Ecuador

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I´ve been in ecuador for about 10 days now and to say its been eventful would be both an under and an over-statement.
Quito was great fun for the first few days and a good starter for what has been a complete culture shock. On the flight I was having my doubts about what I was thinking when i planned two months on my own in south america, but as we flew over the vast mass that is Quito at night that all vanished and was replaced by excitement similar to what I felt when I was driving through Bangkok for the first time. Only problem with Quito was that my hostel and seemingly all others in town were pretty empty (i was infact the only one in my hostel for the first night) this has been a recurring theme throughout ecuador that I have had a lot of alone time. But Quito´s night life made up for it and frankly most of the warnings of walking around quito at night are rubbish. Unless you act as a complete moron and walk down dark alleys and ask locals for help (this is how one guy in my hostel got mugged and to be honest he deserved it for doing that at 4am!) So me and Dan (american guy i meet with in first hostel when someone finally arrived) hit the clubs in town for a few drinks and luckily we found some (one) local girl who spoke english (bit of a rare commodity). With her and her two friends, who didnt speak any english, we got a better feel for quito on our first night out, and after we finally lost them we found ourselves in an after hours club that had a rather speakeasy feel to it. As it was a thursday night quito has a 1am drinking rule where no alcohol is served after this time so when all the clubs shut we wandered round until a few locals asked if we wanted to carry on drinking, the answer obviously being yes he guided us to this large metal garage door one block behind the main strip. The next bit got a bit strange as our ¨guide¨ knocked on the door for it to be opened a crack and us ushered into this dark alley with 5 guys standing there saying $2.50 to us. I didnt fancy paying to get mugged and beaten up so Dan stuck his foot in the door to stop it closing. The guys obviously sensing out scepticsm opened the door to the club to show us it was legit. This calmed us somewhat and we payed and went in for a few more drinks and the end to a relatively interesting first night. Another plus is that for ecuadorian women I am "exotic", I was also a good 5 inchs taller than all the men there, so I had the pick of the girls every night, which was fun. So this was pretty much the pattern for the first few nights in Quito with Dan and I wandering the clubs until about 4am before walking home, completely against lonely planets advice, which i have since pretty much stopped following.
On saturday I headed up to Otavalo for a gander at the supposedly famous market there. However, as Im sure some of you have heard, I feel asleep on the bus with my bag by my feet, which i was told to do by the bus driver. As i stepped off at Otavalo the contents of said bag emptied into the bus terminal and my expensive camera along with my rain coat (it was raining at the time) had gone. Surprisingly my ipod was still there. This clearly put me in absolutely no mood to go wandering round markets so I got the next bus back to Quito, this time with my bag on my lap and death stares at any local who walked down the ailse. Some repair later and my bag is now somewhat functional. Thank god for duct tape. So i had finally been robbed, it would have been a miracle if i had gone 6 months without it happening but i was determined for it not to happen (of course it did). Back in quito i went to drown sorrows with dan before planning to head up to Mindo to see the cloud forests on sunday. Now it being a sunday dan assured me that nothing would be happening in this tiny town of 800 people. So he came with me as he had spent two weeks there volunteering so knew everyone, and his pigeon spanish was much better than my sign language. We got up there and Dan called the girls that he knew to come out for some drinks (definately becoming an alcoholic, sorry mum). They eventually arrived and convinced us to go to a "house party" that some friends of theirs were throwing. We agreed as there was nothing else to do and got in a "taxi" to this place. After driving about 20 mins into the middle of nowhere we came to this barren house of nothing but concrete with no pictures on the walls and frankly very few signs of life. But there were a few guys inside who were clearly not to happy that the only girls had turned up arm in arm with two white guys. This clearly ammused me and Dan and a very very awkard evening ensured until we left at about midnight to had back to town. Now this should have been then end of the dodgy dealings for the night, but the girls then took us to the alley behind their house to say goodbye. After said goodbye me and dan exchanged looks and both picked up a rock in each hand just in case. Luckily this wasnt necessary but i was very aware that i stuck out like a sore thumb whereas dan could blend in slightly being short and dark haired. Anyway I headed back to quito after some ziplining over the cloud forest in the morning (great views but the tornado that had come through a few weeks ago had wrecked much of the forest), and Dan stayed for another night.
