The last few days in Ecuador

---

Ecuador

So we continued our travels by jumping off the plane in Guilquil after our lovely trip to the Galapagos. We spent five hours terrified on the bus - the driver has a death wish! Over taking large vehicles on blind bends with a 3000 meter drop at the edge of the road. Even the locals where banging on the door telling him to slow down and not be such an idiot! Anyway after we got our bags safely back, Jo had a go at the driver telling him how bad his driving was but we don’t think he understood as he just nodded his head.

Remarkably we made it in one piece to Cuenca. As we were arriving at night we thought it was safer to get a taxi to the accommodation. However that also went a bit pear shaped as we got dropped off in the wrong location and that Hostel was full anyway, but he recommended another hostel so we walked into the centre. We found the not so apply named Perl of Cuenca where a 6 year old showed us around the hostel and to our room. We ventured out for dinner but after a very long day of stressful travelling we didn’t even see the local concert on and flaked out.

We spent 3 days in nice Colonial Cuenca with lots of Churches and Cathedrals. We managed to meet up with Marco & Lena for dinner and a few drinks, a Swiss couple from our Galapagos cruise boat. We spent hours sifting through our Galapagos photos and writing the travel blog, some time exploring the city and impressive cathedrals and walking around the large local market.
Monday morning we went to a hat museum/shop and saw lots of Panama hats in the making as the Panama hat is originally from Ecuador.

We jumped on a local bus with everybody gawking at the tourists, got some lunch, paid our departure tax at the bus terminal! The five hour bus journey to Loja took us through some good views which we could appreciate as the driver was not trying to kill us on this occasion. A local stake house and 4 hours later we departed on our over night bus for Peru. After 4 hours we stopped and stamped out of Ecuador, walked across the bridge at 3am in the morning and got a stamp from a man in a booth on the Peruvian side.

Sorted.

---