When we arrived at Colleen's place at around 8pm, she had just pulled a delicious home made pizza out of the oven with another soon to follow. We had only minutes before in the taxi commented that a nice pizza would be great for dinner so we were absolutely thrilled after a long day of travel. We had met Colleen earlier that month in Mindo and she offered to have us stay with her, which was fantastic. Her place is lovely, in a nice safe part of town with a nice...

We stopped briefly back in Quito for 1 night as our flight to the Galapagos left from there. With only an afternoon spare we quickly circled the outdoor shops to stock up on a few things like shoes, pants and socks. Turns out travelling can wear these sorts of things out a little. We tried to have a really early night, since we had to leave for the airport at 4.30am. The hostel was unfortunately holding its weekly trivia night! They also selected to play the mus...

Back in Quito for a night. This time we booked a room at the Secret Garden, a large and popular hostel around the corner from the one we had previously stayed at in Quito. This hostel houses the office of Carpe Diem, the company we used to book our Galapagos tour, and also offered a cheap transfer to their other hostel, Secret Garden Cotopaxi which was our next destination. We only had the afternoon back in Quito. Our plan was to visit some of the camping stores...

Our bus took quite a while longer than expected, though that is not uncommon, so in a way its not really unexpected. It was dark and rainy when we pulled into the bus station and there didn't seem to be any taxi's, but fortunately one pulled up after a few minutes. At first we had trouble finding our hostel, so our taxi driver, some locals and us searched in the rain for a while. We ended up calling them and found them behind a barely marked door. It was a new G...