Ecuador Part 1.

After paying ridiculous departure taxes at the airport in Chile (not to mention the insane taxes getting into the country) we took a flight up to Quito, in Ecuador.

Quito is based at an altitude of around 2800 metres, so for starters it was a bit of fun getting used to constantly being out of breath and suffering from a bit of altitude induced insomnia.

We didn´t hang around for long however, as we had a trip to the Galapagos Islands planned, so we managed to squeeze in a trip to the Otovalo Markets, which were a hairy bus ride down from the mountains into the more southern plains.

One thing to note about Ecuador, it´s quite close to the equator (go figure), so being the centre of the Earth I had imagined it would be quite hot. Not the case in Quito (because of the elevation) so when we got to Otovalo I wasn´t quite prepared for the heat (and hence I got sunburnt to a crisp).

Suz & I both lost our minds shopping at the Otovalo market, and we had to try and refrain from buying everything in sight (we almost succeeded).

We returned to Quito with our purchases and after 3 nights we flew out to the Galapagos Islands.

According to our cameras, we managed to take around 680 photos in the 5 days we were in the Galapagos Islands, so I don´t think I´ll share them all, however I´ll try and get some up here in the near future.

The Galapagos Islands are based around 1000km off the coast of Ecuador, and for those that don´t know, they happen to have some of the most diverse animal life in the world, so we were constantly seeing crazy animals of all shapes and sizes.

We took a boat cruise around the islands, and the basic setup was that we´d do a day trip at an island, and generally the boat would go to the next island overnight, and then we´d see another island the next day and so on.

Some of the animals we saw in no particular order were: Giant Galapagos Tortoises, marine iguanas, land iguanas, blue footed boobies, masked boobies, waved albatross, Galapagos sea lions, frigate birds & much more (all of the animals above are only found in the Galapagos islands, and it just so happens that they aren´t scared of humans so we got to take some great photos (hence the 680 shots).

Apart from seeing the animals in their natural habitat, another highlight was snorkelling with the playful sea lions.

After our 5 days we got a flight back to Quito and got ready for our next trip. The Amazon Jungle!