Advertisement
Published: February 11th 2011
Edit Blog Post
Had an uneventful journey from Guayaquil to Quito took the bus again as the women said it would take 8 hours it didn't it took 10 because what she actually said was that it would arrive at 8pm, got to sort this Spanish out. Sat next to a little old lady she was only tiny but my god that women could take up space never known anyone fidget so much. Picked up a very friendly taxi driver from the station to the hotel who sang to me the whole way!! Not sure if thats always part of the service but thought it warranted a small tip.
Staying in Quito old town which is all very Spanish colonial and has had a lot of work done on it to smarten up all the buildings. Went to the Basillica where you can climb a long winding staircase that brings you out in the space between the top side of the domed ceiling and the roof. After that its along a gangplank and up a ladder and through a hole out onto a small area high up on the roof. From there its up another rickety old ladder/staircase that leads up one of
the buttress/ towers. Got about half way before I decided I'm not as brave as I thought and being down to my last clean pair of underpants decided I'd like to keep them that way and came back down.
On my way back from there to my hotel after what had been a really nice few days it all went a bit sour. As I was walking under a balcony someone threw what at first I thought was water at me but quickly realized was....I'll call it stuff as neither the blog nor my mother like bad language but it wasn't stuff it was something else that begins with S and should never end up on your head. I'm talking here about sloppy, fetid, vile, stinking, putrid diarrhoea that must have been fermenting in a bucket for a week. I thought i'd got myself into the middle of a dirty protest for a moment. The smell was overpowering I'd rather be teargassed than that.
This was no accident, the whole point of the exercise is that while the hapless tourist is wondering what the hell happened and what to do an ever so helpful chap is on hand with
a pack of tissues to help you clean up and once your bags off your back in the confusion an accomplice makes off with it. Maybe this works sometimes but it didn't work with me. By the time matey boy with the Kleenex turned up I was seriously considering beating someone to death and he'd just gone right to the top of my s**t list. He's there blathering on about it being on my bag and I'm all a bit more concerned about the stuff thats dribbling from my hair down the back of my neck. This was all happening in a busy street not some back ally so not sure how they thought thy were going to get away with it. Any way Mr kleenex got told to go away, not quite what I said, more of a purple headed rant by this point. This was all drawing a bit of a crowd albeit at a distance due to the smelly bloke in the middle and some oke still tried to nick my bag!! He got two steps before, my now rather brown hand, caught him round the collar. Being garroted by an irate slightly mentally unstable tourist wasn't
part of the plan so he legged it after Mr kleenex. That still left me about half a mile walk back to the hotel. Neither by Spanish nor my mood were up to explaining to the bloke on reception why I looked like I'd just come back from a tour of the city sewer gone bad so got the key and spent most of the rest of the afternoon in the shower.
Spent another few days there but found i was spending all my time looking up at the balcony's and missing everything else.
The thought of another long bus ride (I've done nearly 5000 miles by bus so far) is too much so I'm going to fly up to Taganga on the Colombian coast and spend a few weeks diving before heading to Bogotá and home.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.157s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 12; qc: 55; dbt: 0.1203s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb