Gringo Blogo

I got a call from the Consulate today - it seems my photos didn’t meet their biometric photo requirements. Its a total pain in the arse, now I have to get new photos and send them via DHL to Argentina. I told them to send the passport to Lima and I’ll get an emergency one to take me across the border to Peru. I’m now back in Quito trying to sort this out whilst Marianne is takin it easy in Baños. I’ve put more photos on flickr - our flickr address is now
www.flickr.com/photos/gringoblogo

Marianne and me eventually got out of Quito and have now started our long trip south. One of our first stops was the Volcanic crater at Quilatoa, which we decided to go to after being unsuccessfully trying to get to the worlds highest active volcano, Cotopaxi. Quilatoa is stunning its an extinct volcano with a massive emerald green lake in the middle.

The place is amazing and the 2.5 hour journey to it is also really cool climbing to our hostel on the rim at 3914m. We climbed down inside the crater and got a mule back up which was cool. The funniest thing though, is the little village on the edge of the rim which I’m pretty certain only exists for tourists. Its probably the poorest place I have ever been and its completely insane. It totally reminded me of when the fair arrived on Craigy Island.

Its the most half arsed attempt at tourism ever - no running water, toilets that dont work and a barrel of dirty water to wash yourself and your teeth. On top of that you get the feeling that everyone and anyone in the place just see’s you as a walking wallet ripe for the rip off. Anyway that said it is still one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever been and we’re glad we went. At the minute we’re in Riobamba and we’re going to Baños tomorrow.

Quito’s foundation festival is on at the minute- things are going wild here, people dancing in the streets, loads of chivas (trucks with people and a band on the roof and on benches inside the open truck… good fun! :)) and festival music and bullfights! Watching a bullfight though only reforced our opinion that bullfights are disgusting and cruel. Once in a lifetime, and never again!

All in all, good fun here!

On the twelve of December we’ll be heading down to South Ecuador, hopefully without getting robbed on the way!

At Christmas time Quito’s supposed to be really boring and dead, so we wanna spend Christmas in a little village called Vilcabamba and get pampered there, there are jacuzzies and massages and loads of that sort… 

For our non-tuetonic friends that didn’t read Marianne’s post we got robbed again on Monday. Ironically, on our way to report that last robbery some dirty fecker nabbed my rucksack while we tucked into a tasty Lasagne. In the rucksack was our passports (cos the police needed ID to report the first robbery) so we now have the whole hastle of getting new passports. Who said life with me isn’t interesting? Poor Marianne, I do kind of feel this is my special gift from above.
And before anyone says it the thieve’s here are real pro’s and the bag was between my feet and I didn’t even notice it.

Zwei Tage nachdem wir ueberfallen worden sind, wurden wir nun schon wieder ausgeraubt! Diesmal jedoch ohne das wir es bemerkten.

Wir hatten beide unsere Reisepaesse in Ciaran’s Rucksack getan weil wir nach dem Mittagessen zur Polizei gehen wollten und den Raubueberfall von Samstag Nacht anzeigen wollten. Ciaran hatte den Rucksack zwischen seinen Beinen am Boden abgestellt. Erst nachdem wir gezahlt haben, ist uns aufgefallen, dass er Rucksack weg war- ich dachte, dass das nicht wahr sein kann und Ciaran den Rucksack bestimmt in der Spanischschule vergessen hat, aber die Wahrheit ist, dass er Rucksack gestohlen wurde.

Wir waren beide ziemlich wuetend und haben uns sehr aufgeregt. Wir haben noch nicht mal eine Idee, wer es gewesen sein koennte, der einige Verdaechtige, an den wir uns erinnern koennen, war ein Strassenjunge, der Suessigkeiten verkauft hat. Das Restaurant befindet sich jedoch in einem Durchgang, also sind ziemlich viele Leute vorbigegangen und es haette jeder sein koennen.

Nachdem wir gestern den ganzen Tag auf verschiedenen Polizeistationen verbracht haben, waren wir heute bei den jeweligen Botschaften, um unsere Reisepaesse als gestohlen zu melden und gleichzeitig neue Reisepaesse zu beantragen. Da ich keine Passbilder und kein Geld mit mir hatte, muss ich morgen nochmal zur deutschen Botschaft und Ciaran muss nochmals zum irischen Konsulat.  

Es wird hoffentlich nicht allzu lange dauern, bis unsere neuen Paesse da sind, Ciarans Pass wird ein paar Wohen dauern, mein Pass nur ein paar Tage, da ich nur einen provisorischen Reisepass bekomme, der auch nur fuer ein Jahr gueltig sein wird.

