Mainland Ecuador

After our wonderful trip to the Galapagos, we realized we would not have enough time or money to see everything we had hoped to see in South America. The reason we were short on money was because in Galapagos we spent as much in 2 weeks as we usually did in 2 months. It was worth every penny, by the way.

The reason we were short on time was because after applying in Peru and interviewing via skype in the Galapagos, I landed a really great job back in Madison, Wisconsin! How lucky am I?!?! We had to book our flights home pretty quickly after that. We could have done a whirlwind tour of the rest of Ecuador and seen everything in a short amount of time, but our experience on the road has taught us that we enjoy places more when we allow ourselves the time to savor them. This meant that we would have to skip Colombia and be choosy about where we went in mainland Ecuador. We chose Banos as our next stop and that turned out to be a good decision.

Banos is a friendly resort town known for a few things: hot springs, being at the base of an incredibly active volcano, and "la ruta de las cascadas"- the waterfall route. We rented bikes for a day and had a lovely time riding and admiring the waterfalls. We appreciated that the rental companies in this town offered higher quality bikes with features such as working brakes (absent on our other rentals). They also gave us helmets.

One fun thing along the route was that you could pay $1 and ride on gondolas over ravines and very close to some of the waterfalls. It was exhilarating.

The views were spectacular. This area reminded us of Boquete, Panama in terms of landscapes. Beautiful!

Sometimes the route actually took us through the waterfalls, which was fun.

I, of course, consulted the map from time to time in order to gauge our progress.
Then tragedy struck! Our camera stopped working! The following photo demonstrates how the rest of our pictures looked when we tried to take a photo.

It was not worth the money to fix the camera, and since it was the end of our trip, we made the sad decision to not replace it. We did buy a disposable camera and took some photos with that but it just wasn't the same!

This means that we did not photograph the beautiful landscapes we saw on our way to Quito or gorgeous colonial architecture or spectacular setting of the city once we actually arrived there. Also missing are photos of us spending an incredibly goofy afternoon at the equator.

We also do not have photo documentation of our trip to one of my favorite stops on the whole journey: Otavalo. In Otavalo, we stayed at a lovely cottage outside of the town (we were a bit more loose with the pocketbooks since I had a job waiting for me), and had a fun day at the Condor Park, where we saw lots of different birds that were being rehabilitated. They had a great flying show.

Otavalo is famous for its huge markets. Sadly, we also do not have photographs of the large animal market, where locals negotiate for the best prices on cows, pigs, llamas, goats, kittens, etc. All the animals were contained with simple ropes tied around their furry necks. It was a controlled chaos. After people unsuccessfully tried to pickpocket us in the food market, we worked our way to the artisan market, where we bought some beautiful textiles that we will cherish forever.

Now that I have been back and working for almost 2 months, it almost seems like it might have been worth it to spend some money on a cheap digital camera. It's just so difficult when you get used to a certain budget! However, the low quality video on our camera still worked so we have lots of short videos of all of these things.

All in all, Ecuador was a great way to end our journeys. The people were incredibly kind and the scenery was spectacular. We look forward to returning to see more of it one day.

Note: this is not the last post of our blog. I am still working on a recap of our adventures!