Quito

Finally, I write. I've been back from this year's month of travel for just over a week now, but I haven't felt settled enough to write on the trip until now. It's been a busy week. I actually just got back from an overnight camping trip which I had hoped would include surfing, but the ocean did not cooperate. It was still a good trip, though, since I got to spend time with my friend Emily who moved here from Austin over a year ago. I also discovered how beautiful Tillamook State Forest is.

On to the travels. My plan is to write the trip in single city installments, which means I have to start with Quito. We booked a hostel in advance and, since our flight arrived in the middle of the night, we arranged for someone to pick us up at the airport. When we got there no one was waiting for us, but the airport had a booth specifically for hotel transportation and the ladies that worked there were able to help us get a cab. Stan chatted with the cab driver on the way there. He enthusiastically recommended that we visit Isla de la Plata, the poor man's Galapagos. I put it on my list of cool things, but we never made it to the Ecuadorian coast. It's impossible to travel in a straight line between many places in Ecuador. The roads go to the bigger cities, so you usually have to go through Quito or Guayaquil, and that adds up to a lot of hours on a bus so we had to cut out a lot of places that sounded really cool because we just didn't have the time to see it all.

We stayed at a hostel called the Secret Garden, which Stan picked and I was happy with. It was in old town Quito, away from the backpacker district, but it had a really great rooftop which served breakfast, dinner, and beer. We met a lot of people in those first few days that we would end up traveling with later.

The best thing we did in Quito was take a cab up to Panecillo to check out the statue that overlooks the city. We went with two Canadians who had been on our flight from Houston, and we played frisbee on top of the hill. Then we hiked down and had (crappy) vegetarian food for lunch. It was a good morning, and a good start to the trip, but the rest of our time in Quito was not really worth writing about. We found it to be an unpleasant city, and we moved on as quickly as we could. Our hostel had another branch near Cotopaxi and, after ruling out visiting Tena, we decided to go there.

Unfortunately, I don't have any photos of Quito. I lost my camera the first day and we were kind of uncomfortable carrying Stan's camera around after that. The photos will have to wait until I write about Cotopaxi.