Ecuator in Ecuador?! No way!

WELCOME TO SOUTH AMERICA!!!

Today is an exciting day because it is the start of 2 and a half months of solo traveling through a huge, beautiful continent, with so many experiences to come and so many new friends to make! And as the plane approaches land the excitement brews and I´m bloody itching to get off this plane!

We arrived into the country headed through customs and made our way out to the city. *Deep breath in* - hellloooo South America!

Hen wasn´t so keen on catching a bus to the hostel but it was 25c (they use US dollars here) so I convinced him otherwise. Pretty damn straight forward, and a good way to get acquainted with the city quickly. Ecuador so far has a brilliant feel about it, I almost feel at home here, it´s a rare feeling in a new unfamiliar place! I can tell it´s going to be great, and what a nice start to the trip.

We stayed at Vibes hostel, really cool place, super safe (inside - had to keep our wits about us outside though) and they have a very cute dog - Hen was stoked.
So we check in, meet the manager, Santiago, get shown around and we met this really hungover Canadian in our dorm called Nevin, he´d become very drunk the night before with the influence of the Melbournian bar-tender, Nick, who worked there. And Amanda, a Sydney-sider taking the fourth bed in the dorm.
Us four have a bit of a chat, do the whole "what´s your name, where are you from, how long are you traveling for, where have you been so far" gig, and decided that we´re all bloody starving and head into the streets to find some food for dinner. Which none of us can decide on. So we ended up doing homemade tuna pasta. Yum. Easy dinner, and great for a pre-drinking night meal! Clearly, that night we all had a few drinks which turned into quite a few more, a few games of pool, and then a couple more on top of that. A fun big drunken night with the entire hostel!
I ended up ´portal-ling´(something a couple of kiwis taught us). It means you´re drinking, then all of a sudden you wake up somewhere else and you cannot for the life of you remember what happened in between. They also taught us ´coming in hot´, ´coming in sexy´, and ´coming in gorgeous´, which are pretty much three stages of drunkenness, in order of sobriety to being munted. Haha they were fun guys. And they watched a game of soccer really early in the morning, Hen joined in.. I don´t know what I was doing at this point. Probably sleeping haha!

Next morning we devour our free breakfast, and Nev, Renee (a girl we´d met the night before), Hen, the Kiwis (Cole & Isaac) and I all decide after a slow start to the morning, to go and explore Old Town. So we drag ourselves out to the bus station, pay a mere 25c and have a fun afternoon in the sun. Nev and Henry decided it´d be a good idea to get their shoes polished in the Plaza de Armas there; Hen´s turned out great! But Nev´s turned... yellow? Was hilarious! We also happened to bump into Smurfette which was cool.
The others went into a market and Nev and I didn´t really feel up to it so we stayed outside and watched the world go by. The others didn´t come out for a very long time and we were wondering what they were up to - they´d gone a found food inside (while we were outside starving, with nothing but disgusting meringue fluffy sweet crap in an icecream cone) and didn´t bother to come out and let us know! Rude! But when they finally appeared we´d all really had enough and didn´t feel up to visiting the Basilica today, so headed back to Vibes.

Apparently, Old Town is super dodgy and the chance of being mugged is very high, but I didn´t know this while I was there and was wandering around with my camera hanging over my shoulder and a bag with money etc in it. I was extremely lucky. We got back to the hostel to be told a whole heap of horror stories about muggings from people staying at Vibes - one girl was walking with her boyfriend at 3pm and she had a group of guys grab her, one with a broken glass bottle and one with a baseball bat threatening the two of them. She ended up getting away with everything but still, not an ideal situation to be in! And wouldn´t forget that too quickly. Maybe I was owed some good karma...

We played a couple games of pool and ate 2 minute noodles for lunch. I (very stupidly and without thinking) took Nurofen for a headache at the same time as a drug called Norfloxacin and basically it wiped me out for the next 3 days. I was wondering why I started feeling so crap and Hen and I researched it on google and found out it can be a potent combination of drugs, and I was lucky! (Again!) Dumb Dom.. really.
I could hardly get up to get dinner so we trudged it to a burger place after our nana-nap for a quick cheap feed. Done. Now to bed.

