After catching a bus from Otavalo to Quito I realised I'd underestimated how long it would take to get to the coast - another 8 hours, so I stayed the night in Quito and visited the Mitad del Mundo - a tourist village on the equator. I forgot to charge my camera so I don't have the obligatory 'one foot in each hemisphere' photo. I also visited an ethnographic museum with info on all the different indigenous tribes in Ecuador, of which there are many, all with their own customs, handcrafts and traditional clothes.

The next day I caught a bus to Canoa on the coast where I spent 3 nights. I bumped into a girl I had met volunteering on Isabella and then got bitten by about a billion ants. At least, that's what it felt like the next day.

After Canoa I traveled to Montañita (although I had an unscheduled stop for one night in Puerto Lopez which was too boring & frustrating to write about). Montañita was very nice, really surfy, laid back, lots of good fish restaurants but as the weather wasn't great I couldn't see what I would do there for more than a day. There are only so many pancakes you can eat really.

So after that I headed to Cuenca for 2 nights. It's a pretty colonial town in the south of Ecuador. I visited the Museo de las Conceptas, a museum attached to a convent which had a lot of religious art & sculpture including some very bloody crucifixes (chunks of flesh hanging off & ribcages showing, etc). So I offset the religious art by going to the Modern Art Museum. I also visited some Inca ruins from the town of Tomebamba which Cuenca was founded upon and wandered around the Museo del Banco Central where I came face to face with a number of shrunken heads from the tribes who live in the jungle regions. (Apparently they're officially only allowed to shrink sloths heads now although I wouldn't want to have been the official who had to tell them that.)

I've made an awful lot of bus journeys over the last couple of weeks and mostly I've ended up where I wanted to go. On buses in Ecuador (and probably the rest of South America) people get on the bus every 2 minutes trying to sell you everything from food and drink to newspapers & jewellery. Often they'll give you a 5 minute talk about why their product is so good. It must be quite hard work to talk for that long about a packet of sweets. On my bus journey from Montañita to Cuenca a guy got on and started giving the usual sales pitch although I couldn't for the life of me work out what he was selling. Then he got a folder out and started displaying some surprisingly graphic photos of cervical and testicular cancer which is not what I wanted to see at that time of day (around 8:30am). He must have talked for about 40 minutes in the end. I still couldn't work out what on earth he was trying to hawk us. Turned out it was ginseng in the end - apparently a cure for all illnesses.

So, after Cuenca I headed to Loja for a bus to Peru (8hrs).