the week of ´NO´s

so im really sorry that the blog hasnt been written in a while..especially ironic as we wasted about a week in quito when we really could have been doing other things...and not because we wanted to it seemed..as the title states that it was indeed a week of nos and as such we had no choice but çto so a lot of waiting around..as a result we are now in peru but i shalñl write a different entry for peru..so:

quito, arrived in quito its rainiy..obviously cara gets the flu which we think is related to the altitude, as we also blame for our lack of breath when we walk up the steep hils..definitely the altitude, nothing to do with the over zealous smoking that has been brought on my the rain!! now i know that people have a lot of good things to say about quito, i however do not!! apart from the a man trying to sell us some dyed chicks in the street (haha they really looked like they could have been scarlett, blue and green) luckily are first instincts didnt take hold of us, other wise we really would be walking around with brightly coloured chickens right now!! (hope you´re proud mum!), or walking up the church, where you can climb to the very top of the towers, up some rickety, vertical, very unsafe stairwells-mum you would not have done, and cara only just managed by crawling up..ha ha was most amusing..only coz the floor wobbled as well and when she tried to get up id shake a little..im suprised we´re still talking actually!! that and some amazing guanababana juice that they give you here...quito really does not have that much to offer...they do sell popcorn with soup though-also amazing.. but its really badly polluted and its quite expensive and theres not alot to do..and in my boredom i decided it was time to get a bikini wax, now this is not for the faint hearted, so some people on thei travels get mugged, others get their backpack sliced, some even get kidnapped or marched the atm, i get a blood blister and bruising from trying to keep everything in order!!! i was going to get the full brazilian done but whe she brings out plastic strips and cold wax im thinking no no ill just take the blood blister thanks and count myself lucky!!! another minus point for quito...

up to the north to otavalo, where we get out of taxi just as bus comes screeching past shouting ´otavalo, otavlo´so we get bundled on to the bus, luggage in the bottom (backpackers big no no!) and not even sure if we´re on the right track...and it becomes more apparent that we might not be on the right road when i spot a sign saying ´zambia´ surely emily dev is more likely to see that sign..however as it turn out we do get to otavalo and for $2 for 3 hours its really not that bad (even if we did go via africa!!) well otavalo is just lovely, a really quiet town, that although has been slightly spoilt by tourism still is able to maintain its charm a bit...though you dont want to spend any longer than 2 days there!there is however a market..well oobviously me and farmer are drawn like moths to a flame...there are so many alpaca goods there, hammacks and jewelry its like heaven in a tent!! apart from after our little wander around the market picking things up and inspe ting closely..i came face to face with a massive tarantula that someone was selling in a box..to be fair it was dead and pinned but WHY OH WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT ONE OF THEM..ARE THEY CRAZY!!´so nearly cried after that but luckily i was able to recover by buying a lovely silver and tourquise rin...oh so lovely-arachniphobia almost forgotten..although on our mammoth journey to peru its now broken so am a little sad but im sure i shall find more goods (and spiders) in south east asia!! more on peru later...

after our shopping spree though we got all excited about our mission to find ned, we got our ´willies´ (for those who dont know ned emailed to make sure that we had got wellies because we needed them but had an unfortunate typo..which to two very grown up girls was not amusing in the slightest!! well we got dowm to the bus station and i made cara go and get the tickets where the guy informed us that there were no buses going up to cuellaje (pronounced queue-ya-jaqui)because there had been so much rain and the roads werent good enough but that we could get a bus to another place and then get camino (a milk truck) up to some where near cuellaje and go from there so we thought that was probably our best bet because we really wanted to go trout fishing, and trekking round the cloud forest and find my long lost cousin!! so we went back to the guy who kindly told us that we couldnt get on the other bus coz it was full..how helpful!! so we had to go back down to gay quito!! so whe we were in quito we looked up mindo and things to do there wher discovered the amazingness of a place called alambi, where they give you camping equpment and wood to build a camp fire, which i know many people will laugh at the idea of these prissy public school girls having to builkd a camp fire and everything but we wer on it..but oh no..another no-there was no address, no directions and no phone numbers-god was teasing us yet again..well we decided that we go to mindo thats a few hours from quito, where apparently it is bird watching heaven and though of man watchers we thought it would be just as entertaining!!!

well we got down to mindo where we arrived at our hostel, a bit more of a shack actually..it was a wooden hut, with hammocks and it smelt of sileage and rotting wood..it was amazing though!!! and we joined in with owner and his friends for a bit of magic time-the guy claimed to a musician but he also claimed to be 88 and looked about 70 so we´re not so sure but it was a quality even..all in spanish but i got some of it..the lady was a very dirty old woman and i think her gesticulations can be translated into any language!!! well we went zip wiring accross the canopy in the cloud forest and went to see parots in the jungle at 5 in the mornign...well mindo was all going very well adn we were suddenly having yeses rather than nos when the stupid lady turns up-our guide to the bird watching!!

well these birds are call cock on the rocks, they are bright red and make screeching noises in the morning and you can only see them very early in the morning...so me and farmer got up so early and we were generally quite happy to be there until....well it turned out that not only to i become one walking mosquito bite and it wasnt worth it-we stood for 3 hours in this hut watching the one bird..it would have been ok if we´d seen more birds but no that was it and as a token gesture oin the way down she pointed out a brown bird..which im positive was a sparrow! she then charged us more for the taxi back and accused us of not paying the fee for the bird watching-which we had AND then charged us $30 for her rubbish services as a guide...ooooo i could have killed her ... she was the real cock on the rock!!!! so to the coast...

---

---