Hi guys,

Sorry about the long wait for our latest update; we have been having trouble accessing the internet recently. In the last 10 days or so we have been travelling up the west coast of Ecuador. We visited 3 little villages along the way, Montañita, Puerto Lopez and Canoa. Each of these places had fabulous beaches but unfortunately there wasn´t that much sun so we did lots of touring around instead…..bike rides, climbing cliffs to visit caves and visiting an archaeological site where an old Ecuadorian civilisation once lived! We even stumbled across some cowboys and helped them herd their cattle up a hill! The sea water was quite warm so Ger managed to go for a dip every now and then while I optimistically lay out under a cloudy sky hoping for the sun to burn through!!

Whale watching in Puerto Lopez was one of the highlights of our time on the coast. Luckily the whales were in great form that day so they were delighted to put on a good show for us. It was mating season for the humpback whales so the males felt like they needed to impress the females by jumping and flipping so we saw some great action. And even though the boat journey was fairly rough Ger managed to keep his breakfast down this time!!

We have spent the last three days in Quito, the capital of Ecuador. It´s an 8 hour bus ride inland and is in the middle of the Andes so we are currently at approx. 3000m above sea level (Carrauntoohil, the highest peak in Ireland is 1038m!!). We have been pleasantly surprised by how nice a city it is, with plenty of things to see and do. It has some of the nicest plazas we have seen so far in South America and it´s really nice to stroll around as the weather is warm at the moment. It´s also a good place to catch up on Irish sport as there´s a great Irish bar here which showed the Ireland soccer match and the All-Ireland hurling final (both fairly rubbish!). Finn McCools is where we also had a few drinks with a gang of Irish to toast Ger´s birthday!

Yesterday we took a cable-car up near the top of a dormant volcano on the outskirts of Quito. We reached 4300m above sea level at one point but luckily the altitude didn´t seem to affect us too much. Hopefully we can be as lucky with the altitude when we do the Inca Trail!

Afterwards we went to the middle of the world! This is what Ecuadorians call the area where the equator cuts through Ecuador. It´s a funny kind of place because there are two rival museums about 20m apart from each other, one of them marking the point where they thought the equator was historically and the other marking the point where modern GPS says the equator is! We only visited the "real one" where they explained some of the strange things associated with the equator. For example in the Northern Hemisphere water goes down a plug hole anti-clockwise and the opposite in the Southern Hemisphere whereas on the equator the water just goes straight down without swirling. Another one was people´s strength being different on the equator and being able to balance an egg on a nail more easily. Although Ger wasn´t too convinced about the last two experiments!

Today we are leaving to go to Baños, a town 3 hours south of here. There is meant to be lots of adventure activities down there so we might find ourselves hanging off a cliff or two in the next few days!

Thanks for all your messages.

Lots of love,

Linda and Ger xxx

P.S. We are a bit behind with our photos. We have only just added our 2nd lot of Galapagos photos. The photos for this blog will be up soon!!