Next morning Nev and Amanda check out and leave - Amanda to the Galapagos and Nev to Banos. Amanda had most of the day free until she started her tour so she came with Hen, Renee and I to THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH! We visited a museum which had the longitude 0 latitude 0 point within its grounds, and had a bit of fun exploring there - saw a real life shrunken head. So interesting!! It still had hair and skin and everything! We left feeling hungry and grabbed some food off the side of the street from a local stall, this is in the middle of no-where by the way, and the food was legitimate local food. Really tasty mystery meat. Bueno.
I´m still feeling really odd from the cocktail of drugs so I had an early one again, and Hen went out with people in the hostel and made of the most of the Quito nightlife.

Today we are leaving to go to Banos and catch up with Nev, Isaac and Cole (who also went), but we have most of the day to kill before our bus. So seeing as we didn´t go and see the Basilica on the first day we thought we´d better do it today! So an aussie guy, Casper, and his Canadian girlfriend *enter name here*, Hen and I trekked it to the bit beautiful building in the center of Old Town. We climbed to the bell tower which was extremely dodgy to get up to, but the views made it so very worth it. Beautiful view of Old Town, and we were so high up so we could see new Quito from there as well. We tried looking for guinea pig for lunch yet failed, so spent $1.75 on a HUGE meal instead.
With that under our belts we knew it was time to make our way to the bus terminal, but before we went there I needed to stop at the DHL office to pick up the care package Matt sent me from home! We got there and found out that it wasn´t in Quito but in another city in the south called Guayaquil!! NOT HAPPY! I was apparently supposed to send a copy of my passport to the customs office down there but I had no idea I needed to do that. So the guy took a copy and we redirected it to another city which was sorrrrttt of on my route. Perfect, we thought.

Leaving Quito was pretty perfect timing as there was an immensely powerful looking storm cloud coming over into the city, and we´d had perfect weather the whole 3 days so we knew it was time to leave. To Banos we go!

We arrived into Banos at night and knew the hostel we were staying in - La Chimonea, where the boys were. We walked to it from the station (Banos is a small town) and had an awesome show of fireworks on the way! South America is full of surprises, never fails to keep you entertained even when you least expect it.
We headed up to the roof after settling into our room and found the guys having a few quiet froths on the terrace and joined in. We didn´t know it at the time but the view of the valley surrounding us was INCREDIBLE, we could only just make out the waterfall behind our hostel, and got a huge shock when we walked out next morning to see where we actually were! Amazing!
There was Peruvian girl in our room called Claudia, a Spanish guy called Erik and an Aussie named Andrei who came up and joined us too. We all chatted for ages and ended up feeling fair tipsy, so we headed out and found a couple of nice places to have a bit of a dance! Then of course, back to the hostel in the wee hours of the morning.

I was going to go for a trek today with Claudia to an awesome place called the Treehouse, which is a real treehouse overlooking the town and the valley surrounding it, but the night before Nev had mentioned hiring a buggy and all going buggying. I thought that sounded fun so I changed my plans and persuaded Claudia to come with us! So there were 3 buggy´s, Andrei and Henry in 1, Erik and Claudia in another and Nev and I in the third. We had the fastest one And the places we went and saw! So beautiful! I highly recommend Banos to anyone going to Ecuador - it´s an absolutely incredible town. We stopped at a place on the way out (to where? we had no idea) and Andrei and Hen decided to do a few doughies and test the buggy´s out. Claudia tried too but she can´t actually drive (which we didn´t know) and she ALMOST and I mean almost got hit by a huge truck by only just managing to stop before hitting the road. Nev said he genuinely thought she was a gonner - all she could do was laugh! Not funny! Stupid stupid move. Anyway!
So we were just driving along the highway taking on our surroundings and then taking really fun rough side roads that were more suited to the buggy style driving! Fun fun. I broke the accelerator on these roads and the buggy wouldn´t actually stop! The brakes worked still but if I took my foot off it would take off! Hahaha. We headed back to town cause we couldn´t see Claudia and Erik, they´d stopped following us and we thought maybe they´d gotten lost or had an accident! On our way back we came across this dog that just came up out of NOWHERE and started going ape-freaking-shit at the buggy! He was so vicious and we both completely freaked out cause we was going for Nevs legs as he was driving! All I could do from the shock was laugh hysterically, it was actually hilarious hahaha!
We found Erik and Claudia with their broken down buggy quite a way back, and felt so bad cause we didn´t notice for ages that they´d stopped following us! Oops. They´d made a call and there was someone coming out to help them and take them back, so we kept going.
By the time we got back to town it was getting dark and we were huuuungrrryyy! So we were about 100m away from the buggy shop and yep, our buggy breaks down too. Bloody bueno. We rolled it back to the shop.

