Quito: 29 September - 3 October. Buses in Ecuador are great (did I really just say that buses are great?!?). There must be about a million of them that leave to anywhere you want to go every ten minutes. They are cheaper than chips as well, costing less than US$1 per hour on average. They don't have the luxuries that the long distance buses in Peru had, but then Ecuador is a smaller country so you don't have to travel so far. You simply rock up at the bus stati...

Cuenca to Banos - 21st to 28th September After a taxi, a boat, a bus and a plane back from Galapagos we landed back in Guayaquil where we said our goodbyes to Andy and Amy and jumped on a bus for the 5 hour trip back up into the Andes to Cuenca, Ecuador's third largest city. We finally arrived in Cuenca shortly after 9pm where we checked in to our hostel then went to the small pizzeria next door for some dinner then bed. After a week of haemorrhaging money on t...

Guayaquil and The Galapagos Islands: 13-21 September. We took the bus from our beach-break in Mancora (Peru) up into Ecuador. The border crossing was straightforward: we all piled off the bus on the Peruvian side of the border to get stamped out and then went through the same process on the Ecuadorian side to get stamped in. Fortunately we got waived through both customs checks so didn't even have to take our bags off of the bus. We weren't long over the bord...