Ecuador

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After spending a few days in Mancora i got the bus straight to Quito in Ecuador. The journey involved a bus change at the border where the bus driver refused to put my bike in the hold first and ended up leaving no space for it. The end result was it being put upright in the toilet of the bus, meaning no one could use it for the 12 hour journey to Quito. Needless to say i wasn't the most popular person on the bus that day! I arrived in Quito early the next morning and met up with some friends i'd made in Cusco, Abbie and Jemma. We decided to travel together for the rest of the trip as we had the same plans and flew out of Bogota at around the same time. On our first day in Quito we went to Mitad del Mundo, the location of the equator line. The original monument there was built in the 1700's, without any of the technology we have today so it's actually about 200m off. The actual equator line located about 200m away was really cool as they do lots of little experiments on it. The best one was showing water draining through a bucket with a hole on it. On one side of the line it drained clockwise, on the actual line it drained straight and on the other side it drained anticlockwise. I really liked Quito as a city. It has lot's of old buildings and squares and a really relaxed atmosphere. Another cool thing was on Sundays they close some of the main roads in the city so that people can cycle on them traffic free. Unfortunately i had already boxed up my bike by this point to make it easier to get on the buses!

The next day we booked a tour to Cotopaxi, the highest active volcano in the world, which is a few hours drive from Quito. We got the bus to around 4500m before walking up to the base camp at 4800m. The weather was really bad when we were there, with a big blizzard so was quite an experience walking up in the snow! As i'm nearing the end of my trip now i have to miss out the rest of Ecuador and head straight to Colombia. I'm planning to spend 2 weeks there to see the sights as we've heard lots of good things about it.

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