Back to Quito

View of Quito from my bedroom.

Back to dry land and altitude of 12,000ft which did not agree with me too much and left me feeling quite dizzy and disoriented for the 1st day but then I got some Coca tea into me and all was good. This is tea made from the leaves of the Cocaine plant and everyone drinks it for altitude sickness, it really works wonders!!

Katie and myself went to the Bella vista cloud forest to see the hummingbirds and experience some of the fauna of the Andes. There are over 140 varieties of hummingbird in the region and we got to see a good 30 of them at least.


We also went to the Equator line on the way back, or at least what the French thought was the equator line in the 1800's, but is actually 260km off. Amazingly, a thousand years before the French made their measurements, local Indians had built a monument on the exact centre without having any of the instruments the French had used for their calculations.

La Rinconada Volcano.

En route we saw a few volcano's. There are 61 in total in Ecuador, 9 of which are active. The last erruption here was in 1995 but they reckon that one is imminent!

That night I flew to Lima, Peru to meet the next group the following morning.