Quito

I've now been in Quito for four days, in what is probably the most dangerous part of my trip so far. However, despite Quito's reputation for crime, I haven't had any problems at all so far, although I have been pretty careful about where I go after dark. I'm staying in the Mariscal area of Quito's New Town. Mariscal is a bit of a backpacker ghetto, with budget hostels on almost every street, and a huge number of bars, nightclubs and international restaurants. On weekend evenings, the centre of Mariscal looks a bit like the Costa del Sol.

However, the majority of Quito's sights are in the Old Town, which is about a thirty-minute walk or a short bus ride south-west of Mariscal. I've spent a couple of days wandering around the Old Town seeing the sights, including the Basilica del Voto Nacional, the Cathedral, the Palacio del Gobierno (which is where the president conducts his business), the Iglesia de Santa Domingo, and the Monasterio de San Francisco, below.

I also went to La Compañia de Jesús (photos here and here), which took 160 years to build, starting in 1605, and is considered to be the most beautiful church in the whole of Ecuador. And it's not just Quito's churches that are worth seeing, because there are many other buildings in the Old Town that survive from the colonial era. There are some photos of typical streets here and here.

On Thursday afternoon I went for a ride on the TelefériQo, which is a cable car that runs up the side of Pichincha Volcano to an altitude of about 4100m. There were some great views of Quito from the top, as you can see here, here and below. Through the clouds I could also just about see Cotopaxi, which is probably Ecuador's most famous volcano.

On Friday morning I went to the Mitad del Mundo, which is the place 22km north of Quito where the French explorer Charles-Marie de la Condamine calculated the location of the equatorial line to be, in 1736. Below is a picture of me on the equator (left foot in the northern hemisphere, right foot in the southern hemisphere).

Well actually, to be completely honest, that's not true at all, because La Condamine wasn't entirely accurate with his measurements, and the true equator is about 300m north of this point.

In the evening I met up with Johann, Philippe and the rest of the group I met in Baños, who had just arrived in Quito after three days travelling around the Quilotoa Loop. We went for pizza near their hostel in the Old Town, and then got taxis over to the New Town, where we had a fairly wild night out in Mariscal until the early hours. As a result, the next day was pretty much a complete write-off. The others were planning to go out on Saturday night as well, but I was so tired that I couldn't face another night like Friday, and I had a quiet night in instead.

This morning (Sunday) I went to an Irish bar to watch England get knocked out of the World Cup. I guess Germany deserved to win in the end, but England were spectacularly robbed in the first half. On the positive side, at least that gives me one less thing to worry about, now that there's no more need to organise my travels around the World Cup timetable.

I'm now seeing out my last few hours in Quito until I have to catch the 11pm bus to Lago Agrio in the north-east of Ecuador. I've booked myself on a 5-day jungle tour in the Cuyabeno wildlife reserve, which starts in Lago Agrio tomorrow morning. However, I met someone in the hostel yesterday who had just returned from the jungle, and he told me that his bus journey back from Lago Agrio had taken 19 hours rather than the usual 8 because it had rained so much that the road was impassable. I hope the road conditions have improved by now because otherwise I'm not going to get to Lago Agrio in time for the start of my tour. Again I'll just have to see what happens.

Baños

I braved the erupting Tungurahua volcano to arrive in Baños on Saturday evening. There doesn't seem to be much danger from the volcano, although I was told that the number of tourists in Baños has dropped by 40% since it started erupting last week. Baños is a small town with a pretty spectacular location in the central highlands of Ecuador, and it's a great base for lots of outdoor activities in the surrounding area, as well as for relaxing in the thermal baths that the town is named after.

I checked myself into a dorm in Hostal Plantas y Blanco, although I nearly walked straight out again because the dorm smelt terrible and was very messy, as you can see (but not smell) from this photo. However, I'm glad I didn't, because I met a great bunch of people there, who I've spent the last few days with. The majority of them were French-speaking, as well as some Spaniards, so I've been in the unusual position of being in the minority as an English speaker. At one point on Saturday evening I found myself at a restaurant table with four French speakers to my left and four Spanish speakers to my right, and wondering which language to attempt to speak in. I'd say my French is still probably slightly better than my Spanish, although having been in South America for several months I definitely feel more confident speaking in Spanish at the moment.

On Sunday a group of seven of us (Anne, Johann, Markus, Philippe, Ollie, Boyang and me) hired some mountain bikes to cycle the 60km Ruta de las Cascadas (Waterfall Route) to Puyo. We stopped off at several waterfalls on the way, including Cascada de Agoyán, Cascada Puerta del Cielo and Cascadas Rio Blanco. The photo below is of me looking a bit wet at Cascadas Rio Blanco.

