Soy no hablo Español...

So, the thing is, Ecuador is a Spanish speaking country. And not "Spanish speaking but everyone speaks English", like in Mexico. They speak Spanish. Only Spanish. We speak English. Only English. It proves to be fairly difficult. We have taken 15 hours of Spanish lessons now, and we can string together a few key sentences like "How much is this?" and "Does this bus go to...?", but speaking it and understanding the response are two totally different things. Anyway, we are plugging along. Hand signals help.

We are still in Quito, but are heading out tomorrow. We are heading east to a town called Tena, which is in the Amazon Jungle. We are stopping at a hostel called the Magic Roundabout along the way, which is sort of a sister hostel to where we are now.

The last few days have been busy. We've been to the equator- both of them. The first one is where some French guy thought it was a long time ago, but he hadn't compensated for the fact that the Earth bulges or something... The "real" equator is about 50m north. This one has been located by GPS. At the fake equator there is a huge monument, a bunch of museums, and people wearing uniforms. At the real equator there is some dude in a Hang Loose shirt pouring water into a basin to show you that it will spin in different directions depending on which side of the equator he puts it on. Oh ya, there is also a shrunken head, and the skin of a 10m anaconda.

We got to the equator by taking the bus. 4 busses, actually. The bus system here is crazy- the bus drives down the street and one guy hangs out the door yelling where that bus is going. If you want on, they'll slow down (not stop) and you jump on. When you want off, you jump off- timing it with a stoplight helps. Anyway, we made it there and back, and felt pretty accomplished.

Yesterday we climbed a volcano called Pichincha. The total climb was only 600 vertical meters, but we started at an altitude of 4200m, which makes it much more difficult. It's a wierd feeling- your legs aren't sore, and your lungs don't burn, but you just can't walk very fast or very far without resting. Cam felt a bit dizzy, more so than me, but we all made it to the top eventually. Unfortunately the view was obscured by cloud and fog, so we did't really get the full benefit of the climb. It took us about 2 hours 45 minutes to get up (to 4800m), and about 30 minutes to get down (basically sliding down a sandy cliff). Descending that quickly gave us nice headaches...

Last night we went out with a group from the hostel. On our way home one of our friends got pickpocketed by a 6 year old girl, who had a baby strapped to her back. This was at 3am. He felt it happening, and grabbed her arm, but the money was gone so fast, handed off to one of the other many children there who were swarming us and the others. That's why we use zippered pockets...

Right now we're trying to upload some pictures. If it works, we'll post again later...

All is well here, 7 days in...

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Cam and Kristin