New Day New City, New Country

  Quito, Ecuador Wednesday, November 25, 2015

As we left the Colombian border behind us, the landscape changed and the hills became greener and looked more like those of England. The fields were all marked out with hedge-line borders and the country has a feel of being more organised and structured. The roads are better too. Gone are the huge pot holed and speed bumps and in its place, lovely smooth black tarmac. It was a long bus ride though and by 8:30pm we were just pulling into the south Terminal Bus Station which was very modern and not like the ones in Colombia at all. A 30 minute taxi ride took us to our pre-booked hostel (eventually we found it in the one way system).The drive through Quito made us feel a bit wary about the city to start with but the closer we got to our Hostel in the old city, the better we began to feel about it. The old city was beautiful, full of character and charm with whitewashed buildings and churches. Quito is the world's highest Capital City at 2850 m (9350ft) so walking around was going to have to be slowly too. Our hostel on Plaza San Domingo, had the look of an old property and from the outside looked lovely. Great location too. Just 1 minute from anywhere interesting. The inside of the building was no disappointment either. Beautiful wooden floors and a wooden staircase which took us up to the third floor and our room. The old courtyard had been kept but just roofed over so all the balconies now overlooked the central atrium down to reception. Beautiful. We had high hopes for our room after this. Oh dear! Dash those hopes all the way to the ground floor will you please!The room looked like something from a pre war nunnery. two little metal beds placed end to end, high ceilings and everything painted an awful shade of pale blue. The room was cold and unwelcoming. We asked to see another room but the only one they had available was even worse. So we resigned ourself to it and hoped it would look better in the morning. Well we woke to sunny skies and a great view through the shutters. We decided to stay put in the room and get on with enjoying the city. We set off to explore the old streets and found a great little place doing breakfast for $1.50 - yes they use the USA $ here and do not have their own currency. $1 got us 2 eggs, fresh croissant with jam and butter, freshly squeezed juice of the day, and a cup of hot milk. On the table you add hot chocolate or coffee but they don't do tea. Well it certainly set us up for the day and we started our day here most days. Quito is full of history and character with a church on almost every corner. There are many large public squares around which are built many whitewashed buildings of note or importance most of which we cannot remember as there were just too many. Here is some history taken from the internet:- Quito, Ecuador's capital, sits high in the Andean foothills at an altitude of 2,850m and, was founded in the 16th century. Despite the 1917 earthquake, the city has the best-preserved, least altered historic centre in Latin America. The monasteries of San Francisco and Santo Domingo, and the Church and Jesuit College of La Compañía, with their rich interiors, are pure examples of the 'Baroque school of Quito', which is a fusion of Spanish, Italian, Moorish, Flemish and indigenous art. In 1978 the whole of the old city of Quito was added the the UNESCO World Heritage list in order to preserve it.We took a city bus tour one day to help us get a better orientation of the layout and hopefully see things we may miss without the tour. It was a great strategy its just a shame that outside of the old city there isn't much to do unless you want to shop or drink coffee and eat expensive meals. But as our bus ticket was valid for the whole day we used it again in the evening to get us nearer the new city and where James Bond was waiting for us with Spectre! We took a couple of trips out of the city too but we have written about those separately. One morning whilst eating breakfast, Bryan amused himself watching the bin men working. There is hardly any litter in Quito everyone uses the litter bins which are everywhere to dispose of their rubbish. Great. So to see the bin men emptying the bins onto the floor was shocking. He noted that they then proceeded to sweep up what they had tipped onto the floor, and carry it across the square and put it into a slightly larger, plastic bins. We both wondered what on earth could be the reason for this. Then as we walked through the city one evening, our memory of these bin men came flooding back. We watched as a bin lorry came along, they attached an electric cable to the bins (or so it appeared) and the bins started to rise up in the air! We watched in silent wonder as underneath the street bins, were concealed huge skips. It was these that they wheeled to the lorry and were lifted and emptied. Genius! Although we have to say we wondered what on earth the purpose of having different recycling bins was, when everything all got emptied in together when it went into the lorry...! Want to see it in action?  