Finally we stopped at Cascada Pailón del Diablo, which was probably the most impressive of the lot. There's another photo of me here at Cascada Pailón del Diablo, now very wet, and a photo taken from the bottom of the waterfall here. It was getting so late at this point that we decided to call it a day, not having even made it halfway to Puyo (actually just over a quarter of the way), and we managed to get a lift back to Baños.

The following afternoon Markus, Johann, Philippe and I decided to hire some quad bikes for a couple of hours to go up the mountain to try to see some signs of activity at the Tungurahua volcano. We did get some good views of Baños (here and below), but unfortunately the top of the volcano was blanketed in cloud, so we couldn't really see very much.

In the evening we went to the Piscina de la Virgen baths, which are one of several thermal baths in Baños. There were baths of three temperatures - hot, super-hot and freezing cold, and it was all very relaxing, except for the freezing cold one obviously. Afterwards we went back to the hostel roof terrace to try some cheese and wine that some of the French contingent had bought for us.

This morning (Tuesday) a group of four of us went canyoning in some waterfalls near Baños, the first time I've ever done anything like that. I think it would have been more accurately described as abseiling, because I'm told that proper canyoning involves several other techniques as well. Anyway we abseiled down a series of five waterfalls - here is a picture of me going down the second one, and another of me on the third one (for some reason we didn't abseil down this one, and instead our guide just lowered us down himself). The photo below is of me descending the final and largest waterfall, which was about 50 metres high.

Tonight is my final night in Baños, and I'll be sad to leave because this has definitely been one of the highlights of my trip so far. I'll be saying goodbye to the friends I've made here, as we're heading our separate ways, with most of them leaving for the Quilotoa Loop tomorrow. I've decided to head straight to Quito, although I may well meet up there with Johann, Philippe and others on the weekend.

Cuenca (part 2)

I'm now nearly at the end of my time in Cuenca, so I thought I'd post an update. I've finished my week of Spanish lessons, and to be honest I'm pretty glad they're over. My teacher, Miriam, was very pleasant, but not brilliant at her job - for example, she made so many mistakes when explaining the imperative mood to me that it started to get quite embarrassing. However, to be fair to her the last two lessons were a lot better, and we had some interesting discussions about subjects like politics, war, and the differences between the genders, so I did revise my opinion of her towards the end of the week.

To give you an idea of how much my Spanish has improved, I went back to Wunderbar this afternoon to watch England's latest dismal performance on the football pitch, and I started talking to the friendly Ecuadorian man sitting next to me, whose name was Oswaldo. We ended up having an hour-long conversation almost entirely in Spanish, which would have been completely unthinkable a couple of months ago.

I also joined in with the activities at the language school in the afternoon. On Tuesday the salsa lesson that I mentioned in my previous post started off as I expected, with four guys and no girls at all. However, about an hour into the lesson a female teacher and two female students did turn up, so the second half of the lesson was a lot more fun. On Wednesday afternoon we went to the Museum of the Central Bank, which is Cuenca's most important museum. I'd already been to it last week, so it was slightly pointless, but this time we had a guided tour, so I suppose I did get something out of it. Finally, yesterday afternoon we had a lesson in Ecuadorian cookery. We cooked plantain tortillas, which considering I don't like bananas wasn't really the best recipe for me to learn.

Tomorrow morning I'm planning to head north to Baños. Oswaldo told me that a volcano near to Baños is erupting at the moment, so we'll have to wait and see if I make it there...

Cuenca

I've been in Cuenca for five days now, so I've got to know the place pretty well. The main reason I decided to study Spanish here rather than in Quito, which was my original plan, is that I've had too many people tell me how dangerous Quito is. Also, an Australian guy that I met in Lima recommended Cuenca to me, and he also recommended a particular language school (Amauta), and that's where I'm now studying. The downside of being in Cuenca is that the weather is pretty awful, with constant cloud cover, rain almost every day, and a maximum temperature of about 18C - it's a bit like British weather really.

I've gone a bit more upmarket with my accommodation this time, and I'm staying in quite a smart hostel in the Barranco area of the city, on the cliff overlooking Tomebamba river. It's costing me a hefty US$18 a night, but I'm sure I'll be back to the US$5 dorm beds at my next destination.

