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Published: November 29th 2006
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Walking Tour - Quito
Our friendly policeman! Quito..... Policemen who moonlight as tour guides and more We landed in Quito on the 22nd and stayed in the old town (the city is defined into either the old or new city) for two nights. The old city houses grand old colonial buildings from the past.
There is plenty of information in the guide books about tourist safety which is backed up by the passing comments from the hoteliers. It was with these thoughts in the back of our minds that when we came across the tourist office offering 3 hour walking tours around the old city with a uniformed policeman, for the basement price of $10, we jumped at it. The uniform policeman had natural benefits.....1) only one attempted bag snatch that the policemen foiled, 2) when we were taking photos in this amazing church the policemen pulled rank over the security guard who came to tell us off and we managed to keep the photo...... in the rush taking it, it is unfortunately blurred.
Otavalo.......a woman's heaven (markets, shopping and more shopping) In fairness we both indulged in a fair amount of shopping (scarfs, blankets and a rug). Not sure where this is all going to
Naera Shops...
Otavalo textile market.. go but will be posted back to NZ ASAP as our backpacks are already full. We went to see the condor park which was quite incredible - they are one seriously huge bird.
Saturday we spent the day looking at the Textile market for which Otavalo is famous for. A surprising number of food stalls as well, so we tried one of each exotic fruit that took our fancy! Naera has been using her (limited) Spanish - the people are really fun to bargin with as they never loose their huge smiles and they don't continue to hassle you once you've said no.
We also took a trip to the animal market and Naera showed off her farmer roots by wandering about the animals with little or no concern as Jem eyed the horns of each cow (or sometimes bull) with ever increasing suspicion.
Back to Quito.... So back to Quito, staying in the new town this time. The food options are definitely better but the sites are lacking somewhat (to be fair the area is nicknamed "Gringo-land" and every second person is obviously a tourist). We took the gondola up to the top of one of the mountains
Food Options in Otavalo
This guy is really holding live crabs! They were on sale for $1 each. which surround Quito. We are struggling with the altitude a bit and this was 4100 above sea level (Quito is 2850-ish) so we wandered around the different viewing platforms puffing and panting like we´d just run a marathon. Naera isn´t a massive fan of heights and as a result Jem just about lost feeling in his hand on each of the gondola trips!
We took a day trip out to one of the volcanoes (Cotopaxi..... highest live volcano in the world) that are within eruption distance of Quito (there are a scary number which are still active in this relatively small country). It was quite a spectacular setting, driving into a valley and up the side of the volcano which is covered in snow at the top. We got out of the car at 4600 metres and walked the next 200 metres to the last hut before the climbers go onto the summit. It took us about an hour and we were absolutely exhausted when we got there! It was nice to do something totally different before we head off to the Galapagos tomorrow (yah can't wait!!).
As you can probably tell we are now settling into the
travel mode... our daily to do list has dropped to the level of tasks like buying sunscreen. We are not necessarily getting up late (generally we've found that alot of cool stuff happens at dawn or early morning) but definitely enjoying the slower pace of life... Naera´s Spanish is sort of improving (perhaps more in confidence than vocab)... Ecuadorians apparently speak slowly in comparison to the other South Americans but she still asks them to slow down on a regular basis. She thinks she is generally understood but only understands about 1/2 of the responses! Reserving accommodation over the phone is still a hit and miss exercise!
There are alot of key phrases that were suggested over the last few weeks of London life being used as well (e.g. uno mas (one more), donde estan los banos (where are the bathrooms))!
You´ll probably have noticed we are still having issues with photo placement... so hopefully next time we´ll get it right!
And finally, we wanted to explain a bit about how we think the travel blog comments and messages work as we are getting a combo of both (which is cool but just so that you know as
Animals for Sale...
Looks like a sellers market if the sales pitch of this guy is anything to go by! well)... messages are visible only to us and if you save them, we automatically get an email (which is very cool) and comments are visible to all (we think this is right).
Take care and until next time...
Naera and Jeremy.
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