Watch a short clip here We bought some postcards one day and planned to sit and write them over a coffee. We know how people at home enjoy receiving them from these far flung places. A quick stop at the post office revealed it was going to cost $3 per stamp so sorry every body, we abandoned that idea. Maybe we'll send them in the new year, from Peru instead. Eventually, tired, we left our hostel as despite a room change we just could not sleep. The room we had to start with was right on the road and was very noisy, the second room here had no curtains and a light was shining straight through our window at us. Arrrggghhh!!!  So off to the other side of the old city for a change of view at Plaza San Blas. Hostal San Blas was more expensive - a whole £16 a night more but we got a much more comfortable bed, more space and our own bathroom. No view. No external window so there was no light whatsoever and it was too far from the road to hear the traffic. Bliss! We slept like proverbial logs that first night.And they did breakfast here, and it was even cheaper. $1 each for a similar breakfast but it was cooked and presented so much more nicely. So by spending an extra $16 a day, we save $1 a day on breakfast. Bargain!!! Apart from our motto of making sure we visit the Capital city of every country we visit, we had come to Quito for a reason. It was the starting point for most visits for the Galapagos. Galapagos belongs to Ecuador as is a 2 hour flight away off the west coast (the only coast) in the Pacific Ocean. It is on most peoples Bucket List and it was on ours too. For most people though, this dream is unobtainable. Try and get  there from England and you will see the prices are just too prohibitive for most family pockets. Just a quick search as we write this shows you would need to shell out nearly £7 grand per person. However, they lay just a tantilising 2 hours away from us now and a flight there was just $90 each (£60). Checking hotels.com we knew we could stay for around £20 a night and maybe do a bit of island hopping to keep it on a tight budget. But we didn't want to do that! No we needed a holiday and we thought that as we will probably only ever come here the once, we needed to do it properly - a cruise.Quito is the place to book your cruise from and there were lots of last minute deals. However, we read many reviews about operators and boats and it sounded as if some were certainly to be avoided. Old life jackets, safety equipment not working, rude crew, terrible food, bad guides - well we certainly didn't want one of those. So we spent hours researching. First the different routes you can take to ensure we saw all the things we wanted to see, then the boats and operator reviews (you may think this is excessive but we were still about to spend a lot of money so it had to had to go on the best we could afford). Most reviews were good though but they would say "avoid cabin 5&6 as they are right by the engines" and when we checked with the local tour operator, they were the only cabins available. Or when we checked the route it didn't go where we wanted to go. Or the price was sky high, or the dates were in 2016 and we were going on Friday. Oh it seemed we would never find the right combination. So, when the tour operator found a great boat, right route, good price, best cabin we said book it there and then. She was on the phone to them and booked it. We heaved a big sigh of relief and went off to the bank to get the money for them. And then it all came crashing down again.We got back and she told us they had sold the cabin to someone else whilst we were at the bank and it was the last cabin available on that boat. We were gutted as it had taken us hours to find that trip. The tour operator put a reservation for a lesser boat on hold for us so at least we had a back up plan but it wasn't what we wanted. We went back to our room worn out from it all and started again. The next morning we told the operator what we had found on line but he dashed our hopes again when he rang the people advertising and said it was all fully booked. Undeterred we set off across the city in a taxi to find the advertisers ourselves. The traffic was horrendous and with still half a mile to go but going nowhere, we got out and walked the rest of the way. On the way, we spotted a sign outside a building advertising the very same trip we had found on the internet. Strange if it's fully booked. We went inside and they said they owned the boat we wanted to go on, yes they had several vacancies, yes for the dates we wanted, yes on the route we wanted. Well no more questions were needed we booked it and paid for it there and then. A few more minutes to send the paperwork across and we were sorted. Done. Phew! At last we could really relax. We were off to Galapagos tomorrow.   [gallery columns="4" ids="12783,12784,12785,12786,12787,12788,12789,12790,12792,12794,12795,12797,12801,12805,12808,12812,12817,12826,12835,12842,12848,12856,12860,12869,12880,12889,12898,12903,12908,12912,12919,12925,12932,12940,12946,12948,12955,12963,12969,12976,12980,12986,12992,12998,13002,13007,13014,13020,13027,13033,13046,13050,13051,13062,13071"]