Quito

Yesterday was a very relaxed day, I ended up spending a few hours in Park El Ejido lying on a nice grassy bank reading my book. The weather really was fantastic; sunshine, blue skies, & 26 degrees! I then had a good wander around El Mariscal which is the travellers' ghetto where my hostel is.

The day of taking it easy seems to have paid off because after a good nights sleep I woke up feeling really good. The constant headache I had yesterday has disappeared so I'm obviously getting used to the altitude. Today was a big sight seeing day in Quito's colonial old town, which is a Unesco world heritage site. Lonely Planet describes it as "majestically preserved, yet big & busy enough that it aborbs tourism like a sponge, allowing you to escape into a world that is magically South American". I had a lovely day wandering the steep cobbled streets & looking around some incredibly ornate churches. The old town is full of plazas & I lost count of the number of shoeshine boys whose business I turned down. I'm not quite sure what they thought they'd be able to do with my teva sandals!

I ended up walking around for about 5 hours, so another early night is in order tonight. Tomorrow I'm catching a bus to Baños which should take around 3 & a half hours, fingers crossed... I was talking to an Aussie girl in my room who had been to Baños, & she said 10 minutes shy of reaching the town her bus stopped & they had an 18 hour delay as the road was closed due to one of the local volcanoes erupting! I have no idea what time the buses go tomorrow, but the plan will be to leave my hostel after breakfast & get a taxi to the bus station & get on the first bus I can.

Apologies for the size of these picture files... I take my photos on a high resolution, but usually size them right down before putting them on my blog. The computer I'm on now won't let me download a program to resize the pics. I might be able to do it in microsoft office picture manager, but when I had a play everything was in Spanish! Let me know if it's taking far too long to load the page & I'll remove the pics & put them back on the blog once I get home...