Ecuador

Days Spent: 43 Bus Journeys: 23 Flights: 0 Places Visited: 13 Favourite Beer: meh… Dave – Club Premium, M – Pilsener (La fiesta de todos) Trains: 1 Volcanos Seen: 0 Bad Arepas: 1 The Good: Varied landscapes / Loads to do / Great coast / Easy to travel / Compact / Not too touristy / […]

Our last stop in Ecuador is Cuenca, our first stop in Cuenca is a “free” walking tour We learnt some stuff about Cuenca including, I assume, what that pole means, but I’m writing this about a month later so don’t have a clue… Oh!!! Ecuador invented Panama hats!!! Basically the hats are pretty banging, so […]

We arrived in Quilatoa late so there was just time to get the wood burner going and have dinner. The hostel was lovely and the heater was very welcome at 3,914m above sea level, it gets below 0°c overnight! Quilatoa is a nice little town (of which we have no photos) but people visit for […]

A second visit to Quito isn’t entirely necessary. None of the blogs or guide books suggest a second trip, but an arepa cut our stay short last time and we wanted to visit Mindo, so it made perfect sense to us. Mindo is almost certainly reachable directly from the coast but we couldn’t be arsed […]

As our next stop, Montañita, is only 10 minutes up the road we decide to live it up and get a cab rather than wait for a bus. The drive is quick and comfortable but it is most upsetting to see so many hammock shops line our route. Maybe we should have a hammock each?! […]

I’m not even going to try and make this blog entertaining (not for a second suggesting the others are)… We got a couple of buses from Guayaquil to Salinas to start our Ecuadorian coastal adventure. We weren’t originally planning to go to the coast but our trip so far had been disappointingly beach free so […]

After the high energy of Baños, we’re looking forward to a relaxed day in Alausí riding the La Nariz del Diablo, the Devil’s Nose Train. We take the bus from Baños to Riobamba and have to change to a bus for Alausí. We wander the terminal and find that the desk for Alausí is shut. […]

The kind fella at the hostel in Cotopaxi dropped us off at the highway and waited with us until the bus to Baños arrived. We’re kinda pro bus travellers now so it wasn’t entirely necessary but was very much appreciated. Baños de Agua Santa, to give it it’s full name, is a small town known […]

We could have taken a day trip from Quito to see Cotopaxi but we decided to have a stop there. As we are heading south anyway it made sense to book a couple of nights nearby. Annoyingly, the day we left Quito the weather was the best it had been since we arrived in Ecuador. […]

Hola Ecuador! We had our passports stamped and got in a cab to take us to Tulcán, the closest bus station to the border. When reading about the boarder crossing, and Ecuador in general, there is a lot of advice about cabbies trying to take advantage and the general consensus is that you should force […]