The historic centre of Cuenca is quite impressive, and it's retained a lot of its colonial architecture, for example this street. Cuenca has two cathedrals - there's a small one dating from the year of the city's foundation in 1557, and a big one that was built opposite it in the late nineteenth century because the old one was considered to be too small (there are photos of the new cathedral here and below).

The reason the towers at the front look a bit stumpy is that the cathedral is unfinished. This is what the cathedral was meant to look like, but it was discovered during construction that the architect had made a serious miscalculation, and if the towers were built to their full height, the whole building might collapse. 130 years after construction began, there are still plans today to complete the towers using a lighter material.

Another of the historic buildings in the centre of Cuenca is the church of Carmen de la Ascunción, which has a flower market outside it. The church has a nunnery attached to it, where the nuns, who aren't allowed to see or be seen by the outside world, make a living by selling goods through a turntable that enables them to remain hidden.

Cuenca also has a lot of museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (nice building, not very good art in my opinion), and the Museum of the Central Bank, which is next to the Inca site of Pumapungo. And did you know that Panama hats originated in Ecuador? Well I didn't, but it's true - for some reason the hats became known after their place of international sale rather than their place of manufacture. There are several workshops and museums in Cuenca dedicated to the Panama hat, and I went to one of them, where we were shown how the hats were made (you can see some hat moulds in this photo). Below is a picture of me trying on what looks like a torture implement, but is actually a device for measuring head size.

The World Cup started the day after I arrived in Cuenca, so I've been watching quite a few of the games since I've been here. Unfortunately, because of the time zone I'm in, most of the games are in the morning, which isn't ideal. However, the England vs USA game was at a fairly convenient 1.30pm on Saturday, so I went to my local Austrian pub (called Wunderbar) to watch England's embarrassing performance. It seemed as though most of Cuenca's British population (and the few Americans that cared) had gathered there, so there was a pretty good atmosphere.

On Sunday I went on a day trip to three nearby towns, Gualaceo, Chordeleg and Sígsig, which are known for their Sunday markets. Gualaceo had the biggest market of the three, which was mainly fruit and veg. Chordeleg's was smaller, but the thing that struck me most about Chordeleg was the incredible number of jewellers around the main square - it was like being back in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham. Sígsig had some strange sculptures in its main square, and quite a big indoor market, which I would guess is open every day, so there didn't seem to be anything particularly 'Sunday' about it. Maybe the Sunday market was somewhere else, and I didn't find it...

Anyway, on Monday I started my week of Spanish lessons, and they're going OK so far, but my teacher is definitely not as good as the one in Cuzco. I'm certainly learning new things though, so I think it's worth the money, particularly as it's only costing me US$160 for 20 hours, which is a fraction of what private tuition would cost in the UK. The school also organises events for the students in the afternoons. Yesterday's was a city tour, and today's is a salsa lesson - it seems as though most of the current students are male, so hopefully they'll rope in some of the (almost exclusively female) staff to join in the salsa lesson, otherwise it's not going to be much fun.

OK, there's more I could say, but I think this post is long enough, so I'll probably write some more at the end of the week.

Tumbes and Machala

You may recall that in my previous blog post I mentioned that I'd been eating a lot of seafood in Huanchaco. Well it looks like I paid the price for that, because I was violently ill in the early hours of Tuesday morning while on the bus from Trujillo to Tumbes. I won't go into any details, but let's just say it was lucky that the bus had on-board toilets, because otherwise it would have been even more messy and unpleasant than it already was.

I'd already planned to split my journey from Trujillo to Cuenca into three parts, and that turned out to be a good plan, because it gave me a chance to recuperate. It also meant that I spent two nights in towns with tropical climates, and I actually got to put on a pair of shorts for the first time since I was in Salta in Argentina, about seven weeks ago.

I spent Tuesday night in Tumbes, which is a fairly large town about 30km from the Ecuadorian border. The main reason people stay in Tumbes is to explore the nearby National Mangroves Sanctuary, but I wasn't really in a fit state to do anything like that. Instead I just had a look around town, and I thought it was quite a pleasant place. Among other things it had a colourful Cathedral and a strange piece of artwork in the Plaza de Armas.

The border crossing to Ecuador at Aguas Verdes has the reputation of being the worst in South America, because the town is full of scammers and con artists who are all looking to take advantage of the fresh supply of naive tourists that turn up every day. Fortunately it's possible to avoid all of this by getting a direct international bus from Tumbes to Machala in Ecuador, which is what I did on Wednesday morning.

I spent Wednesday night in Machala. Pretty much the only interesting thing about the town is that it's surrounded by huge banana plantations, and it's sometimes referred to as the 'banana capital of the world'. However, I didn't see anything of interest in the town itself, so I don't really have anything else to report.

