The idea of travelling to coca was to travelling down the Rio Napo to cross the Ecuadorian boarder to Peru unfortunately due to the indigenous people protesting about the oil drilling they blocked all the water ways. This meant the only way through was by private boat and one guide believed we had $1500 to give him for the privilege in a ten man open canoe, in the rainforest where rain was expected on a daily basis, and the crème de la crème was the side of the...

Riobamaba the home of the devil nose train, a fantastic opportunity to go riding on the top of a train and go down a hairy train of twists and turns along a mountain side with sheer drops one side and beautiful countryside on the other, you could imagine our reaction when we all woke at 5:30am to catch the train at 6:30 to discover that no one was allowed to sit up on the top of the train and was subject to remaining inside the train like normal people..what th...

Say hello to latacunga a small village a few hours out south of Quito although it did take at least an hour to get out of Quito it was so big!!! We loved latacunga as we found cable TV woop woop it only had MTV but that was enough and compensated for no pubs in the area and no WI FI as you guys know we always like to be up to facebook, not like any of you reply anyhow!!! (apart from a small few - you know who you are..love ya) Latacunga has an amazing local mark...

Considering we were told beware of the local buses, don't get on them unless they are empty etc etc, we survived, mugging, stabbing and the old men copping a feel and ventured on at least four local buses to get to Mitad del Mundo, it should have been less, but we got lost due to the lack of Spanish and missing the great big monument standing at the gates of the site as the bus passed!! I blame Nic of course! At she made up for it by spotting the site on our se...

Quito had another hidden gem in the form of a little town called Mindo, there it hid a cloud forest, now in hindsight we should have stayed longer than four hours, but it one of those things you don't know until you get there, how long you are going to need to truly appreciate your surroundings and we clearly needed two days not four hours. However we still got to experience the rainforest and their strong and beautiful waterfalls, in total there was six waterfal...