Advertisement
Published: November 5th 2009
Edit Blog Post
After a busy and fun summer, sailing, trips to Scotland and Turkey, 4 weddings, (including our own!), a brief ‘honeymoon’ in Hampshire, and months….. well no, weeks….. actually a few hours planning (never knowingly overplanned), it was time to pack our bags for the real honeymoon: 6 eagerly anticipated months in South America and a trip back via Down Under to see some friends.
Our outline itinery will take us to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile - with the key highlights being a trip to the Galapagos Islands, to school to study Spanish, Machu Picchu and the Inca Trail, Lake Titicaca, the Amazon Jungle, salt plains, Iguazu Falls, glaciers, the wine region of Mendoza, the alpine heights of Bariloche, trekking in Patagonia and Torres del Paine and to the end of the world in Tierra Del Fuego and Ushuaia.
We left the UK already looking forward to getting back to our lovely house in SW11!!
We flew to Quito via Madrid on 23rd September, arriving in Quito around 4.30pm, although being 6 hours behind the UK, it already felt like bedtime, so we crashed out in our nice hotel room without any dinner!
The next day was a
bright, warm sunny day and the plan was to explore the city a bit and have a look around the old town - supposedly one of the finest examples of an old colonial centre in South America (according to the ‘Lying Planet’). When we did eventually get there a few days later, it was interesting and quite picturesque, but I’d say Salvador in Brazil was much better.
We headed in the direction of the old town, but soon found ourselves walking down a street which had been barricaded by the police, and a large and rowdy student demonstration heading towards us! We sat on a bench in the park for a few minutes to figure out where we were and what was going on, but decided to give the old city a miss when the police started firing tear gas into the student crowd on the street below! Time to head back to the new part of town for some lunch!
With Sarah’s birthday approaching on our first weekend away, we decided to head out of town up into the highlands and to the Cotopaxi National Park area only a couple of hours away from Quito, to stay on
a traditional working hacienda for the weekend. Being at 3,200 metres, it was pretty cold and windy, despite the fact that we were nearly on the equator. Did we bring enough warm clothes if it’s this cold at the equator?!!
The hacienda provided fantastic and plentiful food and lovely big fires to sit by and we had a very enjoyable weekend walking to the waterfall, moutain biking (hard work up hill at 3,200 metres!) and horseriding for fantastic views of Cotopaxi and Rumiñahui volcanoes. The hacienda dogs came with us as unofficial guides every time we left the hacienda yard.
After our weekend away we headed back to Quito for a couple of days. We did make it to explore the old town, but plans to catch the Teleferico (cable car) up the hill and to walk to the Pichincha volcano were shelved after a big night out at a tapas bar where you only pay for the wine and they keep topping up your glass!
Then it was time to get ourselves organised for our first big adventure of the trip - Galapagos.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.078s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 10; qc: 28; dbt: 0.0276s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb