Ecuador (Jason's perspective)

Well, computers have been few and far between for a few days, not because there aren't any, but because we've been non-stop! Subsequently this is a long post. There will be a test.

We've been on a tour of Ecuador for the last 9 days. We've been to quite a few places in the Capital city of Quito, we crossed the Andes and decended into the Amazon Jungle, we travelled to Baños then climbed the highest active volcano in the world. Very busy!

I've found South America to be fantastic fun, but quite draining. The language barrier can be difficult to overcome. You can get your point across, but you spend a lot of time feeling quite powerless.

On to the stuff you care about-
Amy has told you about the landslide and the jungle, so let me tell you about Baños.

Spot Amy in Baños!


We arrived in Baños after a gruelling 4 hour journey across roads that are barely fit for wheeled vehicles. Motion sickness was a real concern for a large proportion of the group.
When we arrived in Baños we checked into our hotel and went out for a meal. I only bring this up because I love to play pool, yet the pool table at the pub-like place seemed to have developed a personal vendetta against me before I could say to my fellow travellers "Prepare to lose a lot of money".
When I attempted to remove the triangle rack from the balls, they all rolled away from the beautiful shape I'd created with my own blood, sweat and tears.
I seem to have become adept at playing 'curve balls', but have yet to develop any accuracy with them. Perhaps it was due to the fact that the table was not even close to flat. I could almost hear the sound of spirit-levels screaming in the night.

Needless to say, my opponents wallets were quite safe that night.

The next morning I got up early to get ready for the day's activities. Unfortunately Amy had been quite sick for the previous night and all throughout the day (probably due to dodgy prawns at the place the night before) and was not able to join me in attempting to die of adrenaline poisoning.

I got into a van with two other people from my tour. The van was crewed by 5 guys who could only be described as yahoos. They were hooting at women as we passed them, making crude jokes and looking luridly at two girls from our group who grabbed a lift to go Canyoning.
Once we were on the river though, they were all business and very professional.

White water rafting is incredibly fun.
I've never done it before, and due to my uncomfortable relationship with water it wasn't something I'd been planning to do. I'm very glad I plucked up the courage to go because it was no where near as bad as I was imagining. The waves weren't too big, the water didn't shift into a huge face with a gaping maw which would attempt to swallow me whole, only to get indigestion. I didn't die.
We travelled 18 kilometers along a river which has a name that is too hard to type. No-one fell overboard, though not through lack of trying.

The next adventure was Quad-Biking. 5 of us set out, 4 of us on 3 quads, 1 of us on a motorbike. It turned out to be very fortunate that someone took a bike because it was the only reliable vehicle in our little convoy. You get a bike and a map and total freedom. We decided to visit Buenavista, a lookout that provides people with incredible views of the city, as long as they have the vehicle to take them up a mountain. Not even half way up, my quad spluttered and died leaving me stranded. I got the attention of my good mate Lorne (a loud Canadian who is one part awesome and 5 parts incredible fun) and he gave me a ride on the back of the bike back to the place we hired the gear from. They provided me with another quad and took the broken down one away. I finally made it up to the top after getting chased by no less than 5 dogs and took in the view in the 5 minutes I had left before having to return.
On the way back I lagged behind the others due to the fact that my quad was a steaming pile of crap on wheels. On a main road just outside of town, the bike spluttered to a stop. I kicked it. It started. There was nothing wrong with the engine this time, it appeared to be straining against the brakes. A piece of metal had sheared off and gotten stuck in the brake handle, holding it down. I yanked it out and zoomed off on my merry way. When I arrived in town again, a taxi stopped suddenly in front of me so I deaccelarated and hit the brakes. Nothing happend. Evidently the piece of metal I pulled out was important. The brakes no longer worked - I was steaming towards the back of an expensive looking taxi with no way to stop myself. I decided that the only way I was going to come to a halt was to hit something hard so I turned towards the curb. Being an all-terrain quad bike, it jumped up onto the footpath instead of coming to the sudden halt I had been hoping for. So, picture a small footpath, filled with locals and tourists diving out of the way of a frantic Australian wearing a silly helmet doing 30kph directly towards them. Once my brain caught up with my reflexes, I hit the kill-switch to stop the engine and pulled off the footpath and came to a halt in the middle of the road. As I sat there trying to digest what just happened, I looked behind me to see the taxi I'd just 'overtaken' shaking his fist and honking his horn telling me to get out of the way. He was soon joined by no less than 4 other taxis, all making the same gestures and honking their horns.
I gingerly started up again and pulled over, stopping myself with my feet to allow the taxis to pass. I got off the bike and walked back a few metres to collect my courage which must have fallen out somewhere along the way, then returned to the bike and slowly made my way back to the rental place without being able to stop at any stop signs or for pedestrians. Now, just to be clear - its very hard to explain to a woman who speaks naught but Latin-American Spanish that the brakes on a quad bike are actually essential to the experience. She grabbed the brake handle and attempted to move the bike. The damned thing didn't move an inch. The brakes were strong enough to stop the bike from moving from stationary, but not under power. I couldn't be bothered getting the point across and to be frank, didn't want to get back on the hell-bike to show her. I gave her back the helmet, thanked her very much for the adventure and walked away.

