The day the earth moved

Warning: quality of blog will be temporarily poor as I have been let loose on the keyboard.

There are several differences between Sarah and I. One of them relates to timing. Having had a fantastic stay in Vilcabamba, we had to catch a flight up to Quito. Someone had mentioned there had been landslides on the road to the airport, so Sarah wanted to take the 60km transfer the day before. I of course thought this was way too conservative and somehow managed to persuade Sarah that we should stay in Vilcabamba one more night, and get an early taxi to the airport. However as the rain poured and poured all night, I wondered if we’d made the right decision.

We shared a taxi with a lovely couple from the States and soon hit smallish landslides. Unperturbed we carried on in the morning darkness until we hit the big one. We were told by our taxi driver in no uncertain terms that we would not be going anywhere and missing our flight was inevitable. There were lots of “I told you so” faces being pulled, and I had to admit we’d made the wrong decision. But salvation……if we walked with our bags in the pitch darkness through a thick slurry of rocks and dirt, with the very real possibility that more big boulders could tumble onto us, then we could get another taxi on the other side. As missing our flight could have screwed up our Galapagos trip, we took the risk and waded through. After one false alarm, which sent the crowds screaming from a clatter of falling rocks, we set off. Of course this kind of adventure was like water off a ducks back to us.

We clambered over barbed wire fences listening for the ominous sound of falling rocks as others came towards us through the darkness, muttering ‘buenos dias’ as we passed. The American couple made an observation that seeing the locals coming the other way moving quietly, clad in blankets with bags and cases, it looked like some illegal crossing from Mexico to the States.

Our saviour arrived in the form of an Ecuadorian business man who was due to catch the same flight. Ironically he was working for a road construction company that had just started tarmacing this same stretch. He called for someone to pick us up on the other side, and we were taken at breakneck speed to the airport and just made the flight. Once again we have proved that the journey is our destination.

Arriving in Quito we booked into a hostel overlooking the old town, and instantly met a friendly couple of guys that we ended up chatting to for ages. For the first time in a while we acted like proper gringos, and pretty much stayed on the hostel terrace drinking, eating and talking the universal language of English - sacrificing a cultural stroll around the city (shock horror). We picked up our tickets for the Galapagos, and I tried unsuccessfully to postpone the trip for a day when I realised that Brazil were in town for a key World Cup qualifier against Ecuador. I seem to have managed to be in the right place at the wrong time on several occasions for such things, but a trip to the Galapagos is a pretty good alternative.

We got up nice and early on Saturday to catch the two hour bus ride to the famous Otavalo market. There were seven of us that went along and we rather cleverly got separated when we took two taxis to the bus station. Even more clever was that Sarah and I were in separate taxis, and I ended up spending the day with two lovely ladies instead. I also had all the money, umbrellas, cameras etc. I thought a cheap day was on the cards with Sarah stranded with no cash but I had underestimated my wife who had begged and borrowed enough money to acquire an array of souvenirs.

We all managed to stay together long enough to go into the new town in the evening, and were surprisingly treated to dinner by Horacio. Cheers mate (real name Nick by the way). We would have partied long into the night, but we had an early flight to the land of the boobies. The anticipation was quite frankly too much.