I've now arrived in Cuenca, which is a much nicer place, and where I'll be staying for the next week to study some more Spanish. I'll tell you more about it next time.

Trujillo

I arrived in Trujillo on Saturday, although I've actually been staying in Huanchaco, which is a bit like Trujillo-on-Sea - it's a town on the coast about 10km north-west of Trujillo. Huanchaco is famous for its surfing, although as its the low season at the moment, there aren't a massive number of surfers here. It's also known for it seafood, of which I've been eating a lot.

I've put a couple of photos of Huanchaco beach here and here - in the second one you can see the caballitos de totora stacked up along the shore. By the way, if it looks gloomy in the photos, that's because it was. I really had expected it to be hot and sunny here, but Trujillo seems to suffer from the same problem as Lima - it's sandwiched between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, which causes almost constant cloud cover. However, the sunset wasn't too bad yesterday.

Yesterday morning I went to Chan Chan, which is quite an impressive archaeological site dating from around 1300AD. It was apparently once the largest adobe city in the world. I've uploaded some photos of the stone carvings here and here, as well as a photo of an excavated tomb.

This afternoon the weather improved a bit, and I went into the centre of Trujillo to have a look around. It's quite a pleasant city, and full of colonial buildings - these ones painted in pastel colours and with wrought-iron grills over the windows are quite typical. There wasn't a huge amount to see, except for the cathedral in the massive Plaza de Armas, below.

I'm now back at my hostel in Huanchaco, and I'm waiting for my inconveniently timed 11:45pm bus to Tumbes, which is near the Ecuadorian border. I'll probably cross into Ecuador on Wednesday, and I'm aiming to arrive in Cuenca on Thursday, in time to watch the opening games of the World Cup. I'll be staying in Cuenca for the whole of next week, as I've booked another week of Spanish lessons.

Huaraz

Huaraz is the adventure sports capital of Peru. There's not much of interest in the city itself, because most of the city was destroyed in an earthquake in 1970, so the main reason for visiting Huaraz is the landscape that surrounds it - the Cordilleras Blanca and Huayhuash constitute the highest mountain range in the world outside the Himalayas. Most people that visit Huaraz go there for the mountaineering and trekking, and there are a lot of multi-day treks on offer, but since I'd only just recovered after getting ill on my last trek into Colca Canyon, I was happy just to go on a couple of day trips.

On Thursday I booked myself on a minibus tour that went to Lake Chinancocha via the town of Yungay. We first went to a viewpoint where there were good views of Huascarán (which at 6768m is Peru's highest mountain - see the photo below) and of other mountains in the Cordillera Blanca.
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We then went on to Yungay, which is most famous for having been completely buried by a landslide caused by the same 1970 earthquake that partially destroyed Huaraz. Only 92 people out of the population of 25,000 survived. We saw a memorial garden on the site of the old town (there are still apparently thousands of bodies buried underneath this), and Yungay's large cemetery. There was also an old bus that had been left in the position in which it was half-buried by the landslide. We then went on to Lake Chinancocha, which was quite pretty, and very turquoise. We also went on a slightly pointless 10-minute boat trip into the lake.

We had a late lunch in the town of Caraz, and it was there that I finally ate my first guinea pig, well half of one anyway. Here is a photo of me about to tuck into it, having put its cute fluffiness to the back of my mind. I ordered 'picante de cuy' (spicy guinea pig) rather than the more common 'cuy al horno' (roasted guinea pig), and I was actually a bit disappointed. The meat tasted OK, but it was a bit slimy and greasy, and not surprisingly for such a small animal there wasn't much of it, particularly as I only had a half. By the way, if you don't approve of eating guinea pigs, you should understand that they're not considered to be pets in Peru, and they're only bred to be eaten. Anyway, from now on I think I'll stick to the ceviche (raw seafood marinated in lime, chilli and onions), which is easily my favourite Peruvian food so far.

On Friday I went on a day hike to Lake 69, which is billed as the best way to get a taste of the scenery around Huaraz without actually going on a 4-day (or longer) hike. I found out that a couple of other people from my hostel (Harriet from the UK and Jeremy from Canada) also wanted to do the hike on the same day, so we decided to do it together. For 50 soles (£12) each, we could have booked a taxi to take us to the start of the hike at Cebollapampa, wait for us, and bring us back. That was my preferred option, but Harriet and Jeremy wanted to save money, so we ended up going by public transport, which cost about 30 soles each, and involved a nightmare 3½ hour trip each way.

