A fish called Lisa

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Well I have been in Ecuador now for 11 days. Feels like so much longer because I have done so much! But have only been in South America for 2 weeks and 1 day.

So Quito ... Quito is cool. A bit busy, polluted and noisy for me to stay here too long but nonetheless very cool. The Old Town is great. I can spend hours and hours wandering the streets and drinking juice papaya, pineapple, orange, mandarin etc etc. What else have I done? Well, after allowing myself a couple of days to acclimitise to the 2800m altitude I climbed a volcano. Yep thats right to a summit of 4700m. So you realise how high that is Mt Cook is only 3700 I think. Now that I have impressed you all I will tell you that we drove most of the way and only walked the last 2 hours. But it was still hard work. The altitude causes you to lose your breath fast. Of course thats the reason , its not because I am unfit at all. Amazing at the top because the volcano is still active! We could see puffs of steam coming out of the crater! Could blow at any time... Oh it was called Guagua Pichincha if any of you out there are interested.

Other than that ... I have had many a great experience on the local transport here. Buses are 25c which is great. Everything is so cheap! For lunch it is set menu including soup, rice and meat, dessert and jugo (juice) all for only $1.50! I will admit that its not that good but fills you up anyway. Yeah the food in Ecuador is definately not something to write home about. Rice, beans, meat (including guinea pig which I havent been able to try yet unfortunately!) and lots of fried chicken. Oh empanadas, those are the yummy meat pastries which I have discovered also come in chicken and vegetable! The fruit here is great. there is a fruit and vege mart just down the road from the hostel which sells everything imaginable including tree tomatos (just like gemini ave) yum.

So I started spanish lessons last tuesday. I am doing 20 hours one on one. its going ok. i find it hard to concentrate and do my homework (yes i have homework!) when there is so much other fun stuff to do! but it is helping i think. only have 5 to go now so hopefully it has made a difference.

Last week i took a salsa lesson. that was fun. i was actually not that bad. and luckily i did so because we went to banos for the weekend where there was a lot of salsa dancing. so about that, banos was cool. went there with some girls i met at salsa. however, it was a bit of a blow out and we went out til 6am both nights drinking cuba libres (thats rum, cola and lemon). so needless to say we did not get up that early in the mornings. banos is a small town underneath another active volcano. it last erupted in 1999 so not that long ago! there is heaps of outdoors dstuff to do like rafting and horseriding and mountain biking. we did go mountain biking which was fun although it was actually on the road. we went for about 3 horus and visited a number of cascadas (waterfalls). i demanded a helmet and the tour guy was quite shocked. but hey better to be safe than sorry i say. they drive like madmen over here! yeah so other than that lots of salsa dancing with the locals. they also have hot pools in banos which we went to but i did not get in the water because it was really gross.

on sunday mel arrived in quito (a friend from nelson) so we have just got back to quito from mindo for a couple of days. mindo was lovely, very quiet and calm. it is a small town set in a gorgeous cloud forest, renowned for the diversity of birts (>400 different species). it also had a lot of bitting bugs.

we stayed at a great hostel in mindo - hostel rubby. and becuase we were the only ones there we got to stay in the "penthouse". this was the attic equipped with a set of hammocks with a view out the window into the forest - perfect! the next morning we went bird watching. at 6am! getting up at 5.30 for breakfast was hard but well worth it in the end - we saw a bunch of different birds including tucans (my all time favourite!), hummingbirds, hawks, woodpeakers etc etc. marcelo our guide told me that there is a fish called lisa in the river in mindo. hence the name of my blog. wicked.

Along the way we also stopped at La Cascada de Nambillo (waterfall) for a swim. You can jump off a rock into the waterfall - i was too chicken to do it. We did however go down the slide into the river - the end of which actually stopped a long way from the water, so there was quite the dramatic fall, scream, and splash into the river.

the next day we also checked out Mariposas de Mindo a butterfly farm, it was cool. other than that we lazed about in hammocks at the hostel attempting to communicate with the children that lived there. very nice. i love hammocks. the people in mindo were lovely. small towns aye.

so back in quito now. not sure what i will do next but rest assured i will keep you updated. that was a long blog! apologies for that but i am using this as a bit of a journal as well so bear with me! i will be publishing photos on facebook only because it is too timeconsuming to do it here as well so check those out if youre interested!

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