In Quito!

hey!

So we made it out of Peru! We are currently in Quito, the capital of Ecuador. But, as usual, there is a long and crazy story of how we got here, so I will begin:

Friday arrived and we were still in Peru. The fisherman were still on strike along the border of Ecuador and Peru and we were unable to leave the country. We checked with every bus company in the city and not one was going to Ecuador until the strike ended. We were starting to get worried, as no one really seemed to know when the strike would end. Some of the locals we spoke to told us that a resolution might not be reached until well into the next week! We were dying to get on with our journey, but had no choice but to stay in Peru. Plus we still hadn't seen one travelver in the entire city, which was a little strange. We really didn't have anything else to do with ourselves, so we went for another day at the beach! We spent the day in the sun, collecting shells, swimming and chatting with some locals. We started asked some of them if they knew any alternative ways out of the country, but we were told that, other than taking a bus for twenty hours to Lima and then a plane (no thanks) or trying to cross the border on foot with all our bags (not only legally, but physically dangerous as the fisherman protesting would attack us), we had no choice but to stay in Peru.

Also, one of the monkeys that lived in the reception area of our hotel in Peru attacked Alice. The one in the picture...well, she is fine now, but don't be fooled by its appearance, that thing is crazy!

On Saturday morning we got up and prepeared for another long, hard day at the beach. We decided to call the bus company just to see if the strike was over, but we didn't have too much hope. However, to our surprize, the strike had ended and we could get a bus to Ecuador that day! We were so happy we were dancing around the room. We felt like prisoners who had been set free. We packed up all our stuff, paid tha hotel and raced down to the bus station in one of the little motorkars in the picture (with our luggage hanging on for dear life).

We took a bus to Guyayquil, Ecuador. Though I am sure most of you have never heard of Guayaquil, it is actually the biggest city in Ecuador! The bus ride took about six hours, but it was really only a three hour journey. It was made so slow by two factors: The first was the fact that the customs at the border were the slowest we have ever seen (mostly due to the fact that their computers were from the 1980s and only a handful of people were actually working... the rest were just wandering around chatting). Also, the bus itself drove at about 40km an hour with the door open, picking up passangers from the side of the road along the way. It was so weird, even though this was not a public transportation bus, locals kept getting on, paying a few coins and then getting off a few minutes down the road. People selling everything from pastries to drinks to fruits to sticks of meat kept climbing on and off. Also, there was a guy with a gun standing by the door the entire journey. We weren't really sure why he was there....

The ride itself was actually quite interesting. We saw fields of tropical plants, palm trees, small fruit stands by the side of the road and lots of houses, mostly built up on stilts to avoid flooding during the rainy season.

We arrived in Guayaquil in the early evening to discover that it really wasn't such a nice city. Nothing was open (it was a Saturday night), and we were told that nothing would be open the next day, Sunday. We walked into the downtown, which seemed to lack the character of cities like La Paz or Salta. There were just a lot of modern, tall, but run-down buildings, empty streets and fast food restaurants. They actually had KFC, McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts, Pizza Hut and this thing calld "On the Run", that Tova claims is Canadian but I have never heard of. We were freaking out, as we hadn't seen a McDonalds since Buenos Aires, and even Buenos Aires didn't have any of these other chains. We went to McDonalds and then went to the internet cafe to update the blog. But as we were in the internet cafe we heard a loud explosion and then all the lights in the city went out. It was pretty scary, we thought it was a bomb. A few minutes later the lights came back on and we learned that it was just a power outage. The explosion was all the fuse boxes exploding. I was upset because I was halfway through writing the blog and I lost everything, but I started again. About ten minutes later the same thing happened. This time the lights remained off, and the man running the internet cafe told us to leave. Before we left he told us to be careful, that Guayaquil was very dangerous at night. We stated walking, but it was pitch black and we didn't really know where we were going. After about five minutes of wandering around in the dark, the man from the internet cafe appeared behind us and asked us if we needed help fniding our hotel. To be honest, he was starting to creep us out a bit, but we let him guide us to our hotel. When we got there, we couldn't even go in because everythng was pitch black, so we had to wait outside another ten minutes until the power finally returned for good.

The next morning we got a bus out of Guayaquil and arrived in Quito late at night. We found a hostel (we hadn't been able to book anything in advance, but a local we met on the bus took us around to find something). We are now in Quito. We are currently deciding whether we should fly to Cuba in a few days to spend a week there before heading to Costa Rica to work with the turtles, or whether we should head by land to Colombia (though this seems rather dangerous). We are trying to arrange a paragliding expedition for tomorrow, which we are really excited about.

Talk to you all soon,

Alice and Tova