The hostel in Quito was again pretty quiet so i had an early night as i was planning on heading to Tena in the morning. On the bus to Tena (you guessed it) i got robbed again, this time i have no idea how as my bag was on the seat next to me the entire time! More annoyingly they took my phone and my adapter as well as my spare memory cards for my remaining camera and my harddrive. So a very lonely night in Tena, as the town was deserted of travelers (stupid lonely planet "tena is a mecca for travelers year round" my arse). Also due to my burst eardrum i didnt fancy go white water rafting on my own so headed to Baños the next morning in the hope that this would provide some more entertainment. As Ive grown accustomed to on ecuadorian bus rides, dont look down is a vital tactic. All of the roads are through the mountains and on these roads with at least a 500m drop off one side and the bus driver driving like he´s on a strong mix of cocaine and laxatives and is in a huge hurry. Therefore it is not surprising to see people crying and blessing themselves as we hurtle along these death traps of roads. Couple this with the constant level of cloud and i will never complain about a bus journey again, provided i survive the rest of them in south america (odds not too good on that one). So i finally arrived at Baños, which took us along a very spectacle road with 27 waterfalls along it. Baños is famous for two things: thermal baths and the volcanoe erupting every few weeks. Just my luck the volcanoe had erupted about a week before i got there, but this was no big deal as the town is used to it. So all the locals were out with the brooms sweeping the ash off the streets and the hostel (again deserted) was handing out face masks, but to be honest it wasnt that bad, you just got a bit of ash in your hair and eyes as you walked around town but you couldnt see huge clouds of it falling and the sky was pretty clear. Ignoring the british foreign offices advice against all travel to the town i stayed one night, and on the drive out of town to Latacunga you could see the volcanoe and the huge ash clouds funnelling out of it. Was definately an impressive site.
So Latacunga, the closest town to Cotopaxi and generally a nice place, and for once the hostel actually had people in it, so i could talk to someone other than myself for the first time in about 3 days! The site of the mountain about 20kms north of the town had the effect of making me want to climb it really bad. Its actually very straight forward and only takes two days with the first day just practicing snow climbing and the second starting at 1am to avoid the sun. But the problem is the altitude (obviously) so after id watched the sunset over the mountain (by the way Latacunga town is at 2800m so pretty high) i inquired about going for the summit. The details: it costs $170 and they provide all the kit necessary including sleeping bags, shoes etc. however the nearest trip i could get would have been sunday. As it was thursday i knew that I should spend those few days in Latacunga going for hikes around the area to get used to exercise at this exhausting altitude. I had been up to a decent altitude already and suffered from it. On my first day in Quito i took the cable car to 4100m to see the view of the city and immediately regretted it as the cable car rose and my head began pounding and finding that i had to take several deep breaths to fill my lungs. I quickly wandered round the vista point, having to stop every few steps to catch my breath before heading back to quito, which in itself is 2800m. So i was already thinking that going for the summit was a tad unrealistic and i knew that i still had loads left to see in ecuador so didnt want to spend 5 nights in one place. So thats another thing to do next time along with the Galapagos.
From Latacunga I headed to Guayaquil on route to Montañita (where i am at the moment). Now Guayaquil is billede as the most dangerous city in Ecuador and in fact i had no intention of spending any time here but i realised it was unrealistic to get from Latacunga to Montañita in 8 hours so i bite the bullet and stayed a night. This turned out to be a good night in a relatively safe part of the city. However one little flaw has occured being the ecuadorian national vote on the laws being put forward. Voting is mandatory in Ecuador and to really enforce this there is an alcohol ban for the entire weekend. This is a right pain in the arse as its actually enforced with police patroling and taking any drunkeness very seriously. So i grabbed a pizza and headed back to the hostel to find several locals who lived and worked at the hostel with beer!! luckily my hostel was not big on following orders (being owned by a german probably explains the availability of beer) so i settled down to chat with them for the evening. Luckily two of them spoke good english and i spent the night trying to teach the only girl there how to speak better english, and my spanish had a few lessons but is still absolutely terrible. Hit the hay at about midnight and got up early to head to Montañita. However i did not anticipate what was about to happen. the bus terminal (more like a big mall with a lot of bus company windows) was absolutely heaving. Trying to navigate this with my big rucksack on my back was horrible and i swear i have never sweat so much in my entire life, i was literally dripping whilst in a queue for two hours to buy my ticket. Several very heated arguements with potential queue bargers (forgot they didnt speak english and then remembered so i could say whatever i wanted as i shouted at them to fuck off to the back of the queue for the next 3 hours like the rest of us). Of course my lack of spanish had meant that i had gotten into the wrong queue for two hours and the window i actually needed had no queue whatsoever. Was not impressed, but nevertheless got on the bus at about 3 having arrived at 10:30 that morning.
Montañita is pretty cool, definately a very hippy place where weed seems easier to come by than alcohol, or this weekend at least as i cant find a beer anywhere. But the beach looks really nice so you can find me there for the next two days before i head up to Puerto Lopez for the poor mans Galapagos.
So highlights of South America so far: The sheer size of Cotopaxi with the sunsetting in the background, the locals having endless patience as i attempt a shocking display of spanish, the view on every bus ride that ive been on so far, the view of quito from the plane at night, seeing hummingbirds as close as my hand, soaring over the cloud forests at 70kph in Mindo, being asked to help some schools with homework which involved them asking me questions in "english" for about an hour and me basically rewriting everything they had written and giving an impromptu english lesson in the main square of Latacunga. Downsides have clearly been being robbed twice and losing a bit of confidence as a result, as well as the seeming lack of backpackers in Ecuador. However hopefully Peru and Bolivia will be busier. Got a long way to go and only about a week of it in Ecuador now so lets hope the girls are as welcoming and the thiefs less prolific for the next two months.

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