Quito, Ecuador

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Quito, Ecuador
After a late flight and a fast taxi ride to my hotel I slept well. My first morning in Quito I appreciated the cool that came with an altitude of 2800m, despite being less than 30 km from the equator. The Old Town is a mass of narrow streets, grand squares, Churches and Colonial era buildings, from the grand to the quaint. I wandered round the museum and then headed to the new town, where I had discovered there was an Irish bar that would be showing the England v Australia rugby game. There was a small enclave of expat and tourist bars and restaurants, the pub was full of drunken English fans who became increasingly morose as the game went on. One particularly depressed expat had tickets to what he had hoped would be all of England's knock out games, including the final! I wandered the main square of the old town in the evening eating street food and getting my shoes cleaned by a small boy who reminded me of a teaching video on Brazil. Early on Sunday morning I took the fastest taxi ride yet, to the bus terminal at the northern edge of the city, to catch a bus to Santa Lucia Eco-lodge in the cloud forest.

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Photos

Museum display of a typical rural home
Compare this to the photos of the real thing in the Quillatoa blog (to come).