We left the hostel at 6am, and after eating breakfast in Yungay we eventually reached the start of the hike at about 10am. It was an 8km walk up to the lake, which we were told should take about 3 hours. We started at the bottom of a valley at an altitude of about 3900m, and made our way up, passing through scenery like this and this. We passed by several waterfalls, for example here and here. We walked pretty quickly and actually made it to the lake in around two hours. Below is a photo of me at Lake 69 (altitude 4600m), and this is a picture of the three of us at the lake.

It started to snow just as we arrived, so we spent a pretty freezing 45 minutes resting and tucking into a lunch of Ritz crackers and coconut biscuits, which was about all we managed to buy in Yungay. We also heard and saw a couple of minor avalanches while we were at the lake, at the snow line way above us.

We made it back to Cebollapampa by 3pm, and we then had a long wait for a minibus to take us on the bone-shaking journey back to Yungay, from where we crammed ourselves into another minibus that took us back to Huaraz. I then had a mad rush to get something to eat and get ready to catch my overnight bus to Trujillo, which is where I am now, and will be for the next couple of days.

P.S. The map of my trip has now got so big that Google have split it onto two pages, which isn't what I wanted at all. I'm not sure at the moment how I'm going to deal with this.

Lima

I arrived in Lima on Saturday morning after a very luxurious 16-hour overnight bus journey from Arequipa. I travelled up here with Markus, who I met in the hostel in Arequipa, and we both decided to stay at Red Psycho Llama hostel in Miraflores, a suburb of Lima near the ocean. By the way, if you're wondering about the hostel's name, it's because the hostel has an eco-friendly theme, and the name is a very rough approximation of the word 'recycle'.

On Saturday I was feeling quite a lot better than I did on Friday, but I still wasn't fully recovered, so I decided to have a fairly lazy day and stay in Miraflores. In the morning I walked down to the beach (below), where there were a lot of surfers enjoying the waves.

We'd discovered when we arrived that the hostel was celebrating its second birthday that evening, and all of the guests were invited to a party at the owner's parents' house in a nearby Lima suburb. Markus and I decided to go along, but we didn't plan to stay very long because both of us were a bit ill. Anyway there were free pisco sours to drink, and for food there were anticuchos, which are a traditional Peruvian dish consisting of skewered meat served with boiled potato and sweetcorn. If I'd known at the time that the meat was actually cow's heart, I'm not sure if it would have stopped me eating it, but I might not have gone back for seconds.

We ended up staying at the party a bit longer than expected, and at around midnight some of the hostel employees told us that they were going to a disco back in Miraflores. Having had a few too many pisco sours by that point, we decided to go along to that as well, and we ended up not getting back to the hostel until after 2am. So much for getting an early night.

The following day I managed to drag myself out of bed at about 10am, and I felt well enough to make the journey into the centre of Lima. I'd read in Lonely Planet that a new bus system was about to be introduced, linking Miraflores with the rest of Lima, so I decided to go and see if it was up and running yet. I discovered that the southern part of the bus system had recently opened, which was enough to get me into the centre, and best of all it was still in a testing phase, which meant that all journeys were free of charge.

I went straight to the Museo de Arte de Lima, which had only recently reopened after a multi-million dollar revamp. There were three exhibitions there, including one of photographic portraits by Mario Testino, who I never knew was Peruvian, and born in Lima. I then walked to the Plaza de Armas, where I saw the Cathedral and the Palacio de Gobierno, the home of Peru's president. I also visited the Monasterio de San Francisco, whose catacombs contain thousands of human remains in some interesting arrangements.

On Monday I went to Huaca Pucllana, which is an adobe pyramid in Miraflores dating from around 400AD. They had a small farm there, as well as a few Peruvian hairless dogs running around. I then went back into the centre of Lima, where I visited the Museum of the Spanish Inquisition, and I also went to Chinatown, which was strangely devoid of Chinese people.

I'm now spending an unscheduled fourth day here in Lima, because it's a good place to relax (it has lots of Western comforts, including branches of Pizza Hut, McDonalds, Burger King, KFC and Dunkin' Donuts within three minutes' walk of the hostel, not that I would ever go to those, of course...). It's also nice not to be freezing cold at night, although Lima rarely gets very hot either, being almost constantly blanketed in cloud.

Tomorrow I'll be moving on to Huaraz, which is another town in the mountains. To be honest at this stage I'm just a little bit tired of mountains, but I'm told these are really good ones, so they're probably worth a couple of days of my time.