Blogs from Ecuador, South America - page 659

- FOOD: My bad diet was broken by 'ceviche' - a Peruvian/Ecuadorian dish of fish marinated in chilis and lime juice and served with chopped tomatoes and raw onion, served with pop corn! Sadly the desert of tinned peaches and squirty cream let the meal down. - AREA: Cuenca is classed as Ecuador's most beautiful colonial city with it's narrow, cobbled streets and colourful houses with balconies. Sadly my accommodation did not live up to this pretty picture! - PEOPLE: Locals that stare. Not many tourists. - WEATHER: Am I back in the UK? Thur 30th June: The moment I arrived in Loja at 7am, there was a bus to Cuenca so I caught it. What's another 5 hours when you've already travelled for what seems like 5 years on the bus? I thought I'd got ... read more

Will update what we have been doing on arrival in Cuenca, but just to let you know, there will be no pictures for a bit as the camera met a watery grave. already! ... read more

Hey there yáll, this is Rich. I previously informed you how fantastic i was, but it seems that needs qualification. Sorry bout the camera, and the lack of photos means more text. We have no photos of this excursion, but we went rafting on class three plus rapids, which is pretty cool but not life threatening. Big waves, big rocks and lots of getting very wet. I tried to comfort myself by stating that the camera may not have survived that anyway, but the guide pointed out he had a dry bag. So did I, I just left it in my other pocket. Overall we rafted 25 kilometres of rapids with damn fool names interspersed with periods of calm in which to pretend we weren´t tired. The trip took about five hours overall, and in that ... read more

Got back from the Galapagos and had a dinner with everyone from the boat. We all ended up in the same hotel which was great! After a week of sharing a cabin where only one person could be in the cabin at one time (unless the other was in bed!). I soon had all my belongs sprawled out all over the place and a huge pile to send to the wash. Had to continue to take motion sickness tablets as was now feeling land sick - no swaying was causing a problem! I was not the only one and we decided that the only thing to do was to go out and have a couple of cocktails with dinner. Strong cocktails, being up at 6 am and altitude effects had us all yawning and in bed ... read more

Hey there yáll, this is the mighty Rich signing in under Jenny´s name cos mine still doesn´t work. We´ve found our feet okay, left our hovel and gone to a better place where you don´t have to stay up all night through fear of the staff. Also we´ve got down with the food (kind of), do as the lacals do for cheap food, and we have overcome the language barrier by simply sitting and looking confused till they bring food in the hope we´ll go away. We´ve been up to much of late, although much of it has involved sitting around in Quito planning today´s mammoth expedition of poor fortune, as will be seen. We intended to go on another intrepid expedition into a 4k wide volcano crater, but got it inspiringly wrong. The bus we ... read more