Quito, Ecuador.... South America at last

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Well its been a long time coming, but we finally made it to South America! Yes I know some of you non-believers thought we wouldn´t make it but here we are!

As we came into land at Quito we saw fantastic snow capped volcanoes and mountains before anything else from the plane window, and landed to beautiful blue sky and a temperature of about 27 degrees! At 2800 metres above sea level, Quito is pretty high and it takes a while to get used to the altitude. Undeterred, we dumped our bags at the hostel and headed straight out to meet up with friends from home - Bec and David. It was so lovely to see a friendly face from home and to meet David for the first time (they got engaged recently - Congratulations guys!) and we ended up spending a few days and drunken nights with them which was such good fun.

Quito is a modern, lively city and the old town is really picturesque and packed full of colonial architecture. Bec and David showed us around, introduced us to empanadas and aji, and gave us some top SA tips! We all took a day trip out to the Saturday market at Otavelo where Richard made friends with a roast pig, and we cruised around taking in the "authentic" i love boobies t-shirts. We had a drunken food filled last night with them and it was sad to see the soon to be Mr and Mrs Jury head off for the last few days of their 20 month trip!

Since then we have been to a few museums in Quito and also visted the equator - Mitad del Mundo. The equator was marked and a monument built 20 years ago and is a huge tourist attraction. But.... its 200 metres out! The real equator was measured by GPS and at the crazy Museo De Sitio Intiñan just outside of the main complex you can watch the water go straight down the plughole (not clockwise or anti clockwise), balance an egg on a nail, and check out the solar clock (amongst other things). Apparently due to the bulge of the earth you weigh much less at the equator too so we were both quite happy with that as we have eaten very well so far on this trip! About 5km down the road is the Pululahua crater - the world's largest volcanic crater, and one of only two thats populated, housing a community of about 200 in incredibly lush farming land. Its quite an amazing sight to stand at the top of the crater looking down, cloud just tumbling in and out.

For those of you interested we have more photos at:
http://www.kodakgallery.co.uk/I.jsp?c=68l0hn5x.9jhtlh65&x=1&y=-y2yzea
I think this web address works... let me know if not!

We travel to the Galapagos Islands tomorrow which is pretty exciting...... we are traveling on a boat for 8 days with some extra days on the main island so Rich can do some diving. We have heard mixed reviews about the diving but we reckon you can't go too far wrong in the Galapagos hey?

Cath and Richard

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Photos

Otavelo Market
Richard and his NBF... lunch!

Quito old town
David, Richard, Cath, and Bec

The ACTUAL equator
Guess who is north and who is south!

Quito old town
roof of.... er get the guidebook!