So much time, so little to do

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Nearing the end of our South American adventure, we found ourselves in Quito for 5 nights, and had high hopes of spending the time wisely...sadly this was not to be.

We stayed in the main touristy area of town Mariscal (?) in a lovely room above a coffee shop, surrounded by bars and restaurants..we even bumped into our mate Sally who had just arrived on a 48hr bus journey from Peru.

However, Quito doesn't really appear to have that much to offer...plenty of bars, if you like your bars with security guards and pistols, plenty of streets which you're told are too dangerous to walk down, but not a whole lot else. The coffee is generally also pretty crap for a country famous for selling the stuff...

We visited the old town, which was nice...but that's all I can say about it, really...nice. Plenty of old colonial style buildings, a few really old, nice churches, but nothing we'd not seen in, say, Salta or elsewhere...we didn't stay there for too long, save for a lovely one pound lunch at the local Hare Krishna restaurant.

We even went on a bus trip to the Mittal del Mundo...a feat in human ingenuity if ever there was one. A bit outside Quito, the Equator passes by, and the industrious Ecuadorians (?) decided to build a town to celebrate it (having already named their country after it). There are statues, depicting the clever folk who worked out where it was, lines in the ground with big North and South signs, T-shirts, guinea pig roasts, the lot.

Trouble is that the clever bods who worked it out got it slightly wrong, and the actual equator was found some years later to pass a km or two from there...Doh!

We didn't stay for long...

At least we had the start of the World Cup to cheer us up...Ecuador having qualified this time.

The locals were really looking forward to the first game, against Poland, and sported the obligatory yellow shirts all over town on the big day. We found a spot in the beer garden of a Dutch pub we knew and settled in to watch first the Germany game and then the Ecuador game....great fun, including the rainstorm which kicked off in the middle of the second half and threatened to soak the tv as well as us.

After the big win, the town went wild, in the rain. This would have been great but for the fact that we had to be in the airport less than an hour after the final whistle, and most of the cab drivers had stopped work to watch the match.

We got there eventually, though a bit soaked, ready for our overnight flight (via Bogota) to Buenos Aires in time to catch the next match in the morning.

Last stop before Europe...

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Comments

[Q]

Ah....
I never made the connection between Equador and the Equator. So for this factoid alone your entire trip has been worth while! I have really enjoyed reading this blog, thanks for taking the time to share your trip with us. Apart from the Guinea pig. You could have left that bit out.