Nev and I went and found a kebab shop and on the way to get food we saw Hen and Andrei drive past. Back to the hostel after food and it started raining! We kinda wanted to go out but we stayed and had a few drinks and laughs while listening to music in our room until it stopped raining. We were being very noisy apparently and got told off by the (very anal I have to say) manager of the place. Walking to the clubs in the rain wasn´t fun, so we all got burgers and just went back to the hostel to sleep.

Next morning we knew it was the day to leave Banos, so we hitchhiked to Rio Bamba to spend the night there on the way to Ambato (where I needed to pick up my DHL package). It was the COLDEST drive ever! But luckily only a couple of hours (in the trailer of this truck by the way.. outside). We drove through a very pretty volcanic valley and took a few snaps from the comfort of the bumpy trailer. We arrived frozen in Rio Bamba and went to a cheap lonely planet recommended hostel; bad move. They were not only wayyyy too expensive but they didn´t even have dorms!!! What the hell lonely planet! So we wandered around town struggling to find a place to stay (there are no hostels here!) and went and asked a nice looking foreign girl for directions. Her name is Frida and she is living in Rio Bamba because she is working just outside of town in a farm, and comes back to the city for the weekends. She offered us (Nev, Hen and I) a bed for the night in her apartment! SWEET! So she took us to her home and we just couldn´t believe our luck! We were so grateful so we made her a huge yummy dinner. I think she liked having company too. Early night for us tonight - big day tomorrow!
We woke up and packed up and found that she had prepared breakfast for us! OMG! SUCH a sweetheart, we felt so spoilt. We sat and ate with her and chatted about her volunteering. She´s here for a year as part of a government funded thing in Germany, really interesting! The people in Rio Bamba are seriously so nice, even all the locals. We loved our night here, but the town didn´t look like it had much to offer really. 1 night was all we needed but it was a great time.
We left her place with lots of hugs and "thank you so much"s, and tried walking to the bus terminal. We walked for ages and found one - not the RIGHT one though, so we jumped in a cab, which is what we wanted to avoid doing in the first place, and went to the correct terminal and caught a bus to Ambato to pick up my much awaited package! So exciting!
We were told that the package was delivered to Ambato the day before so figured it would 100% be in the DHL office by the time we got there. When we arrived we were told it was still in QUITO and that it would not get to Ambato that day, but the day after! Which we didn´t have time for! The length of time it´s taken us to sort out the package has been incredible and by this point we´re just so over it and just want it sorted, so we got realllly angry and I demanded to speak to someone in Quito over the phone explaining that we were leaving for Peru and it needed to be delivered TODAY, and he said ´well you need to pay a $47.5 tax on the parcel, and it won´t be there until tomorrow´. FLIPPING USELESS.

THEN out of the blue I was told that the parcel was broken into somewhere between Sydney and Quito and everything but some sunscreen was stolen from it!!! So if we waited, I would have paid $47.5 for sunscreen!!!! ARGHHH! So annoyed!! So that´s the parcel story. I hate DHL.

So in an angry fit we left the office and got an ice cream, which dramatically changed my mood.. As ice cream always does. So we wanted to get out of this shithole asap to head to the party town of Mancora, in the north of Peru on the coast. We had to catch a loooong bus down to the border town of Huaquillas, the problem was we did it late in the afternoon (we didn’t want to stay in Ambato) and ended up getting to the border at 12:30am – NOT a good idea. We walked across into Peru and headed to the immigration office to get pretty stamps in our passports. Now we’re in Tumbes, the border town on the Peruvian side. Our hope was that we could just hitchhike with a tourist bus traveling through, yet our luck wasn’t great and we ended up being rejected by 2 buses, ending up in a 4 hour wait in immigration.

So by now it’s 4:30am and we finally decided to catch a taxi into town and find a cheap hostel so we could head to Mancora tomorrow. Plus we hadn’t showered in something like 3 days. So hygienic. We all fell asleep in our packed, dirty little room and half an hour later the guy at reception came and woke us up (at 5am) and tried to explain to Nev that he was leaving and that there’d be a different guy in the morning. We couldn’t for the life of us understand why the flip he felt the need to let us know so early in the morning. What a hellish couple of days! Now to Mancora, Peru for the craziest, drunkest three days of the trip.