Meanwhile, Amy had a bit of a sleep in, did some shopping and drank some passable coffee. It would have been nice if she could have joined me for the day's activities, but she just wasn't well enough. It isn't a huge problem because we can do them all at home anyway, with a modicum of safety.
That said, she did have a brush with danger. While drinking coffee in one of the better cafes in town, a local man approached her with a small child. He stood nearby while the child sat at the same table with Amy and started playing with the sugar. After a minute or so, he told Amy that he didn't want to interrupt and that the child was his nephew. Amy smiled and continued to drink her coffee and write postcards. Eventually the child and the man got bored and left. Immediately, the dutch woman who ran the cafe came out and asked Amy what the man had said to her and explained that he was one of the main drug dealers in town and likes to approach single looking women and "ruin their lives". I'm not sure what this entails, but I'm equally sure I don't want to find out. So much for Baños being a safe city. I guess 'safe' is a relative term.

The cafe


We left Baños the next day and headed up a crazy-bumpy road to Cotapaxi, the tallest active volcano in the world. This wasn't particularly exciting as it was absolutely covered in cloud. We got a photo of the sign telling you in meters how high we were.
This little side trip was probably not worth the effort as we didn't get any views. This was compounded by the fact that one of the ladies in our group had gotten gastro, coupled with the bumpy road, coupled with altitude sickness. We made 4 vomit-stops on the way down. She did a great job though - she didn't get a drop in or on the van.


Thats about all from me for now. Posting next from New York!

Amazon Jungle

Once we got back to Quito from the Galapagos Islands we had a couple of nights in Quito with day trips. On the first day our tour guide, Alberto, took us around Quito. We saw a few Catholic churches. One was amazing - beautiful paintings everywhere, and almost entirely covered in gold. He told us that this one was established by a group of powerful Catholics. The next church he showed us was dark and dusty, with a creaky dirty wooden floor, and few decorations. He said that this church was made by a group of Catholics who are more humble and don't think that power and riches are important.

The next day we went on a day trip to Otavallo, an Indian market town. We bought a few things there. It was a massive market - apparently the biggest one in South America. Everything was really dirty, and we were definitely too scared to eat anything! The toilets were really gross - you pay 10 cents, then get a given a few sheets of toilet paper. The floor was all wet and gross, and the smell was soooo bad. Then we went to a small town famous for selling leather products. A big long street was basically all leather shops. We didn't buy much there, although it was all really cheap.

The next morning we headed to the jungle. First we had to drive for about 2 hours up into the Andes mountains. It was freezing cold and cloud-covered at the highest point. We crossed the equator on our way up...

