Ecuador

Quito

We arrived in Quito for Christmas Eve and arived at our hostel......our dark, dank, horrendously overpriced hostel! Given the prospect of spending Christmas Day in this place we opted for going on a tour to the Otavalo Markets - the largest open air markets in South America - visiting a few other places en route including a chance to stop and take a picture on the Equator line.
We had a quiet Christmas Eve night with only a quick Margarita and a meatfest of a burger and went to bed early.
Christmas Day came but alas, Father Christmas obviously got lost on his way to find us as my stocking was empty!
We joined the tour on a surprisingly full bus first stopping at a shop that made models and figurines. They were crap! Remember FIMO when you were younger, the dough that was baked in the oven......well this place made a living from it.
We then went to a bakery to see and old clay oven in progress......but actually we didnt because there was no baking going on(!) and then on to the Equator line. This was a brief stop but quite interesting. Equador is the only country on which the Equator runs over a glacier and is the best one for astrology as it has fixed points on the horizon, everywhere else is too flat or dense with jungle.

At the Equator as marked by GPS

Having Christmas in both hemisphere's!!

The markets were quite good with all sorts of touristy tat for sale by indignious sellers. We bought Alana a bag, Alpaca wool jumper and the two of us some art work. We even came across some Alpaca fur hats.......which I may well still purchase (much to Alana's horror!!).

Should it be this one??

This one?

Or maybe.......

On the way back we stopped at a lake before going back to Quito for Christmas dinner. We cooked our own at the hostel thinking nowhere would be open (turns out loads of places were because only 45% of Ecuador is Roman Catholic) and had steak and veg.....well we thought it was steak, on reflection it may well have been some old car tyre!
A bit of a disappointing Christmas, but these things happen and we still had New Year to come!!

We also went south to the town of Cuenca. Old Colonial style buildings and really chilled out. Had we have had longer apparently the surrounding mountains and jungle are pretty amazing!
It had a nice river we walked along to some old Incan ruins before visitng the museum to see shrunken heads!
Another highlight of Cuenca (for Alana!!) was me ordering a 'Chocolate Especial' - from the hot chocolate menu - thinking that it would be hot chocolate with marshmellow, cream, maybe even a couple of hundreds and thousands.......but no.What I actually received (as Alana laughed at my crushingly disappointed face) was a hot chocolate with cheese! YES! Thats right, CHEESE!! Its actually a speciality here but to be honest I didnt find it that special!!

Travelling from Cuenca on to Mancora in Peru for New Year was an interesting/nerve racking experience. We travelled for about 4 hours on a wet, muddy single lane dirt road with drops of 100-200m on one side. Meeting other vehicles coming the other way was interesting as we inched past the other vehicles and fish tailed around corners in the mud. We did eventually make it back on to paved road and finally to the Peruvian border!

The river in Cuenca

Not fallen out yet!!