Friday 6 September - Monday 9 September

Quito and beyond, Ecuador

Due to the continued strikes in Colombia we had no choice but to cut our time there short by a week and fly from Cali to Esmeraldas in Ecuador as the roads south of Cali were still being blocked by protesters. Unfortunately this meant we missed out on seeing the colourful jagged landscapes of the Tatacoa desert, the Valley of the Statues in San Augustin and the Cathedral that is built into a canyon in Ipiales. We were gutted as we'd been enjoying Colombia, but we had to push on so as not to miss our start date for the Inca Trail in Peru later that month.

Upon arrival in Esmeraldas we had to endure snail-pace customs and baggage claim and with time of the essence to catch the only bus to Quito that afternoon we were then 'gringoed' by the taxi driver who took us for a $12 10-minute taxi ride to the bus station where we still missed our bus by 5 minutes. Some quick thinking meant we hopped on the very next bus pulling out of the station and headed to Santo Domingo where we hoped there would be more buses to Quito and luckily managed to get into our hostel in Quito, the 2nd highest Capital in Latin America (2850m) around 1am - exhausted and cold.

Saturday meant an early start to travel two hours north to Otovalo where we strolled around the biggest market in South America, and finally broke our resolve not to buy anything whilst quenching my shopping thirst with various brightly coloured alpaca and woolen garments. They were so cheap, it was a crime to leave empty handed. With our hiking bags bursting at the seams we made our way back to Quito the next day and visited the Equator at Mitad del Mundo - this is where they have a huge monument on the equator, but its apparently about 200m off the exact spot. Go figure. With the use of military GPS they have now established the correct spot and we visited the quirky Inti-Nan Museum there where we partook in some fun experiments involving the Correolis effect (which direction water goes down a drain in the Northern & Southern hemispheres - yes it did go straight down on the Equator), walking straight on the Equator with your eyes closed (impossible) and balancing a raw egg on the head of a nail - it took some fiddling but we are both now fully fledged Eggmasters of the Equator.

In need of some exercise we headed out to scale Cotapaxi Volcano (5897m) early on Sunday morning. We started our trek from the parking lot at 5400m and after about an hour of trudging up steep slopes of soft volcanic ash and a hot chocolate to warm us up at the refuge we reached the bottom of the glacier at 500om. Breathtaking because of the views and the altitude! We managed to climb onto the ice and peer into some of the crevasses before running back down to the parking lot in just 10 minutes so that we could mountain bike the rest of the way back down to the lagoon in the freezing cold sleet. Thanks to CarpeDM and our local guide, Fernando, our day on Cotapaxi was easily one of my major highlights of this trip.