Day 50 - Travel to Ecuador - Tacna to Lima and Lima to Quito

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Woke up this morning at 05:00 as the body clock was still on Chile time, so lay in bed for one hour before getting up to finish yesterday's blog. Internet was a bit slow but managed to get it all done before checking out. The Nice Inn was very cheap $AU45 for the night but is quite modern and clean. Only drawback was no lift and our room was on the third floor. Daisy had a great idea which was to leave our big bags downstairs and we just carried up what we needed for the night. None of the staff spoke English but with Google translate we managed to get the receptionist to book us a taxi transfer to the airport and also to add 20 soles to our bill so we could pay for the transfer. The driver turned up at 09:23 and she gave the driver payment and off we went.

It was only 10 minutes or so to the airport and the check-in desks weren't even open yet. It was only a small airport so everything went quickly and we just waited for our 11:52 flight to Lima. The flight was another interesting one as it basically followed the South American coast so I had constant views of the coast all the way to the Andes. It also helped that there were very few clouds around.

We landed in Lima at 13:30 and our next flight to Quito was at 16:10, so plenty of time to have lunch. We didn't have any Peruvian sole so I just exchanged some Brazilian money we had so that gave us enough for lunch and a couple of bottles of water. We tried a local chain selling sandwiches which was very good.

The time went quick and being a bigger airport we got free internet for 30 minutes. Flight was not so interesting this time as it was much cloudier and quite dark by the time we landed at 18:00. Leo was our driver/guide and as usual gave us a lot of information. The airport was very modern, being only 4 years old and the highway into town is also very new, so Ecuador is spending a lot of money on infrastructure. The new airport is a fair way from the city and it took about 50 minutes.

The Reina Isabel Hotel is very nice and it looks like the remainder of our trip will be more luxurious than what we are use to. As it quite late we just had dinner in the hotel which was quite good. Rest of the evening was spent planning what to do over our two full days here.

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