It seems an awful lot longer than just a week and a half since we got here. We´ve done so much, and it´s been so intense, with the continual effort of being happy and sociable and trying to think of things to say and getting to know complete strangers. My general state of being since arriving has been completely knackered, and I´ve had a cold for the past few days too. But what we´ve seen and done has been fantastic.
A week of Spanish lessons and I can still only speak in the present tense, so if you asked me what I did this weekend then I´d be stuffed, but I can certainly understand everyone a lot better. Hurrah! And have also been learning random words and phrases like what ´snot´ and ´I fancy´ and ´all men are slugs´ are.
To begin with this week we went and wandered round the old half of Quito, with little cobbled plazas and all the grand colonial buildings. We walked up the side of the mountain too, ignoring the guidebook´s advice to get a taxi instead through the most dangerous district in Quito, up to this huge statue of the Virgin Mary, with wonderful views of the whole city. Or what would have been wonderful views had it not been pissing it down. But oh well. That evening we went out to a bar in ´Gringolandia´ (sounds like a theme park or similar, but it´s just the name for the bit of Quito filled with gringo-esqe restaurants, bars, internet cafes, etc), and I ended up dancing with a random Latin American. Ha!
On Thursday we visited the fake equator. Hurrah! This was a really touristy little complex of shops and restaurants with a line painted down the middle where they thought the equator was until discovering it´s actually about 100m down the road. And then on Friday we had our first salsa lesson, which was wicked. We nailed the first three steps.
This weekend was spent in Mindo, a one-street town in the cloud forest, which was absolutely amazing. The scenery on the 2 hour bus journey there gradually changed from dry mountains around Quito to lush, wet cloudy rainforest, with huge exotic plants and grass and trees and bright flowers. Cloud forest is so-called because it´s forest in a cloud, and to start with you wouldn´t think there´d be a cloud big enough to cover it all, but we didn´t see a single bit of sky during our whole weekend in Mindo. We were simply surrounded by cloud, and it didn´t stop drizzling. We stayed in this fantastic little wooden hostel, completely open to the outside, with canopies of leaves in the windows, beds tucked away in random corners and on balconies, hammocks and fairy lights.
On the Saturday we went tubeing down the river. Tubeing usually involes sitting on a raft made from giant tubes tied together and sedately floating down the river. For us, however, tubeing turned into a sort of primitive form of white water rafting. It usually takes a group 20 minutes to make it down the river, and it took us 12. We were flung into and under giant rapids, bounced off rocks, and submerged completely at points. It was great fun. And then on Sunday we delved into the rainforest to go and swim in a waterfall pool, walking across rickety wooden bridges, climbing down rickety wooden ladders, and taking this rickety little cable car thing across the top of the cloud forest. It was beautiful.
I´ve managed to upload some photos onto the internet, and they can be found here: http://aol.photobox.co.uk/album/2526654
