It could
have been worse. It was just ‘things’
after all. They are insured and no
one was hurt. But it was the icing
on the birthday cake, so to speak.
Yeah, today is my happy f-ing birthday, one we won’t soon forget.
We had
pretty much decided to cut the trip short anyway. Brazil is too expensive to justify now that Sandy isn’t
going to meet us there. It seems
like we have seen all the colonial towns before; Lima, Arequipa, Cusco, Cuenca and now Quito –
plus all the places we visited in Mexico.
For
something different we took a bus this morning for Banos where the Tungurahua
volcano is erupting. On the way
someone opened my backpack on the bus and took both cameras and my
sunglasses. When I picked up the
pack it weighed nothing. And I
almost stopped breathing. Both my cameras were gone, about $2500 worth.
We knew we
would get tagged eventually. The
odds were against us. And this is
the third time we have had problems in Ecuador. Without cameras it hardly makes sense to continue the trip
so after filing a police report – in Spanish, mind you – we bussed back to
Quito, found an American Airline office and changed our flight home. To tomorrow!
Does this leave a bad taste re Ecuador? You bet your ass it does! We had eleven wonderful weeks in Peru and in only three weeks in Ecuador (1) I was almost robbed at an ATM in Guayaquil, (2) Connie had money stolen on our Galapagos cruise and (3) today. We are getting tired of the food, greedy cab drivers, high prices and (let's get petty here) buying drinking water. So it's time to go home.
