The mavrix usually answer to no man, no appointments, no schedule, no problem! Unfortunately the United States embassy seems to have a problem with this...sigh.This meant that rather than going and traveling at our usually leisurely pace where every day is a holiday we found ourselves having to speed things up quite significantly and sacrifice Ecuador to the Travel gods. We ended up spending a total of just 9 days running through this great little country...sniff...and what we saw was beautiful, plus the weather was spectacular and coming from 8 days trekking in freezing cold in Peru this was very welcome.
We found that Ecuador has an amazing intercity bus service, basically anywhere you want to go within roughly 17 hours you can just arrive at the terminal and you will be sure to be on a bus in less than 10 minutes, we got quite used to boarding buses on the move (try that with 15kgs plus of luggage!). We traveled through the citys of:
Cuenca - a beautiful town that has been made a Unesco World Heritage site with amazing coffee that the Vixen indulged in while the M sipped chilled Cervezas in the cafe. Oh and we would be remise not to mention the AMAZING Banana split ice cream that we gorged ourselves on....sore tummy but a happy one :-)
Aulusi - Home to the "World Renouned" Nariz del Diablo (we also hadnt heard of it) where you ride on the top of the roof of a classic train through the switchbacks in the mountains surrounding the town. Not actually scarey at all ...yawn... Mavrix need real excitement!
Banos - Home to more Hot Springs and a still erupting Volcano (thats more like it). Unfortunately the Volcano is unclimbable for obvious reasons so we just got the one sighting and then had to head out again.
Tena - This river rafting and kayaking Mecca was a super chilled jungle and river town where we took a rest from the traveling for a day. In this time we met a guy wearing a snake in his head, around his neck and down his pants. He proceeded to hand these over to the Mavrix much to our fright and delight. We had to stop him though after he attempted to put a snake down the M's pants which he thought was hilarious. So after handing back the snake hat (the snake was enjoying tonguing the M's eye lid) we followed Gabrielle the Snake man back to his "office" come "house" infested with more snakes and spiders and signed up for 2 days of jungle trekking and a day of rafting. Sweet! We ended up having a good time swinging from Tarzan vines, swimming in Waterfalls, eating Coco Fruit (the stuff they make chocolate from) and much more! Then finally we ended it off with a days rafting in the sun...pity our boat was a little pap but all was good. That night we jumped in another bus and headed for the Capital City.
Quito - The Old town here in Quito is also quite spectacular but the Mavs felt it lost some of its magic due to the size of Quito like a giant resting his big toe inches above a flower.
While it might sound like Ecuador doesn't have much to offer what must be remembered is that we ran through it without taking time to smell the roses under the giants foot. The scenery we saw in the many hours of bus rides was enough to convince us that Ecuador is an ecological beauty... oh well maybe next time.
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