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Published: October 13th 2007
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Wow, I can´t believe it: I am back in Ecuador. I still don´t know whether I am completely mad with what I have done, or whether I would have been mad if I had not done it. A couple of months ago I decided to exchange my 100-200 emails a day, teleconference after teleconference and nagging clients for a free life in the mountains and jungles of Ecuador, at least for a limited period of time. I also exchanged a safe life with a regular, nice salary, a beautiful roof top flat in the outskirts of Munich and friends and family around for a life of uncertainty, ever changing guesthouses and a limited budget with a fair danger of getting mugged or lost in the wilderness. Was it the right decision? I will only know at the end of the trip.The past few weeks have been quite tough: saying good bye to all the colleagues in the office and explaining what I´ll be doing, trying to find somebody to live in my flat while I am away (I finally signed a contract with a Finnish guy who works at EADS for 7 months, so it worked out quite nicely in the
end), packing all my stuff and moving it four floors to the basement (my back is still sore, but luckily the Hausmeister and Tom helped me a lot), saying good bye to family (with dad being in hospital with pneumonia, mum suffering from an abdominal influenza and very high blood pressure and Ella agonizing under the first few months of her pregnancy) and friends, and getting all the technical stuff sorted out (bought a brand new Olympus SLR, a second hand Toshiba subnotebook, an MDA all kind of last minute and with loads of technical problems).
Anyway, now I am here and everything seems to be fine. Amazingly, about 95% of the people who I had told of my plans, including those in the office, actually didn´t seem to think I was crazy, but rather admired and even envied me! In fact, I got the impression that there are loads of people who are secretely unhappy about or bored with their current lives, but just don´t have the courage to follow through with their dreams. So they are amazed when somebody does it.Obviously I have been having very mixed feelings about my plans as well. Especially during the past
couple of weeks the thought that I have screwed up my life completely came rather frequently to my mind. However, it is my experience that always just before a new adventure starts one gets rather nervous about it, and that the nervousness fades away once you get started with the new task. We shall see...and if worse comes to worse I can still give up and go home. But now I have talked all about the past, but not about Day One.
After a rather uneventful flight (apart from the constantly screaming and kicking baby on the seat behind me) I arrived in Quito to find they had damaged my bag: the handle was broken. At the exit I bought a voucher for the taxi,and asked the lady where the Delta office was, so I could complain about the broken handle. I went all the way to the other side of the airport to find a deserted airline office. Well, there was actually the light on and a candle burning, but as nobody showed up in a quarter hour or so, and the lady at LAN next door didn´t bother about my knocking I went out to the taxi
stand and asked a cab driver whether my voucher was valid in his cab. He said Yes and so we took off. I showed him the address of my hostal, but he kept asking again and again about it. In Mariscal we circled around for a while, but finally found it. When I got off, I wanted to hand him the voucher, but he said No, no, I should pay him. I said No, I had already paid. Before the whole thing could turn into a major argument, the hostal guy intervened and finally I didn´t have to pay again. I believe what happened was that the taxi driver was an analphabetic which he didn´t want to admit when I showed him the voucher and that the voucher wasn´t valid with his taxi company. The hostal guy did some phone calls to the airport and it seems the cab driver was able to reclaim the money from them in the end (I hope so).
At night I chatted with a Scottish guy from Aberdeen who also wants to do a lot of hiking in South America. After a good night´s sleep I had a delicious Musli breakfast at Coffee Tree at Place Foch where I had always had them already last year. Loads of tropical fruit with yoghurt and granola, maracuja juice and a capuccino ... yummie. I then changed to another hostal, as the rooms in the first one were too dark and grubby. I am now in Hostal La Galeria, which isn´t perfect either (especially as they didn´t give me the room they had promissed in the first place), but I think I can livewith it. At least it´s not as dark as the other place and I have a desk where I can work on my notebook. The downside is that it doesn´t have WiFi connection.In the morning it was first quite chilly, then it warmed up, follwed by a heavy downpour of raon in the afternoon. At least I was able to capture some really good views of Pichincha during the day. I spent quite a lot of time sorting out my mobile phone. Some guy at the Marriott hotel who I had asked where the Mobistar (the recommended provider here) building was, sent me about 5 km away to a place which was hard to find, and in the end it turned out that the other Mobistar office was very close to where I had originally asked for it. In that place everybody was quite fiendly, but it´s quite amazing what bureacrazy it took to get me a ´chip´(SIM card) and a tarjeta. It must have taken over an hour to go through the whole process. Anyway, now I am the proud owner of an Ecuadorian phone number! As there wasn´t that much of the day left by then, I thought I´d get myself a treat and had my hands manicured. Unfortunately part of the nail polish has alread come off by now.
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