We spent Thursday daytime exploring the old town of Quito, though didn't have much luck in terms of things actually being open for us and so had to content ourselves with visiting the Jesuit church rated as the most stunning in all of Ecuador.

After lunch break from the rain with the locals in a small cafe and a bit more mooching around we headed back to the hostel in a taxi where the driver was a hard taskmaster in testing me on my Spanish by getting me to pronounce all the street names 5 times over if I didn't get it right at first.

After a siesta at the hostel we were raring to go for a last big night out as the 5 of us but unfortunately poor Riggers became ill yet again and so we had to settle for a quality Mongolian BBQ and a waiter who seemed to take a bit of a liking to me!

We had only just realised that Friday was Ecuadors independence day - it seems like every country we have visited so far we have been there just as it happens to be their independence celebrations! Cue a 4 day holiday, everything shut down and every man and his dog out drinking!

The area where we were staying in the new town, termed 'Gringolandia', had plenty going on all the time and despite the name, seemed to have locals out in the bars and restaurants throughout the day. It also has a bit of an edge to it though, and there was a particular set of alchies who seemed to like muttering crazy stuff right outside our hostel and who always made us put a slightly brisker walk on!

It was a shame that we never really got to experience a big night out as you could tell it would not be hard to have a good one.

With KR bedridden, the other 4 of us decided to put the day to good use and organised an impromptu trip to the equator - visiting both the original monument from when the middle of the earth was calculated hundreds of years ago, plus the actual dead centre calculated using modern day GPS!! It was a really cool afternoon and we did all the tests demonstrating the properties of the equator - the water running down the sink, balancing an egg on a nail and trying to balance whilst walking along the equatorial line with your eyes closed and arms out!!

An early night was then in order to get us ready for a 530am start on Saturday morning to catch the bus with the locals to Otavalo and it's famous Saturday market, rated as the best on the whole of South America! It really was massive and we spent hours wandering through the lines of stalls and haggling big time as I bought pressents, a bargain hammock ready for the Amazon, a bow and arrow (?!) and other pretty worthless stuff that you would never usually buy!! And all broken up by a quality hog roast lunch at the food market!

We had spent quite a lot of time over the last couple of days deliberating what to do about a) a Galapogas islands trip and b) how and when to get to Colombia.

But first, we had to do the hard bit of saying goodbye to Becky. With all 5 of us crammed into the back of a taxi by 5am Sunday morning I couldn't believe how quickly 7 months had gone since going to see the girls off at Manchester airport, so I can only imagine how it must feel for her!

So after the tearful goodbyes we were back at the hostel with it still stupidly early and we made a snap decision to not even bother going back to bed and to pack up there and then and head into Colombia by bus!

I felt kinda sad to leave behind Ecuador as the people we have come across in all the places we stopped off at have been really warm and welcoming and it has proved that you can pack quite a lot in to a small country!