(if you look closely our tour group is lined up along the equator line)

Then we began our descent, and the lower we got the more pretty flowers, waterfalls and nice green rainforrest trees there were. All was going well until we saw some traffic stopped ahead of us. Alberto said "this doesn't look good" and got out to investigate. About half an hour earlier there had been a massive landslide, so the road was blocked with mounds of mud and trees. A lot of cars were just turning around and going back. But luckily there was another Gecko tour bus on the other side of the landslide trying to get out of the jungle, and we managed to negotiate a bus-swap. So we loaded all our luggage onto our backs and tried not to slip over as we made our way about 60 metres over mud and branches.

(the landslide is the bare muddy cliff behind the bus, and down the bottom left you can see people carrying their luggage across the fallen mud and trees)

We were significantly more dirty by the time we got to the other side, but had a big luxury bus waiting for us. There were only 8 of us, so it was nice to be able to spread out.

About another half an hour down the road there was another landslide that had just occurred. Luckily this one wasn't as big, and there was just enough room for the bus to squeeze past the pile of mud, except for a tree trunk blocking the way. So our bus driver magically pulled a machette out from under his seat and hacked away at the tree. And then we were on our way again. This bus driver could only take us as far as a town still and hour away from our lodge. So after some lunch in that town we hired a ute to take us the rest of the way. I sat in the front, but Jason and some of the others had to sit in the tray of the ute - they had a great time, but I think they were all rather bruised by the end of it!

We arrived at a river and piled into a long canoe and motored down stream to our lodge - there are no roads in that part of the jungle, and all transport is via the river. The lodge had no electricity, so we had to use candles and torches which was fun. There were mosquitoes and sandflies everywhere so we took heaps of vitamin B and smothered ourselves in insect repellant. I think Jason got a bit sick of me pointing out all the bugs, and all the places in our cabin where bugs could potentially get in.

The next day we put on some gumboots and went for a walk through the jungle. It was really hot and humid, and we all had sweat pouring off us.

(our guide explaining something to us - he had to hit everything he was talking about with his machette)

(This is a bad photo of a really tiny cute stick insect)

We finally arrived at Amazoonica - a centre for injured animals. We saw tucans, ocelots, monkeys, pig-like animals, and funny-looking huge rodents. The most bizzarre animals were some big guinea pig-like creatures that were at least knee-height. My favourite was the tiny monkeys - they were so cute!!

To cool off at the end of the day we put our bathers on and floated down the river on inner tubes - we'd highly recommend it next time you're in the jungle! Although I hate to think what nasties were hiding in the murky water.

Galapagos Islands

Our four days on the Galapagos Islands were the highlight of the trip so far.
Amy got quite seasick, but luckily one of our fellow tourists was kind enough to give us some seasickness tablets. The only downside to them was that they completely knock you out. On the other other hand, this meant that Amy could actually sleep through the rocking of the boat.

The fact that all of the islands were formed by volcanic erruption completely blows my mind. Before the first erruption, there was nothing there but empty sea!

We saw sealions on almost every island, both marine and land iguanas, blue footed boobies, red-breasted frigatebirds, Galapagos tortoises, sea turtles, bright red crabs on dark black rocks and all manner of incredible volcanic creations.

We were extremely fortunate to be in a tour group that consisted of great people.
Of the 16 tourists on board, there were 5 aussies (1 ex-pat returning home from the UK), 5 Canadians, 1 American and 5 UKians.
Charles (the American) happened to be from New York and gave us lists of things to do and see, and (most importantly) a place to go to get good coffee.

The boat we were on was really good, the crew were extremely efficient and the tour guide was extremely knowledgeable and helpful. I don't think we could have asked for more (except maybe time and money!)

We're keen for updates on:
- The election
- Church stuff
- New haircuts and facial hair (*looks pointedly at the Wilkins...*)
- Family stuff
- Anything else people would think we'd be interested in.

