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.

Quito, Ecuador

My first morning in Quito I was booked for a walking tour of the old town. My hotel was very close to old town so it was a good plan. I had a good healthy breakfast with lots of fresh fruit and some nice oatmeal. The coffee was great too. Then my new guide showed up to pick me up. She was very nice. She spoke a mixture of English and Spanish before asking me if she could practice her English all the time. I asked her how was I ever going to learn to speak Spanish if everyone always wanted to speak English with me. She laughed and we ended up speaking Spanglish as a compromise.

We started our tour at, you guessed it...the Cathedral. It was another nice Cathedral and then we went to guess again...the main square. You are a fast learner on these city tours. We also went to the presidential home, a museum, a handicraft center (she did not tell me if it was her uncle's shop or not), an art museum, walked around the old town streets, had coffee at a nice cafe and lunch at a nice little restaurant. We drank a bottle of wine with the lunch. We were having a good time. My guide was much more experienced than my other guides had been. She was older too at around 40. She seemed to be having as good a time as I was on our tour. After we exhausted the old town area for the most part, we jumped into her car and went on a drive up to the top of the city to look at the views from on high. Quito is a sort of sectioned city mostly due to its geography of mountains that pretty much go through the city itself. There are areas that are mostly poor and of course there are the posh areas but also areas with dense condo style housing and areas of homes, new and old areas and overall a good mixture of everything. There should be a place that appeals to almost anyone somewhere in the city.

I was pumping my guide with questions. I didn't ask the usual questions about the history and politics of Quito. I wanted to know about healthcare, social security, taxes, family income, religion in daily life, love, sex and other personal things about the people. She was pretty cool with some of my tough questions. The overall impression I got from her was that the general population was very Catholic with a large swing to other missionary religions recently. They lived their lives in a pretty strictly christian manner and most of them attended their respective religious services regularly. This was different than say Mexico where everyone claims to be Catholic but almost nobody actually goes to church anymore and their lives are much more secular than Christian. She told me the health care in Ecuador was very good and very accessible to even the poorest people. She claimed there was nobody going hungry because social services were readily available to help the less advantaged people. I had to agree with her after looking around the city during our tour that most of the people seemed healthy and happy if somewhat reserved in their happiness. She told me that any deviance from the norm like homosexuality was looked down upon strongly as was divorce, abortion and any other sexual deviance or radical view. Politically she called herself a moderate and told me the country was very stable at the moment politically. She told me a story and showed me an art piece to demonstrate how the people feel towards adultery. The art piece was a cot with a man and a woman tied to it naked and face to face with the two bodies all dried out and mummified. She told me that adulterers were tied up like that and then placed out in the hot sun until they were mummified as a penalty for their sin. She said the punishment is still in use today although it is illegal. It did get her point across about the attitude to "sin." Pretty gross if you ask me. I can't imagine dying such a slow agonizing death with a lover like that.

When my tour with her was over I had some time off. I was beat up from walking too much in my physical condition but I still went out for a few drinks that night at a place my guide had pointed out as a good place for me to go. I met some other Americans that were living in Quito and they loved the place. We talked for a few hours over some local beers and then I went back to my hotel room to try to recover.

Machu Picchu to Ecuador

I helped my young girlfriend as much as I could with her sunburn but there really wasn't much I could do for her. I carried her stuff to the train station the next morning and we rode back to Cuzco together. She was whimpering most of the way. Everybody felt sorry for her. She wanted to sit there with no clothes touching her sunburn but she had to wear something so she put on another spaghetti strap top and let the straps hand off her shoulders.

We made it back t Cuzco and I took her to her family she was staying with. I left her there and told her I hoped she felt better soon. They were very concerned about her and I know she got good care from them.

I hung out in town until it was time for me to leave for Ecuador. I went out and had some fun but mostly I was tired and sore from all the traveling and I ended up in my hotel room more than I wanted to be. My guide finally came and got me to take me to the airport for the flight to Ecuador. My two weeks in Peru had flown by too quickly. I should have allowed more time for the trip.

The flight was long. First I flew back to Lima and then from Lima to Quito Ecuador. I got some good views of the Andes mountains as we flew over them. There sure are a lot of mountain peaks and volcanoes in the range. I kept thinking about the plane crash where the survivors ate each other to stay alive. I can see that because the amount of uninhabited space below us in these mountains was immense. There were some very isolated hard to get to places we flew over. Way up high in my plane I was comfortable and warm. I was just hoping the plane made it to my destination safely. It did.

I landed in Quito and was met by my new guide for Ecuador. We waked out to the car and went on a quick driving tour of Quito and then to my hotel. The long travel day beat me up and I needed to go take some meds and rest in my hotel for a bit in order to recover. The next day would be more touring with my guide around Ecuador.