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Published: August 5th 2009
Days 63 - 84: Mancora (Per), Baños (Ecu), Quito(Ecu), Puerto Lopez (Ecu), Montanita (Ecu), Guayaquil (Ecu), Galapagos Islands (Ecu), Quito (Ecu)
Executive Summary •
Status: Very much alive … and in awe of nature
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Current location: Quito, Ecuador
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Notable incidents: Being sick in Baños, stripy trousers, canyoning, horse back riding, bridge swinging, straddling the equator, hump back whales, The Galapagos(!)
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Facial hair status: Very “Brett Favre” (American Football Player), or so I was told by a guy in Baños - and he was American which adds credibility!
Full Report Jules: We could only handle so much of a good thing, or rather our wallets could only handle so much of a good thing so after three excellent nights at Casa Del Playa in Mancora, it was time to wave adios to Peru, and cross the border to try our luck in Ecuador.
Our first stop was Baños, a town in the central highlands pretty much right in the middle of Ecuador. It was a long journey from Mancora (16 hrs), on a not-so-luxurious bus and about half way through, at about 2am, I began to feel decidedly nauseous. I blame some dodgy fried
chicken at the Ecuadorian border together with the very windy roads but the end result was that I had to use my bestest Spanish to ask the sleeping girl next to me if she’d mind swapping her window seat for my aisle seat. To be honest I don’t think any Spanish was needed - the look on my face and the green tinge of my skin were enough for her to know that it was in her best interests to switch seats with me sharpish! After 15 minutes of sticking my head out of the window, I felt better and the rest of the journey wasn’t too bad.
We arrived in Baños at about 8am and found a restaurant to have breakfast. While we were waiting for our orders, Sim did a quick reccy of the local hostals and found us a great place, Hostal Carolina, for a bargain $12 a night. It was fortunate that we found a nice place, with a functioning and pseudo comfortable bathroom, cos we spent much of our first day in Baños in our room with distinct but similar ailments which meant that venturing too far from our hostel was a very risky
business!
Sim: Actually it was just Jules who was sick that first day. While I wish neither of us were sick, after my run-in with the food poisoning in Cusco, I was happy it was not me this time. So I spent the day searching for fun activities for us to do and strolling around the town. After about two hours I was almost at my wit’s end as no one in the tour agencies spoke English, and finally I tried one last place and found Nancy. She spoke broken English, but after a half hour we got everything sorted and I had a variety of things to show Jules! To my great surprise across the street was someone selling striped pants (Jules had been looking at these pants for the last six weeks and wouldn’t buy a single pair. I think we spent a total of an hour and half trying them on in different shops). So I selected a lovely green pair and took them back to the hostel, hoping that they might cheer Jules up.
Feeling a bit better, Jules was happy to come out for a stroll around the town. We didn’t make it far when kharma came round and bit me in the ass (I should never have let the thought cross my mind that I was pleased that he was sick instead of me). I had now fallen ill and did a quick jog back to the hostel. Needless to say, while I was hugging the ceramic “plato” that night Jules slept soundly.
Jules: By the morning of Day two, I was fully recovered and after a couple of false starts, Sim also decided she was well enough to partake in our first activity in Baños, which she’d organized, canyoning. This basically involves putting on a wetsuit and a harness and abseiling down a series of increasingly high waterfalls. It was great fun, and made even better by the fact that we were the only people in the group.
After a quick lunch, we were back in action, this time on horse back. Well, I say “horse” back, but I think a more accurate description would be “malnourished pony” back. Neither of the “horses” looked particularly healthy and while I’m not entirely certain how you tell whether a horse is the right size for you, I’m pretty sure that if
you can touch the ground with both feet when you’re on the horse’s back, it’s a reasonably reliable indicator that it’s too small!
Well, neither the owner nor our guide seemed at all bothered by the apparent mismatch between my “horse” and me and so we set off on a nice relaxing ride through the countryside surrounding Baños. Or so we thought.
