Wednesday, January 21 We woke up early, had a quick grocery store breakfast of oatmeal cookies and yogurt and were on our way to Quito. We continued riding through the Andes, surrounded by mountains on both sides, though not as spectacular as in prior days, the scenery was still very pleasant and we stopped frequently […]

Thursday, January 22 We slept in until 9:30 am, and by the time we rolled out of our room in hopes of having breakfast at the hostel, they could only serve us coffee and one glass of juice. We weren’t particularly impressed with our hostel and it was not available to us the next day, […]

Friday, January 23 We woke up early, had a quick breakfast at the hostel and took a cab to the airport for our 12:30 pm flight. We were quite impressed with the free wi-fi at the airport and the service of the local Tame airline. We had a quick stop over at Guayaquil and on […]

Saturday, January 24 As part of our daily routine, the breakfast was at 7 am. After which we had a dry landing at Puerto Baqurizo Moreno on San Cristobal Island to visit the Interpretative Center. I am not quite sure exactly why it was called that, particularly because our guide interpreted very little, so much […]

Sunday, January 25 Our morning landing was at Gardner Bay, which was another stunning beach filled with seal lions, [qt:/southernexposure/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/mvi_2427.mov 320 240] swimming iguanas, [qt:/southernexposure/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/mvi_2331.mov 320 240] and four different kinds of crabs. We swam to a rock outcropping 200 ft from the beach to snorkel and saw large schools of fish, eel and sting […]

Thursday, January 29 Finally, after being in Quito for two and a half days running errands and scheduling our Galapagos tour we had a full day to enjoy some sightseeing. We were mainly interested in visiting the Centro Historico, which features colonial architecture the Spanish constructed over the remains of the Inca city. We had […]

Sunday, February 1 I was very happy with our selection of hostal Chordeleg. It was a converted colonial home right in the center of Cuenca. Not only did we get to park our bikes in the lobby, our room was clean and spacious with a little balcony overlooking one of the churches. The included breakfast […]

Monday, February 2 I have really enjoyed Cuenca. It is a very neat and orderly city with stunning architecture set in the beautiful rolling hills of southern Ecuador. It was time for us to move on and try to get as close as possible to the border with Peru. After the usual jumble of trying […]