Other photos-


Our tour group.


A metric tonne of marine iguanas.


We were sitting down eating our lunch when our tour guide told us to come up on deck to see some dolphins. We were very pleasantly surprised when they turned out to be a pod of pilot wales! This a an amazing sight that isn't common in the Galapagos. Even the crew and the tour guide were taking photos!

Safely in Quito

We made it.
If you look closely, you'll see that the Asientos (seats) are 1D and 1F and the word 'BUSINESS' at the top of the boarding voucher...
Yep. Due to the fact that we were delayed yesterday, and the long amount of time we spent attempting to check in this morning meant they upgraded us to Business class for the two hour flight to Quito!

We got to relax in the big comfy chairs with lots of leg room, ate our Caesar salad, a glass of white wine and enjoyed our Cinnamon cake with coffee. We reclined our seats, watched some Cold Case then read our books.

So yes Mum, we made it here safely. You can stop worrying now. When we landed at the airport we could see the crashed plan still hanging off the edge of the runway. It was an incredible sight. Unfortunately I couldn't take any photos of it because electronic devices were "Not to be used until well inside the terminal".
After the runway, there was a bit of a downward slope so the plane was leaning over to one side. I could just imagine the yellow inflatable slides hanging from it and people streaming down them.

The hotel in Quito isn't bad. We've got a meeting for the start of our tour at 5pm. We take a small plane flight to Baltra Island tomorrow morning to begin our four day cruise.



More info when we get back to the mainland!

Apparently bad luck strikes in threes...

Jason has finally let me use the blog (since I had to show him how to do something on the computer today!). Anyway, back to the story...



Bad luck #1:

This first one we already mentioned in a previous post - the fact that there just happened to be a transport strike the day we were due to go to Machu Picchu. We still made it there, but just had to leave earlier (ie 5:30am - our body clocks are getting so messed up!)



Bad luck #2:

On the way back from Machu Picchu the train was really late. It ambled along at nearly walking pace, and randomly stopped for rather long periods of time with no explanation. We finally arrived back in Cuzco at 11pm, where a Transfer was supposed to meet us to take us back to our hotel. They weren't there. So we were stuck in Cuzco in the middle of the night with no idea what to do (Cuzco is safer than Lima, but you still wouldn't want to be a tourist there at night). We tried to make a phone call to either our hotel or Tucan (the company who was supposed to provide the transfer), but we couldn't get the public phones to work. There were lots of taxis around, but we had been warned not to use them - they are very dodgy. Eventually we had no option other than to take one of these taxis. It was a tiny tiny car, covered in dents and rust, which we were surpised even started. Luckily the driver took us straight to our hotel.

Our taxi looked a bit like this, but imagine blue and way more dodgy

Not long after midnight we finally made it to bed.

Bad luck #3:

We got up at 4am this morning (that means we got less than 4 hrs sleep) so that we could get to the airport to fly from Cuzco to Lima then from Lima to Quito (in Ecuador). The plan was that we would be in Quito by about lunch time then have a day to relax before heading off to the Galapagos Islands. Of course nothing is ever that simple!

When we arrived at Cuzco airport we were informed that there had been a plane crash (apparently it ran off the end of the runway) in Quito, so Quito airport was closed. (Note from Jason: Mum, stop panicking) So we could get to Lima, but no further. Also the flight from Cuzco to Lima was delayed by more than 4 hours. Oh, and by the way, in the girls toilets in Cuzco there is no toilet paper acutally inside the cubicles. There is a big roll of toilet paper near the hand basins where you have to get your supply first. I'm not used to having to budget my toilet paper. I have no idea how much I use in a 'sitting'*! It's strange how such small, but significant differences remind me of how lucky we are in Australia.