Sim: Horse back riding was one of my top things I had wanted to do on the trip. I had fantasized us galloping along green rolling hills, trotting through fresh water streams and later having a picnic somewhere in the countryside. However, a couple that we had met in Macchu Pichu had just been to Banos and recommended the horseback riding, so we thought we would try it. So when we rocked up to stables, I was extremely excited. However when I saw that the stables were little more than a garage door along a residential street, my mouth dropped. I couldn’t believe we were about to spend the next four hours on these unhealthy looking horses. Once I was on Mira, the saddle felt good and with a few apologetic words and strokes on his mane we were off.
Jules: I quickly realized that, unlike riding a bike, riding a horse was something that apparently you do forget how to do. My rising trot was acceptable but when my legs began to protest I discovered that my seated trot was both more painful than I remembered and also waaaay less flattering. When I was 10, I’m certain there was significantly less wobblage than there is now that I’m 32! I also had another problem which had also ‘grown’ since I was 10. This problem was also exacerbated by my underwear-de-choix. When I was 10, Y-fronts were the in thing, whereas nowadays I’m more of a boxer shorts kinda guy. I simply could not find a position that worked. If I let them do their own thing they invariably ended up underneath me, which was not good, and if I tried to maneuver them up front there was a different problem - the western saddle and its damn ‘nobble’ up front - the thing in the cowboy films that they hang their lassoes over - which seems to me to be positioned for maximum discomfort. So anyway, those were the two immediate issues I faced
and I found that they only got worse as the horses picked up speed, so just walking was fine by me. However, our guide seemed to think that speed was what his paying customers wanted and I was frankly embarrassed to request otherwise.
The ‘horses’ were somewhat reluctant to do anything more than walk (understandably considering their payloads!) so to get them going our guide had a big whip which he used to unceremoniously lash their hind quarters. The first time he did it, which was pretty much as soon as we left the yard, the look on Sim’s face was priceless. A mixture of horror, shock, sadness and concern was quickly followed by a glance at me in a kind of “Is he going to keep doing that?”. The question was soon answered with another ringing THWACK on Sim’s horse’s behind and before she could say anything, the horse was trotting off up the road with Sim doing her best to look elegant.
Anyway, with the thwacking and the discomfort, it was with a certain amount of relief that we arrived at the bottom of a big hill as it surely meant a slowing of the pace.
However my relief was bitter sweet. I was happy that the speed was going to reduce to a walk but I also felt flushed with guilt that my poor ‘horse’ was going to have to carry me up this hill, which was not inconsiderable in its height or steepness! I’m sure I heard him mumble “stupid fat gringo” under his breath but he nobly started the climb with a bit of “encouragement” from our guide.
Now a quick word about our guide. I didn’t catch his name even though he repeated it about five times so, we’ll call him Jed which was my best guess after the five repetitions. I think maybe one of the problems with the name pronunciation was that I don’t think Jed had been speaking very long, in fact I think he was only very recently out of nappies. I reckon, and this is no exaggeration, that he was no more than 10 years old, which was somewhat perturbing, but he was pretty nifty on his horse and spoke enough English to tell us whether to go left, right or straight on - although that was the extent of his English. He spent most of
the trip talking to us (or rather me) and although I tried really hard to begin with I soon realized it was a futile exercise and resorted to just nodding or shaking my head as I thought was appropriate based on his tone of voice and body language. On the occasions when it became apparent that the question required more than a yes or a no, I told him what the time was (which worked more than you might imagine) and if that didn’t work, I asked him to repeat the question as many times as was necessary for me to understand what he was saying. Sometimes he got bored, and stopped asking, so it can’t have been that important in the first place!
As the horses climbed the hill we got some pretty good views of Baños although I didn’t take very many photos at all because I was in pain for much of the trip. After an hour and a half we reached a viewpoint where we mercifully got off our mounts and had a well earned rest - us and the horses! However, too soon, it was time to get on and start the descent, which
was much more hair raising than the ascent and both our horses seemed set on dislodging us from our seats as they insisted on taking us underneath every low hanging branch on the route. In my pigeon Spanish I had managed to explain to Jed that even though we had paid for a four hour ride, three hours would be just fine so after surviving the low hanging branches we arrived safely back at the yard from where we both very gingerly walked back to the hostel.
