to go to the non-Starbucks-but-very-similar-to-Starbucks cafe as a reward for all our exercise, and then the plan is to get the night bus still to Esmereldas. Kim is a little bit perturbed by the fact that my overriding memory of Ecuador when I get home might be a Starbucks-esque cafe in Guayaquil.
Here's the update since last Tuesday when I was in Latacunga. On the Wednesday I wandered round Latacunga in the morning, looking at the cultural things there. This involved a strange one-room museum, with some paintings and little re-enactments of Andean people dancing round maypoles and things. I then looked for another museum but couldn't find it, and also felt a little bit ill so instead took a few paracetamols to pass the time and drank some tea back at the hostel. The pavements in Latacunga are annoyingly narrow, which I was also finding stressful. I then got the bus back to Quito. This was an adventure in itself. I got a taxi to where you get the bus to Quito, which isn't a bus staion, just a corner of a street where all the Quito-bound buses stop. En route the taxi driver asked me loads of questions, which included 'are there trees in England?'. Yes, I answered, as there definitely were last time I was there. He wanted to know how the landscape compared, so I was explaining we don't really have huge mountains like they do here, and that our tallest mountain is probably 1500m, so not really a mountain, more of a small Andean hill. He was very nice and seemed genuinely pleased I had chosen to spend 5 weeks in Ecuador.
I got out of the taxi and straight onto a Quito bus. A man grabbed my rucksack off me and trotted alongside the still moving bus and threw it on the luggage bit. I then got on and sat down, next to a sleeping man to my right, and a man reading a book to my left across the aisle. The man to my left immediately started asking me questions about where I was from, and what I was doing - the usual stuff basically. He was reading a psychology book so we talked about psychology a bit, and by the end of the bus journey he wanted my number and to be my friend and to call me and talk in English. I told him I didn't know what my phone number was, sorry. The sleeping man to my right woke up during the journey and asked me the usual set of questions too. He was going back to Quito after visiting his parents somewhere further south from Latacunga. He worked as a security guard in Quito, for a factory. I told him I was going to Quito for a few days, to see my boyfriend Danny. He asked me some more questions about Danny and then told me that Danny must definitely be married, as he is 34 and Ecuadorean, and that's just how it is here in Ecuador, it's totally normal to be married and then have lots of girlfriends too. I said ok, and that I'd check when I got to Quito. I asked him if he was married and had lots of girlfriends, but he said no to both. I didn't know what to believe by this point, so we talked about the landscape. I explained (again) that there weren't any big mountains in England, and he asked if it was just totally flat then. Not really, no, I said, but in parts yes.
The little girl on the seat in front of me kept turning round to give me sweets and talk to me too, she was on her way back to Quito as she had to go back to school the week after, she'd been in the countryside, I think helping her family on a farm somewhere, but I might have got that all wrong. She also wanted my phone number but I told her I didn't know it. She was really really sweet and only asked me a few questions, so she was my favourite of the 3 people I was surrounded by. I asked the men what time we would get to Quito, one of them said 1 more hour, the other said 10 more minutes. I think they often just invent things here, when it's to do with time related things. It was around 30 minutes more, so on average they were about right. When I got to Quito I met Danny and we went to look for a Panama hat for my friend Melissa. She bought one here last year and needs one that is a bit bigger, so I said I'd find the same hat shop and get her one if I could. I did find the same hat shop, in Plaza San Francisco, run by Homero Ortega, who wasn't there at the time, but I did find a very similar hat, which I'll go back to get on Friday before I go to the airport there. I then went to buy tickets for the Devil's Nose train, which me and Kim had planned to do on Saturday (ie yesterday) in Alausi. This is a train that goes up a mountain, and looked pretty exciting, you used to be able to ride on the roof of it and then it closed for quite a while due to maintenance etc and possibly because somebody fell of the roof and died. You're not allowed to travel on the roof anymore. We wanted to go on the 11am train, but there were just 2 tickets left on the 8am train, one at either end of the train. They sell out like 2 weeks in advance usually. Eek. I left the shop to ring Kim and check what she thought. In the meantime lots of people went in the shop to buy train tickets, so when I went back in I had to wait for ages, and hope that none of the people in front of me were buying the last 2 tickets on the 8am train. Luckily they weren't, and I got them, and we figured we'd just ask people to move when we got there so we could sit together rather than at opposite ends of the train.
