Finally Onto Our 2nd Country!

We finally coked for ourselves for the first time....a great breakfast of local fruit, eggs, and arepas. Our first whole day in Cali was very lazy including a trip to the mall, watching zombie movies and eating street food. The highlight of the day was eating a burrito and it made me realize some of the things I miss besides people. These things include GOOD spicy food, driving my car, flushing toilet paper down the toilet and being able to say what I want when I want. I don’t mean the last one as a freedom of speech, but just the fact that I am starting to think in Spanish and realizing how limited my vocabulary is.

After our lazy day in Cali, we ventured into the city and it was pretty uneventful. Cali didn’t have much to offer besides some time to relax and a bus station to move onto Ecuador. It was interesting to watch the news during lunch and see that the top stories were The Giants winning the World Series and that it was election day in the US.

Our trip to the border was rather relaxed. We were on a comfortable bus that was searched a couple times by the Colombian army before finishing our 10 hour trip to the border in Ipiales. There we took a taxi from the terminal to the border, went through customs, walked across the border, went through Ecuador immigration, then took a collectivo to the bus station and finally got on a bus to Otavalo, two hours away. Otavalo was great! Nestled between some large volcanoes along the Pan-American Highway it is home to one of the best markets in Ecuador (where we purchased more art) as well as some nice sights.

The first impression of the Ecuadorian people was great, they treated us well and were very helpful. However, while I was alone on a hill overlooking the city I was asked for some help by a stranger. In short, I was asked by a friendly local to help him determine his sexuality…This led to a very awkward no thanks and a quickly planned exit route. Thanks mom, I realized I am naive and a little bit too trusting of new people.

The following day, after the best shower of the whole trip, which included hot water and high pressure we met a fellow American and headed up to see a sacred tree, an Andean Condor park and some beautiful waterfalls. After a 5 km hike up to the condor park, which took to an elevation over 9,000 feet we found out we missed the sacred tree and did not have enough time to see the waterfalls. We took a cab with our new friend back to the city and quickly made our way to the bus terminal for our 2 hour ride to Quito.

Our arrival in Quito was met with welcome arms, by a “hostel” we had found on hostelworld.com. It was not a hostel, it was a guy who thought he could make some cash instead of just having a posting on couchsurfing.com. Thanks Hostelworld for not checking your listings. We arrived so disoriented and late that we didn’t care that he had to take down the decorations from his sister’s birthday party, tell her to go to bed and then clean our room. He hadn’t renewed his internet contract so we had him escort us to the nearest internet café to plan the next day. It didn’t turn out so bad because he helped us navigate the city and his mother made us an amazing breakfast…he just has a poor business plan with good intentions.

We really didn’t want to go to Quito for more than a bus layover, but considering that we are geographers and the monument to the equator was just outside Quito we had to hang out for a day. We took a $0.25 bus to the terminal where we saw the biggest farmers market ever, a few city blocks in area. Then we took another bus for $0.40 for about 30 minutes to the Mitad del Mundo monument where we took lots of pictures of us playing around on the monument. I say monument because the real equator was a few hundred feet outside the monument’s boundaries so we had to use a GPS to find it…then took more pictures. Funny thing happened here, Josh and I were getting some coffee and going through pictures on our cameras. He was wondering how much space was on his memory card and for some reason decided that formatting the card would tell him. Well after he did that, he had ZERO photos on his card, everything from the trip was lost! But don’t worry, we got them back after some good internet detective work on his part.

That day we returned to Quito and hitched a ride with our host to the bus station and caught another 10 hour bus to Puerto Lopez, a bit south and on the Pacific coast of Ecuador. The bus ride started out alright, except the seat in front of Josh leaked and I was in the front row and was almost thrown out of my seat by our driver’s amazing stopping skills. At 3:00 AM, or about ¾ of the way through our trip we started to let people off, so about every 20 min the bus stopped and people started yelling. This went on until we got to Puerto Lopez around 5:15 AM. We got off the bus tired and disoriented and walked to a hostel we emailed, hoping for a room. I rang the bell and a man yelled at us, then came out of his house to let us in. He said he was expecting us and let us into our room, offered us breakfast when we woke up and said he looked forward to showing us around town.

So far our stay in Puerto Lopez has been great. He showed us a few places in the small fishing village and introduced us to some other guests, a couple on holiday from Quito that happened to be going to some beaches at the national park. We tagged along and it turns out they are biologists that have worked at the park and in Ecuador so we had some great guides to show us the botany of the coastal dry forest. Today our host hooked us up with a tour group going to Isla de Plata, essentially the poor mans Galapagos Islands because it is much cheaper to visit and smaller. Josh and I were not part of the large group of German tourists that arranged the trip, so we unfortunately had to tour the more rugged and remote section of the island with our own guide. Not a bad ratio of two English speaking eco nerds to one Spanglish speaking tour guide. On our 6 km walk we saw lots of boobies (the Bluefooted and Nazca types) as well as a large sea lion and a baby albatross. A note about the baby albatross, it was larger than the boobies and this baby stood taller than my knee!

I really need to get some photos up, but I am lazy and we are having enough trouble with them on the computer and memory cards. Technology has been challenging us lately as the wi-fi has low signals, Josh lost his camera battery charger, our UV water purifier has been on the fritz and the beard trimmer that we are sharing sucks. I was so fed up with it that I reduced my beard to a mustache and soul patch for a day, I laugh every time I look in the mirror, tomorrow I will just have a soul patch. Our host is arranging to take us into the cloud forest for a two day camping trip, I hope him and his co-guide get things figured out. In the mean time, I am waiting for some bug bites to heal. In about twenty minutes at the condor park, some small bugs made my legs look like chicken pox and left me with an ankle that is sore and swollen.