One of the reasons we had gone to Baños was to do some white water rafting. Lonely Planet (LP) said that Baños had some excellent Grade IV rafting but when we checked out the various agencies, they said that with the current water levels, the rapids were no more than Grade III. I’ve done Grade III before, a few times, and while it was fun, there’s quite a big difference between III and IV so we decided to save our $60 and try something else. It was on the way back from the stables that we saw a poster advertising bridge swinging. We both agreed it looked fun so booked ourselves in
for the 9.30am slot the following morning.
I had a fairly good idea what bridge swinging consisted of, but from the look on Sim’s face when we arrived the next morning, she clearly didn’t! Essentially what they do is tie a piece of rope to one side of a bridge, the rope then goes underneath the bridge and up to the other side where it is attached to a willing individual who then jumps off and swings under the bridge before being lowered down to the bottom and unclipped from the rope. Anyway, we put on the harnesses and I volunteered to go first. It was a very similar experience to bungee jumping in that the scariest bit was definitely climbing over the bridge railings and out onto the small platform, which was no more than 18 inches square, and looking down at the 100m+ drop below. However, with my eyes firmly fixed on the horizon, I put my arms out and jumped.
My feelings thereafter go something like this …. “Shiiiiit ……… WOOOOHOOOOO ……… ouch ………. really OUCH …….. is that blood?!”
It was an exhilarating feeling, although a bit more of a painful experience than
I had expected. The first ouch was as the rope snapped tight and I got rope burn across my face. The second ouch was when I realized I hadn’t done a good job of ‘adjusting’ myself in the harness before leaping and with my boys downstairs still tender from the horse riding assault of the previous day, the last thing they needed was to get stuck between the harness and my leg. Anyway, once they were released, they were fine and it was only then that I realized that the rope burn on my face had drawn blood.
So now it was Sim’s turn and I think it’s best to let her describe her experience …
Sim: As soon as we got out of the truck at the jump site, I was ready to get right back in and return to the hostel. Fear filled every ounce of my body as I realized bridge swinging looked no different than bungee jumping (tall bridge, harnesses & long ropes). So we got kitted up in all our gear. I incessantly asked one of the guides, why my harness was loose and can’t he make it tighter? Everything went blank until I climbed up the platform. I was told to look at the horizon at the houses in the distance, but of course I looked down 300 ft to the muddy, rushing water below. “Oh god!! What am I doing? What if the rope breaks and I fall? I am sorry mom! I don’t want to die” … all things that were going through my head. While I was doing all this thinking a crowd had started to form, a large family of tourists, several villagers and a supply truck (the driver did give me the thumbs up though!). One look at all this, I lost my nerve… the guide started to push my legs and egg me on at which point I instantly snapped “don’t do that!” I climbed down off the platform and wasn’t going to do it. All these strangers, no Jules (he was under the bridge waiting to get pics of me coming down) and I felt completely defeated.
At this, the guide said there was another option, “the safer way,” I could go backwards and he would just push me. Not wanting to accept defeat, I hesitantly agreed. Within a few minutes I was falling
upside down! Even though I was falling for only a few seconds, it felt like an eternity and I wondered when the rope was going to pull me up. Finally it did…I swung back and forth over the river below me. Tears were slowly falling down my face as I stared at the rope. Finally I was lowered to the ground below. I was a mess (a little dramatic in hindsight) and won’t go into any more details, but lets just say Jules took the micky out of me for the next few days.
Jules: To add to Sim’s comments, I was extremely proud of her for doing it, I know a lot of people, in fact most people, would never have jumped off that bridge!
After the bridge swing we went back to town, ran a few errands, including finally purchasing some stripy trousers I’d had my eye on since Bolivia. A combination of cost and size limitations (they evidently aren’t used to clothing asses as big as mine!) had prevented a purchase earlier in the trip, but in Banos we hit a rich vein of XL stripy trousers, and I can now say I’m the proud
owner of four pairs which anyone who has travelled in South America will be familiar with, and which will make excellent pajamas when I get home. For those of you with doubting faces, I can solemnly swear that they will only ever be worn inside and further these purchases will not lead to any purchase of anything tie-dyed and further still, I am not actively cultivating dreadlocks.
So with our errands complete, we got a bus five hours north to Quito, the capital of Ecuador and the second highest capital city in the world, behind La Paz.
