Quito area tour

I was picked up by a new guide in the morning. She was just out of school and eager to please me. She drove me up to the top of town to look at the views. I told her I had already been there and she was surprised. Then we drove out of town. She was a terrible driver. She would start talking to me while she was driving and look at me as she talked. The car would wander out of its lane and I would have to tell her to watch out. This happened over and over again. We had several near collisions. I finally told her she could not look at me at all when she talked. She found that difficult to do.

There are a lot of bad drivers all over Central and South America. They pass on blind curves and at the top of hills with no regard to what might be coming from the other direction. There are a lot of accidents, most of them 100% preventable. She started to pass a few times and I asked her to wait. She did not understand my concerns. I tried to explain it to her but the concept seemed to be beyond her abilities. I do no understand that. Seems like a simple concept to me. Do not drive your car somewhere you can not see what is ahead of you on the road. It is not like they are in a hurry all the time because they are not. There is no need to pass in the first place so why pass in a dangerous manner?

We made it to our destination safely despite her terrible driving. We were at a park on the equator. We jumped out of the car and went in to the park. There were shops, rides, games, restaurants, educational displays and history displays in the park. We started out in the equator facts room. We played some games where on one side of the line the water went one way and on the other side the water went in the opposite way. Just like flushing a toilet. There was a balance an egg on the equator game and places to get your picture taken straddling the equator. There was also an insect museum that I enjoyed tremendously. I love all the oddities of the insect world. I am just glad they aren't a lot larger than they are or we would all be in big trouble from them. They had a lot of different beetles from little ones to big ones and all different colors. I enjoyed the bright iridescent ones and the hercules ones the most. The attendants would take your pic covered in beetles if you liked.

We checked out all the displays and some of them were very juvenile but others were interesting. There was a large miniature display with various cities and things in miniature. I enjoyed the history room talking about early explorer's attempts to travel in the jungles of South America and map the equator's path through the jungles and over the mountains. When we tired of it all we took off for Quito again.

We stopped for some food at a nice little restaurant on the way back. I was having fun talking to my young guide. She was very open and would answer all my questions which I found interesting because I had a lot of questions for her. We lingered over the food we were having so much fun talking together. I shocked her when we were talking about music and she told me she was a heavy metal fan and I pulled out my Ipod and played some of her favorite music. She could not believe that I had the songs on my Ipod. There are almost 10,000 varied songs on my Ipod so there was a good chance I was going to have something she liked no matter what it was.

On the way back after we ate, she finally had a little accident. I wasn't surprised when it happened. I did not laugh at her or complain. It was entirely her fault for not paying attention to her driving. There was no damage to the other car but she had some trim hanging off the front fender after she hit the car in front of us. I helped her tuck it up under so it would stay on until she got somewhere where it could be fixed. She felt terrible about it and was near tears. All I was thinking is that she got off lucky considering the way she drives. We canceled the rest of our tour after that and called it a day. She took me back to my hotel and I wished her luck with her boss over the damage to the car. She was going to be my guide for the rest of the week too. I just hoped there was not a lot of driving in the plans.