Up and Up

“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” –Rudyard Kipling

How true the above quote is. It´s amazing how much our smell plays into our senses and what that can tell us about the environment we are in. From the clean or polluted air that we inhale, to the foods and drinks we ingest. New places, as funny as it sounds, also open us to new smells. Some are enjoyable like a fresh pineapple or mango, or some others are harsh, such as a large diesel bus spewing out black fumes into the streets.

Spent about four days in Quito, which included New Year´s Day festivities, a walk to a large hill, and taking the TelefériQo gondola from 10,226 ft to 12,943 ft. Hiked up and up to the summit of the Volcano which was around 15,413 ft above sea level. Man oh Man, my lungs have never hurt so much and breathing was really hard, but it was all worth it. 

From here we headed into North-Eastern Ecuador, also known as the Oriente. This is more jungle-rainforest land with rivers feeding into and out of the Amazon. Spent two days in a little mountain town called Papallacta.  Now if you have the money you can stay at a very nice place with hotsprings etc at Termas Papallacta.  

However, being a budget traveler. We opted for the cheap hostel about one block away and have hot spring pools all to ourselves! 

The hostel was family run and the mother made us some delicious fresh trout and we enjoyed talking with the young girl working on her homework next to the crackling fireplace in the common area. 

We hiked around (in the rain) and saw llamas and some cool plants.




From here, we planned on going a bit North to visit more volcanoes and waterfalls. However, we learned quickly that it is not an easy task to catch a bus off the highway. Not exactly a bus station out here in the hills.  Basically you have to wave or flag buses down.

The bus would fly by and you would have about one minute to see if the name of where it was going was the one you needed. The one we wanted was not very regular.  Later we learned that you practically have to stand in the middle of the street and wave with both hands to flag it down, then will it stop.  We wasted three hours of our life standing in the cold. We decided to forgo the waterfall and just take the next bus back South to the town of Tena.

And oh what the views! At first it was standing room only, then we finally got a seat as the gorgeous green, lush mountains zoomed by and the wild,roaring rivers cut through them.