After finding what turned out to be a very nice hostel called the Amazonas Inn ($26 a night), and having a good night’s sleep, our main objective the next day was to book a Galapagos tour. So at 9am the next day, we set out and went to four or five different agencies before deciding on an eight day cruise on a boat in the ‘Luxury’ class called Archipel II, which was set to leave in five days. We felt pretty pleased with ourselves for securing a 45% discount off the list price, but with flights and the park entrance fee,
Sim trying to balance an egg on a nail
apparently this only works on the equatorwhich are generally not included in any of the tour packages, it was by no means a cheap excursion!
To describe our deal as ‘last minute’ may be accurate in terms of timing but when we subsequently canvassed the other people on the boat, it turns out that everyone booked last minute and paid the same so the ‘list price’, from which we got our discount, may have been a bit of a misnomer!
Anyway, we had five days to fill and after scouring the LP, we decided that after spending a day doing the sights in Quito, we would head to a small town on the coast, south west of Quito, called Puerto Lopez where the main activity is whale watching.
Sim: I was simply happy that there were no bridges involved in any of our plans and that we were going to stay on solid ground from here on out. Jules: In Quito, the three main tourist attractions are the colonial Old Town, Mitad Del Mundo (literally “Centre of the world”), which is a tourist attraction similar to Greenwich in London but which celebrates its position on the equator (Equator = Ecuador … something
I’d stupidly never realized), and the TeleferiQO - a cable car up to one of the volcanoes that surround Quito.
So we got on a bus and headed out to Mitad Del Mundo, which is about 30km outside Quito. I have to say, that I’ve been to a lot of tourist attractions over the years in many different countries, but I reckon Mitad Del Mundo has to be either at the bottom, or very near the bottom, of my list. It was rubbish.
a) It’s ugly
b) It has dreadful touristy shops and crap overpriced restaurants
c) There really is nothing to do there, except get the photo with one leg either side of the equator, and finally …
d) It’s not actually on the equator!!!
It turns out that years after the structure was built, someone came along with a GPS unit and discovered that the Mitad Del Mundo is actually 240m north of the real equator - doh!!!
Fortunately, on hearing this, some enterprising businessman quickly built a rival attraction, 240m away on the actual equator which, thankfully, was a lot of fun. The place is called the Museo Solar Inti Nan and it
was excellent. We got an hour long tour which was made up of two parts. It started off with a history of the indigenous population who originally settled the area around the museum before moving onto the real equatorial line and a series of impressive ‘scientific’ experiments which included an experiment to show that water going down a drain spirals in an anti-clockwise direction north of the equator and a clockwise direction south of the equator, while on the equator, the water just goes straight down the plug hole. I wasn’t totally convinced by the scientific rigour of the experiment they showed us as I have a hard time believing that a distance of just a few metres can have such a profound effect, so I assumed there would be some sort of scientific tomfoolery, but I didn’t see anything, I just saw the water going in different directions.
There was also the old ‘You can balance an egg on the head of a nail at the equator’ trick which I believe, particularly as I saw a fellow tourist do it. However, I also believe you can balance an egg on the head of a nail anywhere in the
world and will certainly, try next time I have an egg and a nail handy. It should be noted that much to our chagrin, neither Sim nor I were successful in balancing the egg on the nail.
Next up was the equator strength test where I, as the biggest member of our tour party, was selected to demonstrate we are weaker when we stand on the equator. Our guide asked me to stand about a metre north of the equator and put my arms out in front of me, clasping my hands together. She then pulled down on my hands while I tried to keep them parallel to the ground. I wouldn’t say she could hang from my hands, but I put in a reasonable performance. She then asked me to move so that I was standing along the equator and did the same thing. Muscle fatigue, and a lack of big game clutch-ness may both have been contributing factors but she definitely had a much easier job of pulling my hands down while I was standing on the equator. There were clearly skeptics amongst the group, but I was relieved to see the same fate befall everybody who
The main square in Quito by night
We think The White House would look great with some coloured lights too! Maybe I'll send a link to my blog to Barack! tried. So, all in all, a worthwhile excursion.
