hola
Sorry we´re slow poke bloggers, but we´ve been sifting in a great little surf town, internet has not been our priority at all.
Here are our sneaky highlights since we last updated....
Hung out on Taganga beach in Columbia, the hippy graveyard, as still extremely exhausted from our trek and our first night out, yes first night out in a whole two weeks of travel!!!!!! Sifted in Taganga for a while (as we discovered we had bonus days due to us not working out our timetable very well) and returned to our pattern of nana nights in.
Made our way to Cartegena, a busy Spanish influenced coastal city, beautiful old town, stinky everywhere else. It was now time for Bee to catch the vomit virus, especially good timing, in a town where its not safe to go out at night so Beej was forced to read books back to back in a hostel / sauna where the air conditioning was broken.
So we did manage a good day in Cartegena. Decided to head to the beach. Maybe would have prefered slightly longer at the beach, one hour was lovely but, unfortunately we jumped on the Spanish tour boat that went round the islands explaining in Spanish..... something ( we don´t speak spanish so can´t tell you) instead of the direct transportation boat to the beach. But it was the beautiful carribean sea that we´d been expecting so there´s always silver lining...
So we jumped on a plane and said ciao to blearing car horns, fried potatoes and the colourful country which is Columbia.
Tally so far....
Countries 1, Kidnappings 0, Sicknessess 2.
Quito Ecuador, elevation 2850m above sea level, second largest ecuadorian city, and its most dangerous....
Noticed its first feature when getting off the plane and walking up the slightly sloping platform from the plane, was the slowest walk ever and seemed like a mountain, luckily we knew we were fit from the trek and it was just a bad bout of ass. (accimatisation suckee sickness)
Not much to report on Quito, wandered the narrow streets a bit, slept a bit (Bee still sick), experienced chicken foot soup just the once and visited some amazing markets in cute town called Otavalo.
Next natural decision was to go to a place called Banos, the Spanish word for toilet) of course we´d want to spend quite a while here, as we´d been spending a lot of time in these lately (esp Bee) and didn´t want to venture outside of our comfort zone.
We then had a busing 'incident' on the way to Banos but we´re not ready to talk about it just yet, tune in, in a few months we might be ready to go into it.
But we can update our tally:
Countries 2, Kidnappings 0, Sicknesses 2, Robberies 1.
We fell in love with Banos, its a cool, safe! little thermal town, with hotpools (lots of locals with eyes for christmas) and adventure activities, of these we chose the safest one possible, buggy riding. The buggy´s top speed of 5km per hour uphill meant we were never going to get into much trouble, despite going offroad and also down private, inaccessible roads where security had to track us down and making us leave. Also did an exceptional Spanish class in Banos, the Mayra Spanish school if anyones in the neighbourhood. It was HUGELY better than our class in Columbia where we were taught all of hello, goodbye and thanks.
Our next bus trip, also our first overnight bus trip was actually fine thanks to strapping our belongings to bodies and the help of some strong sleeping pills.
Rocked into Montanita (this town is why we came traveling!!!) Ecquadors main surf spot, a small six sandy streeted town (try and say that ten times, go on) filled with street stalls, surf shops, bars and locals.
So now we´re no longer having nana nights in at 7pm and rising at 5 or 6am. Instead we woke this morning at 2pm and decided it might actually be time to leave. We love this town, our biggest decision each day is what to eat and there are SOOOOOOOO many good options. Oh and the dogs are amazing, they all sift round, like homeless but well fed dogs and they love people and will adopt you, but may try to attack. Beej had to drag one along the road by her jeans, Edwardo the dog, as we named him, took a liking to her legs and jandels. After a jandel wrestle and a Ceasar like hiss and tap on the head, Beej, the pack leader, managed to get away.
We now have to mention the newest member of our traveling party, Bee 3. One night we were busy building a sand couch to watch the sunset from, we had our cask of fine white wine and orange juice, we had Doors and Bob Marley playing in the background, when all of a sudden Bee 3 and her Mum came up to us and nearly kicked over our sand creation. Beej tried to distract them, while Bee carried on building, but Bee 3 was persistant and barged through the sand again. But we couldn´t get angry, they eventually sat at our feet to watch the sun set and eventually fell asleep. Bee 3 and her Mum are actually dogs. This would have been weird if not.
We absolutely love this town, have met some cool people, there´s always something to do, we´ve even been here for a surf competition, plenty of surfer eye candy, especially from a distance. We actually thought we were watching the gromets at one stage, but infact it they were just Ecuadorian surfers. They´re all 4 foot 1.
We´re now leaving Ecuador´s largest surf town and heading to Peru, next stop Peru´s largest surf town. Stay tuned....