That was both tasks achieved for the day, which was nice. On Thursday I went to el Museo de la Ciudad (the museum of the city), as I wanted to see if I could learn some things about Quito and had heard it was a good museum. It was a good museum in fact, and I tried really hard to read all the information, especially as it was all in Spanish. It's hard to read fluently when you have to look up every 10th word, but I did learn some new vocab, including gremio=trade, and cofradia=brotherhood, and prendas=garments. There was a reenactment of a hospital, as the museum was on the site of an old hospital, and there were lots of interesting black and white pictures of the hospital back in the days. This made me suddenly think a lot about death and illness and how precious life is, so I was grateful to that section of the museum for reminding me about the shortness of life and how important it is to do things you enjoy/that are useful for the world. I can't remember any of the factual things I may have read about whilst there, but overall it was nice to be in a museum and momentarily feel like I knew some more things about Quito.
After the museum, me and Danny went to la Mitad del Mundo - the equator. This was such a touristy experience, it actually made me feel a little bit sick. That's not a fair thing to say really about an interesting tourist attraction that's also an important part of Ecuador's heritage, but I have been trying to avoid doing anything that makes me feel like a tourist here, and here it was utterly impossible as I was in a group of tourists from New Zealand, on a little tour in English, around a very touristy tourist attraction. The start of the tour was all about the Amazonian tribes, and the animals that live in the jungle, like snakes and tarantulas. The longest ever snake found in the jungle was 12m long. Our tour guide showed us some shrunken heads from the Amazon too - some of these used to sell for 50,000 US Dollars. The Amazon tribes have a secret recipe that means the heads they shrink and the most shrunken in the whole world. This was all very interesting, apart from I didn't understand why we were being told about the Amazon tribes, when we were in the mountains at the equator. Anyway, then we got to the equator, and our guide explained some things about the equator and how gravity doesn't apply there, and you weigh 2.2 pounds less. Ho ho, everyone laughed, let's go and live at the equator. Then we did some eggsperiments, such as balancing an egg on a nail (because the yolk goes straight down in the egg, it therefore can stand straight upright), and watching some water go straight down a plughole instead of swirling to the right of left, both of which it did on either side of the equator. I got my passport stamped with an equator stamp and bought some postcards, and then promptly left. There's a 2nd equator museum, just down the road, which is the first ever place they found the equator, but then they decided it was a bit up the road, ie where I had been. I couldn't bring myself to visit this 2nd touristy place so just looked at the monument from afar, and then we got back on the local bus back to Quito, which at least cancelled out any more touristy activities for the day.
On Friday I didn't do anything touristy, but we did sit in the square and drink coconut juice from a coconut. Coconut juice is really really good for you, if you ever get a dodgy stomach you should drink it. I then got the bus to Alausi to meet Kim for our train ride. Getting to the bus terminal in Quito was really stressful as all the buses and taxis were full, as it was Friday afternoon, so I got really stressed thinking I was going to miss the 5.30 Alausi bus, which was the last one, and then not be able to do the train ride and then the world might end etc. I managed to find a taxi that wasn't full, so everything was fine, as usual. There was a sleeping man to my left, he did wake up at some point, but he didn't ask my any questions. The bus took 5 hours, and then I got stressed as I couldn't find a taxi that knew where my hostel was, but I did in the end, and met up with Kim at the hostel down the road, which is also a really lovely farm. Alausi is a really nice small peaceful town in the mountains, with lots of painted colourful houses. It reminded me of a wild west film, kind of like the place where that person ends up from that famous Western film, thought I think that's in Bolivia somewhere - is it Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where they steal all that money and go to Bolivia and there's a huge shoot out at the end? I pictured myself living there and sitting outside on the pavement smoking cigars and playing the guitar and watching tourists arrive and get stressed trying to find where to get a taxi from ha ha.
Saturday morning we went on the Devil's Nose train, which was pretty cool, but not as thrilling as you would expect, maybe because you can't sit on the roof, or maybe because it goes pretty slowly, or maybe because we were exhausted as we'd stayed up chatting until about 1.30 and had to get up at 6am. Talking of which I have to go to sleep now as I'm exhausted, but will write more soon.
Adios for now pepinilllos xx
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