Next day we spent the morning paying for our Galapagos trip, which required repeated visits to various ATMS to avoid a 6% credit card fee (!). Handing over physical cash certainly made the expense of the rip more ‘real’ than it would have been had we blindly handed over our credit cards, but by paying cash we saved ourselves $120 - woohoo! We also made a trip to the airline office to get our flights.
In the afternoon, we did the other main tourist attraction, the cable car up the volcano. Quito is similar to La Paz, not only in terms of altitude (Quito is at 2,900m while La Paz is at 3,600m), but also in terms of its setting. While not as dramatic as La Paz, Quito is also set in a valley surrounded by mountains (which are mostly volcanoes and mostly (!) extinct) and the TeleferiQO is the easiest way to get up Rucu Pichincha, the largest of the volcanoes surrounding Quito, for a view of Quito. The cable car doesn’t go all the way to the top of Pichincha - that is another 800m from where the
cable car stops - and despite the cloudy weather limiting the view we got of Quito, it was a worthwhile trip.
After the cable car, we got a taxi into the Old Town to tick off the third of the three main tourist attractions. Quito was a major city in the Incan Empire, probably second only to Cusco, but unlike Cusco, it was totally destroyed by the last Inca king (Atahualpa) shortly before the Spanish conquistadors arrived so today there are no Inca ruins, at all, in the city. Instead the city has some very impressive colonial buildings, mostly churches and monasteries, which we spent the afternoon looking around. These included the San Fransisco Monastery where we did our second monastery tour of the trip (well done us!) and the very impressive Compania de Jesus Church whose walls, ceiling and altars are supposedly guilded with seven tons of gold - there was certainly a LOT of gold, although no photos were allowed 😞
So with the big three ticked off, we boarded an overnight bus to Puerto Lopez. It was an ok journey and we arrived in Puerto Lopez at 6am.
During July and August, Hump-Backed Whales
make the long journey down from the Arctic to the warmer waters of the Pacific ocean around the equator, to breed and have their babies, and Puerto Lopez is the most popular spot from which to go and see them.
We planned to stay in Puerto Lopez for the day, do some whale watching and then head out of town and spend the night a bit further down the coast. None of the whale watching tour operators were open when we arrived so we sat ourselves on a bench and waited. At about 8am the touts started swarming us and by 9am we had various competing offers for seats on various tour boats and ultimately decided to go with a guy who called himself Winston Churchill - a patriotic choice!
Sim: Jules felt some kind of patriotic connection to this guy, I was less than impressed. While I appreciate the fact that he wanted our business, I wasn’t fussed. Everywhere we turned, sat down, etc he showed up and continued to badger us until we signed up with him. Jules: With an hour to kill, we went for a walk down the beach to the port where
all the fishing boats were coming in with their catches. There were loads of fish, including a load of hammerhead sharks (which really are funny looking animals!), being brought to shore amidst a lot of commotion. The commotion came not only from the fishermen and buyers but also from the hundreds of pelicans that circled around the boats looking for scraps.
At 10am we made our way down to the beach to get on the boat. Our first impressions were not good. The boat was small - much smaller than it had looked in the photos, and much smaller than some of the other whale watching boats we’d seen leaving the harbour. Also we were the only gringos (maybe everyone else knew something we didn’t) and on top of that, the skies were grey and it looked like it was going to rain.
So, full of skepticism we boarded our smaller-than-we-would-have-liked boat and headed out. The seas were pretty rough and many, in fact most, of our travel companions were not looking too good. However after about 45 minutes, we saw a group of whale watching boats and shortly after heading over in their direction, we saw our
first spurt of water coming out of a hump-back’s blow hole.
After our initial misgivings about the quality of our tour, to the captain’s credit, we always seemed to be in the right place at the right time and got some really close up looks at the whales. Our very first sighting was probably the best of all as a large male stuck his head vertically out of the water (apparently to have a look around) and I managed to get a pretty good photo of it. Overall, it was an immensely enjoyable experience and I could happily have spent hours out there but our fellow passengers were looking decidedly ill so after 45 minutes we headed back to port.
