Wooooooohoooooooo, for the first time since June I'm back in the southern hemisphere. I flew into Quito, Ecuador today which is approximately 25km south of the equator. This is also my first time in South America, its always a good day when visiting a new country, let alone a new continent and leaves Antarctica as the only continent I haven't visited!

Quito is located in the Andes and at an altitude of 2,850m above sea level is officially the second highest capital city in the world. You can tell Quito is hemmed in by tall mountains by the corkscrew decent the plane took when landing though due to cloud only the mountains to one side of the city were visible. In the cab to the hotel I found myself looking up at the peaks that weren't shrouded in cloud and I realised that these were all 4,000m+ peaks right next to town.........cool. Once I checked in I decided to go for a walk and get a late lunch, three block later I was feeling the altitude, with a woolly head, so I decided to find a cafe and chill until my red blood cell count improved.

So far my impressions of Ecuador are good, I sat next to a really Ecuadorian couple on the plane and got good advice on what to see and do in Quito and also in the rest of Ecuador. In the end they gave me their phone numbers and said if I had any problems to give them a ring, they even offered me accommodation in their holiday house in Banos when I go there. The city of Quito is also a lot more laid back than the central American cities I've been in over the last couple of months, at a nice temperature somewhere between 18 and 22 degrees it is also a welcome change from the sticky humidity I've been used to. Did I mention the mountains......

Another cool thing about Ecuador is the currency. Apparently at some stage the Ecuadorian government looked at their Latin American neighbors currency's devaluate and decided they wanted something stable so they adopted the US dollar. I'm not sure how the United States feels about this but Ecuador being a relatively small country (only 13 million million as opposed to 250 million) they probably don't care. Its nice to have a currency that you know the conversion rate of, even though the Aussie peso has slipped from 95c US to 66c US in the past three months!!