Hasta Luego Quito

And as all good things must come to an end, so I have decided that it is time to venture out into the big wide world again and stop hiding in the comfort that is Quito and La Mariscal. Thus, tomorrow I will be on a rickety bus off to have some adventures and make this blog page worth reading again! Not sure where i will be going as yet, much to the amusment of my friends here, but will figure it out today!

Anyway, have had a fun few days in Quito relaxing and doing everything that I have meant to do in the last 6 weeks but failed to do. Amanda and I (being the only 2 left now, sob) also decided that on sunday we needed to escape and so took ourselves off to Papallacta to wallow in hot springs for a couple of hours. So off we tootled to our least favourite place in the world (aka terminal terrestre / bus station) and then sat on possibly the most uncomfortable bus ever for two hours, only cheered by the KFC we had cleverly bought for brekkie, the US mags we had discovered in our hostal and the thought that at least we werent on the bus for 8 hours as the rest of the suckers were!

Anyway, after much confusion, eventually managed to get of the bus at the right place and the first surprise was that the springs were in a completely different place to where we thought, but luckily a nice man with a truck was there to charge us a small fortune to drive us up the hill to the springs (we had thought they were down!) So bumped and banged about we, wer v happy to see the springs and spent the next 2 hours getting wrinkly and hot in lots of hot water trying not to notice that we were the only foreigners there and that everyone was staring.....nice

So then, fully relaxed and invigorated (and dry) we pottered off into the car park to find a lorry man....thinking surely if there was organised transport up to the springs, there would surely be some down again. but we were forgetting that this is ecuador and therefore land of no common sense. And so our relaxed selves were forced to walked 1.5k back to the road on a very dusty path.....grr.....and then to cap it off, there were no seats on the bus back so we had to stand for 2 hours whilst small children ran back and forth and people with seats did their best to look smug! God, tell me again why i am planning on doing this for the next 4 1/2 months!!!!!