Sim: I had been whale watching before but never been this close the whales. It was absolutely fantastic!! Winston may have been a dudd, but his men on the boat were superior! Jules: In the afternoon, the sun came out so we found some hammocks on the beach and spent a very relaxing afternoon reading and drinking fruit smoothies.
At about 4pm, we got on a bus to head a couple of hours further south to
the beach town of Montanita. As the bus was pulling away, Sim gave me an anguished look and asked me if I had her iPod. I didn’t, so we jumped up and got off the bus. We headed back to the beach, which I thought was a futile exercise, but to my amazement, when we got there, Sim’s iPod was still sitting in the hammock she had vacated some 45 minutes previously - amazing!
Sim: The sheer thought of no more Scrabble or movies on the long bus rides, taught me my lesson. I haven’t let my ipod out of my sight since. Jules: So we headed back to the bus station bought new bus tickets and headed to Montanita, which has the best surf in Ecuador.
After finding a place to stay (Galapagos Hostal - $20 a night) we went for a walk along the beach, which as promised had some pretty impressive waves, and then grabbed some food in the town. We liked Montanita a lot - but sadly, the weather didn’t cooperate so instead of staying two full days we left on the morning of day two and headed for Guayaquil. However, we did
manage to both acquire a Panama Hat which we thought would be excellent for our Galapagos trip.
Note: Panama hats actually have nothing to do with Panama. They were actually invented in Ecuador, in a town called Montecristi, just a few hours north of Montanita.
Guayaquil is a port city and the biggest city in Ecuador (Quiz time - How many countries in the world can you name where the capital city is not the biggest city?). It got a decidedly average write up in LP, but we managed to while away an afternoon walking along the recently renovated waterfront - the Malecon - (we had arrived the day after Guayaquil’s National Day so we were joined on the Malecon by about 10 million other Ecuadorians - mainly kids!). At sunset, we climbed the 500 stairs at the end of the Malecon to the lighthouse and then on our way back had a delicious McDonalds! We liked what we saw of Guayaquil, but 24 hours was probably enough.
Next day our Galapagos adventure began. We successfully caught our flight from Guayaquil and spent the whole journey out to the islands analyzing our fellow travelers as we knew
that the 14 people joining us on Archipel II were also on our flight. The average age of our fellow passengers, which was probably north of 45, did concern us slightly but our spirits were high.
We met the rest of our group at San Cristobal airport and to our relief, it was a young group, in fact I was the oldest! I was also the only Brit with a large Israeli contingent (six), a surprisingly large showing from Switzerland (four), three Irish and two Americans.
I’m not going to give a day by day account of our trip around the Galapagos cos it would take ages but overall it was a fantastic experience and here are some of the highlights.
• Our boat was very nice, probably one of the nicest places we’ve stayed on our trip so far. Also we were very pleased it was a catamaran. The seas were pretty rough and as we did quite a lot of sailing during the night (to get from island to island) I can’t imagine what it would have been like on a single hulled boat.
Sim: It was the nicest place! Our room was cleaned twice a day. We had fresh towels every morning. We were greeted upon our return from snorkeling with morning and afternoon tea. Someone cooked us dinner, while we sat on the sun deck and read our books. Bliss!
Jules: • The animals were amazing. Because there are really no land predators to speak of - the Galapagos Hawk is the top predator which I think says a lot - the animals have evolved to be almost totally fearless of humans. Birds build their nests on the ground (no need to build them in trees when there is no indigenous threat to your eggs), sea lions sleep on the beach and barely bat an eyelid as you walk past and metre long iguanas bake in the sun and barely give you a passing glance as you stick a zoom lens in their face but no animal sums up the Galapagos quite like its most famous inhabitant the Galapagos Giant Tortoise. These guys really live up to their name with the largest of them weighing in at a hefty 500 pounds (250kg) and are fascinating to see. However, they are also a great example of Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest by
natural selection in that, there is really nowhere else they could survive and even in the Galapagos they are under significant threat. When sailors first came across the Galapagos, imagine their joy when they found thousands of giant tortoises which were a) massive, b) tasted great, c) couldn’t move very fast and d) had no real defenses other than a shell. Or think of it another way - when humans started to actually colonise the Galapagos, they brought with them, both deliberately and accidentally, animals from the mainland. These included goats which thrived on the islands. Some of them escaped into the wild where they came into direct competition with the tortoises because they had a very similar diet - plants. Somewhat unsurprisingly the tortoises lost, big time. On some islands the impact of humans and introduced animals has made the tortoises extinct but thanks to a number of very successful breeding programs, as well as a ‘War on goats’ which was seen the animals eradicated from three of the five islands they inhabit, the populations are growing again, although only eleven of the original thirteen species of tortoise still exist in the Galapagos. I can’t help but feel that
if you’re a tortoise, you have to look in the mirror and say to yourself “Listen kid, you’re being out competed by a goat - a freaking goat!! WTF?! It’s time to raise your game and do some of that evolution stuff. Maybe shell-mounted lasers?”
