Last night it was Vicky’s Birthday (19, Wandsworth), and we went out with Angela (28, Glasgow) and Barbara (Switzerland). It was a pretty good night all round, just $8 entry and all you can drink! I didn’t actually get too drunk though, a combination of too much food, the high altitude and general knackeredness meant that I stuck to the beers.In the morning, the four of us got the bus to the Equator (Mitad del Mundo), where we saw the monument, established by the European settlers in the 18th century, although it’s actually about 300m awa... [read more]

Just after arriving in Quito, having travelled for more or less 18 hours, the taxi driver responds to my directions with "Oh, the Gringo Quarter." Which is nice.

First impressions of Quito are more or less as I expected. It´s similar to the sightly dodgier parts of most European towns. Only it´s all like that. There´s a KFC just round the corner from the hotel (no, I haven´t been yet), and the security guard there is armed.

The hotel is much better than I expected, I´ve got a double bed with ensuite, free internet in t... [read more]

Today, we took a three hour bus ride to Otovalo, the largest indigenous market in South America, although we kind of misjudged how long it would take to get there, and it turned out we had just an hour there before we had to head back, for the 6pm group meeting.

The market itself was OK, alot of the stalls were selling the same stuff though – alpaca wool, bracelets and jewelery, ponchos, and wood or stone carvings. There was also a food market there though, where we saw one guy selling live baby chickens in paper bags, and several stalls with kilos and kilos of so many d... [read more]

Day 8 of the tour, we arrived in Cuenca - Ecuador´s third largest city with about 500k inhabitants. It has a distinct colonial feel to it, with dozens of very impressive Churches, built by the Spanish Conquistadors as they sought to (successfully) force Catholicism upon the Ecuadorians.

On the way to Cuenca we stopped off at a farm that has been converted into a tourist spot, where we tried traditionally prepared Cuy (guinea pig), which was slaughtered in front of us before being rubbed with a variety of spices and cooked slowly on top of a furnace. He... [read more]