Es ist wirklich schade, dass wir jetz voll die Paranoia schieben und jeden verdaechtigen muessen, man kann hier ja noch nicht mal wirklich der Polizei vertrauen. Man kann sich halt nie wirklich sicher und relaxt fuehlen, weil man immer aufpassen muss, dass einem nichts geklaut wird oder man ueberfallen wird.

Bad news I’m afraid, we got mugged last night. Just metres from home three guys ran at us from behind and next thing we new I had a big kitchen knife to my chest and the were russleing through our pockets. They got my watch and Marianne’s lose change but it was pretty mad and thankfully no-one got hurt especially as the muggers were totally nervous and amateurish. Afterwards the police came and ‘cos in Spanish I always confuse my cutlery I told the police “Its a guy in a red jacket with a big kitchen spoon!”. I only hope they bring anyone matching that description in for interrogation.
Yeah but we’re now and we just have to file a report with the Police as pointless as it will be.

Last weekend we’ve been to the cloudforest in Mindo, a little village west of Quito. It was really good fun to do tubing (racing down the river on big black tubes) and see the butterflyfarm; although by the time we got there, most of the butterflies were already having their butterflysleep and butterflydreams….

Oh, and it was amazing to literally have breakfast with humming birds, there were thousands of them! No, i don’t mean we had humming birds for breakfast, but with them! People there feed them some kind of sugar solution using a birdfeeder. The humming birds were only one meter away from our breakfast table! 

We stayed in a cabaña with big glass windows all around it, so you felt like you were sleeping open air in the middle of the beautiful nature. Our bathroom though had a really big whole in the ceiling and big glass windows, too… 

We visited the waterfalls, too: after we have walked for about one hour we arrived at a river, two men were taking us over the river in a weird construction consisting out of a rope and a cage which was opened on the sides.

Then we were hiking for up the mountains in the deepest jungle for ages! The “path” was really narrow and wet, because it had rained a lot and the there was loads of humidity. There were no ropes or any other safety precautions. The signs they’ve put up were totally misleading because they did not say the distance to the waterfalls in the right order, so when we thought we’ve always made it there appeared another sign saying it was still ages away….

After a lot of other really dodgy rope bridges and about three hours we arrived at the waterfalls! There was one pretty mental slide out of thick concrete, at the end of which followed a 4 metre freefall into ice cold water. We both touched the ground and Ciarán hurt his feet.

There were two different places from which you can jump into the waterfalls, one is 12 metres high, the other one is 4 metres high. I consider jumping from the waterfalls was actually safer than the slide, because the water was deep enough…

It was really good fun to jump, although we only had the guts to jump from the 4 metre one….. 

Oh, and we discovered our new favourite Ecuadorian food: Platanos (fried cooking bananas with melted cheese and onion!)!As greedy as we are we eat a lot of the Ecuadorian food here, because it is sooo cheap to eat out here! Think we both took on weight since we arrived, but this still needs to be scientifically proofed!

Sorry for the delay everyone, I have been working to try and build a little thing to integrate our photos on flickr into the blog but I havent really had the time yet. You can however go to our Flickr GringoBlogo account directly and see our photos.

This morning I heard the funniest thing - In our apartment block the owners have a laundry service, which we used once but haven’t again because its a bit expensive so we usually take our clothes to the local laundrette instead. So, this morning the owner told Marianne that we should use their service as everyone else does because we could catch “the AIDS” from our clothes after they have been washed in a laundrette. She went on to warn that if we persist in this foolish money saving laundry experiment we may end up “very sick”.

Whilst this news did come as something of a shock we’re hoping that it should at least cheer up the Vatican and much of Africa - Its not about the condoms stupid! Just buy a nice Zanussi!

So we´re both pretty ill at the minute, the typical travelour´s sickness…. You never know why you´re sick, perhaps it was the food from “Caféton Cubano” where we had a really delicious Cuban Sandwich (as we wanted to pay the woman wo works there disapeared in the bathroom and only returned ten minutes later after we´ve heard her vomiting very loudly and violently in the bathroom…. guess that´s kind of normal here and by no means the worst food experience we´ve made here, i mean, in most cases you don´t get to see the kitchen…) 

The rainy season has started in the meanwhile and i guess this does not help either: we always carry our rain jackets with us, because you never know when it´s gonna rain next time, and once it starts, it won´t stop for a long time. So I´m having a cold at the minute and Ciarán is pretty sick, too, mi pobrecito! But the good thing about the rain is that Ciarán feels pretty homely with it, the rain makes him feel as if he was in Ireland :)!

Ecuadorian people use to say that most gringos here always ill. Probably we just kind of gotta accept it, unless our organisms get used to all the germs here quite quickly.