• The landscapes of the different islands are also amazing and vary dramatically from island to island.
• The photography potential is also fantastic! The variety of animals and the proximity you can get to them meant that I took over 3,000 photos in the eight days which meant a lot of time deleting the crap ones (of which there were many!)
• Swimming around the boat and jumping/diving off the top - although Sim’s top deck water entry technique could do with a bit of refinement!
Sim: Let’s just say the seated entry position is not good when jumping into the water. I think I bruised my tail-bone. I would kill to have a blow up donut ring to sit on. Jules: • The name game - always a winner! And a special shout out to the non-English speakers in the group (David, Sonja and Didier) who performed extremely well considering the language
barrier! Cher/Michael Bolton anybody?
• Watching Barb teach Sim to Irish dance
Sim: A picture tells a thousand words. In my defense Michael Jackson was playing in the background, so it was hard to get the rhythm of things. Jules: There were a couple of minor downsides to the trip which I would be happy to discuss with anyone who is thinking of a Galapagos trip at some point in the future.
• Our guide, Javier, was OK, but not great (we probably learnt more from the three part documentary the BBC did on the Galapagos that we watched before we came to the islands than we did from our guide)
• The snorkeling equipment provided was OK but not great (bring your own if you can)
• Our itinerary was really good and we saw loads of animals, but it could have been better (essentially our ‘8 day’ trip was really a 5 day trip and a 3 day trip stuck together so day 5 was spent back on the main island where some people got off and some new people got on which meant that day 5 was a bit of a nothing day and if
we hadn’t had to come back to the main island we could have gone to some of the farther out islands and seen some other animals that only live on those islands)
• Watch out for the invisible jellyfish - Sim got stung on the first day and you can still see the marks ten days later!
Finally, the weather wasn’t great - we only had one day of sun during our eight day trip - but to be honest, it wasn’t really that big a deal - we got plenty sunburnt on the one day of sun we had, so it’s probably good that we didn’t have more sunny days!
So, after eight days on the Galapagos, we’re back in Quito.
Next stop Colombia - we fly to Bogota this evening.
Continued thanks for all your messages - great to hear your news, no matter how mundane it may sound to you,
Love Jules & Sim This week’s likes • Hump back whales
• The Galapagos (obviously) but in particular the sea lions - swimnming with them never gets old! - and the Boobies - boobie jokes also never get old!
• The Birmingham tea towel
we saw hung on the wall in a bakery in Quito!!
• Frozen fruit smoothies at the Magic Bean in Quito.
• Shopping in the local bazaars
• American apparel dress - can be worn in 17 different ways!
• Multi-colored lighting on the churches and government buildings in Quito
This week’s dislikes • Ceilings, doorways, bus roofs - all TOO LOW and I keep banging my freaking head in the same freaking spot!!!
• The rooster in Montanita which started cock-a-doodle-dooing right outside our window at God knows what time in the morning!
• Michael Jackson music everywhere we go - the guy was a genius and an amazing performer but seriously, enough already!
• Papaya - would the world be any worse off without it?
• $5 manicure/pedicures - you get what you pay for!
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Ewan
non-member comment
jealousy
Keep them coming, Jools; you write well and it makes amusing reading. Just waved my little boy (6'2"!!) off this morning to join you in Bogota - I trust you will teach him well in the ways of backpacking and I hope he and matt aren't too much of a pain to you guys. All the best to you both, Ewan