Halfway through my grand adventure already - today we left Quito to begin the two month expedition. Leaving Quito was really rather sad - after seven weeks there I'd become quite attached to the place. I think the thing that I'll miss the most about Quito is the amazing view of the mountains that we always had walking Westwards in the city. I liked those mountains.

Leaving the school was quite sad too. We finished our greenhouse and world-map mural on Thursday (both of which we are very proud - and I'll now leave South America with my handprint and name on an Ecuadorian wall, how cool!) The school gave us a really good send-off on Friday, with some traditional dancing, cheerleading, songs, and presentations for us. We were all given a random duck bag thing and a lovely certificate from the school to say thanks for our help, and many hugs from the children. Lots of photos were also taken. Leo (our project supervisor) gave Mel a dollar because the flowers that we'd planted alongside the greenhouse hadn't died over the weekend. We had to give it the girly touch.

On Friday night the other half of our group returned from Puerto Lopez on the coast (where they'd been buidling a house for a month), and EVERYONE went out for much drinking and dancing, including our wicked project supervisors, Leo and Diana, VentureCo guys Alicia and Mark, Aussie Sarah's Pablo and his friends, and both Kat and Chris's whole groups. There were a lot of people. I became really quite drunk and somehow spent the entire night with a cool guy from Chris's group called Tom, behaving like I NEVER would at home, while the rest of my group did 'project' dancing (including brick laying, hoeing, and throwing up), got home at half three, and had to wake up at eight to pack while still drunk. Whoops. Becky and I then said goodbye to our family (also really quite sad), who gave us some chocolates and lovely little Otavalo-esqe bags. I think Becky and I got the best pick of the families out of the six of us, and I'll miss them. In particular I'll miss Fausto who I didn't even get to say goodbye to, which was a bit of a pity.

But now we're moving on to other things - the first stop is Tena, in the cloud forest. We're here for white-water rafting tommorrow, down the Rio Napo for a day, a river which leads straight into the Amazon. How exciting! And then into Peru within a week.

More photos uploaded into the same album as my last entry, I think.