When we arrived in Lima we had to try to book more tickets to Quito (we will hopfully be leaving Lima tomorrow morning) and find some accommodation in Lima for the night. Hardly anyone speaks English and our Spanish is rather less than fluent, so it took us a few hours to finally get things sorted.

We are hoping bad luck really does only strike in threes.

*please note that parts of this post were heavily edited by Jason - he can't help himself!

Machu Picchu

It was just our luck, there was a transport strike on the day we were travelling to Machu Picchu. The trains were still running, it just meant that we had to leave Cuzco at 5:30am instead of 6:30am, and of course, we didn't actually end up boarding the train until 6:30 anyway.

A very slow train trip took us past lots of small villages and some amazing scenery. 4.5 hours later we arrived in Aguas Calientes - a small (touristy) village near Machu Picchu. After some (extremely cheesy) pizza with our personal guide, we took the 25min bus up the side of a mountain to Machu Picchu.

The ruins were absoltely breathtaking. We were perched on the top of a mountain, with literally nothing (at times) between us and a very long fall into the river 400 metres below.

Our guide explained the theories about the Incas and what the ruins were used for. We explored why they would have chosen this incredibly remote location for their home and how they made it practical.

The mountain we were on was surrounded by a range of other mountains. You should get an idea what we mean when you see the video once we return.

Tonight we catch the return train to Cuzco to sleep in preperation for an early flight to Lima, then Quito in Ecuador. Then off to the Galapagos Islands.

Peru

While wandering the Avenue El Sol in Cuzco, we came across this lovely sight. Unfortunately, this lovely sight cost us 20 Soles (6USD)! After we took the photo, they came over with their hands out. They asked for 10 Soles, but I only had a 20. They said "10 each"! Bah, you live, you learn.

What a nice photo. I can't think of a caption.

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We barely made it to the plane on time thanks to some mis-direction from the hotel receptionist.

We've safely made it to Cuzco, Peru. Luckily the flight was quite short as we weren't able to sit together. Happily enough, I was seated next to a retired Australian couple who were very forthcoming with their life stories and travel plans once they found out I was Australian.

Having arrived, we've both been affected by altitude sickness. Luckily the symptoms have been fairly mild compared to what could have been. Just dizziness and varying amounts of nausea.

Breakfast this morning was tough, dry pieces of toast, some suspicious fruit and some of the local cocoa tea which apparently helps with altitude sickness.

Today we braved the streets of Cuzco as we made our way to the hotel that out tour starts at.
Every taxi that drives past honks in an attempt to get your business and almost every person you pass wants to sell you something.

We leave at stupid o'clock tomorrow morning to catch a train to Machu Picchu. We should have some breath-taking photos for you soon.

Spot Amy in Disneyland

People told us to avoid LA. We should have listened.
On the whole, it was smoggy, ugly and the people were really rude. We did find a few diamonds in the rough though, some people who were quite happy to help.

Simple fact: Disneyland is awesome, everyone should go there.
Disneyland made the whole LA saga worthwhile.
I don't think I'm overstating it, even though we're well past being classed as kids, we had an absolute ball. The rides were great fun (even the Winnie the Pooh one that Amy made me go on...), everything was extremely well finished and the atmosphere was (to borrow a phrase from Walt himself) magical.

We're currently in Lima, Peru awaiting a flight at 4:30am to Cuzco. We've hardly slept in the last 36 hours and Amy's been really sick. Can't wait to move on, Lima is a scary scary place.

We'll report in next time we can get to a computer that actually works!
We're homesick already and miss you all terribly.

--Jason and Amy.


Amy under the Hollywood sign.



Jason in front of Pooh's 'Hunny'.

Sunny Sydney

Here we are enjoying the Cane's hospitality. Noah's getting spruced up before going to meet Eliza Shepherd. Sadly, the shades weren't enough to win her affections.
We've been out enjoying the Sydney sun, consuming numerous Lindt chocolate beverages, kidnapping Noah and drinking our last good coffee for 6 weeks. Thanks Campos!