Tom & Claire's Big Adventure: Surprising Quito!

We were a little apprehensive about heading to Quito - we'd heard lots of scary reports about armed robberies and violent muggings, plus also the city is close to 3000m in altitude so the weather is changeable to say the least. However, we headed to the city as it was en route to Columbia (plus Tom was invited to attend an art festival) and we were pleasantly surprised by what we found. We stayed in a very homey hostel, whilst only down the road from allegedly 'the most dangerous road in South America', it was safe and cosy. It even had hot water in the kitchen which is a rarity in SA!!

We met a bunch of Aussies and studied hard at Espanol for a week and a half and cooked dinner together every night. Some of the best meals on our trip were created here - we even cooked a roast. Believe us, the food in SA is not something to shout about so home cooked meals are a blessing!!

At the weekend we headed to Mindo on hired mopeds with a couple of Aussies for a mammouth 260km round trip (thanks Josh and Jules!). Mindo was a beautiful little town set deep in the valley, with multi-coloured humingbrids, the best trout lunch and yummy chocolate brownies.

The journey there and back was the highlight though, Josh and Jules' moped conked it after 10 mins of driving, we then had to wait 40 mins for a new one, meanwhile we were gassed by car fumes and the most stinnkiest bin/sewerage juice, which had us all retching on the side of the road.

Broken down in Quito, waiting for our replacement moped. I must have loved that helmet as I hardly took it off!!

When we finally hit the open road we encountered huge steep dirt roads which had us off the bikes and pushing them. And the roads didn't improve - there were massive pot holes so it was a bone shaking ride for the first 5 hours!

Trekking up the hill as the moped could not handle the road conditions with 2 people on board!

On the return trip we were pulled over by the Police and Josh and Jules were threatened with jail for not carrying their drivers licenses. Thankfully a bit of my Spanish kicked into gear and I managed to get them out of the pickle. We found out later that the Police can throw you into jail for 4 days for this offence. Big relief. When we finally reached Quito we hit rush hour and got stuck in the fast lane of a 5 lane motorway in the dark, thanks to the schizophrenic GPS. We seriously thought that this trip might be our last as we hit speeds of 80km/hr. Lucky for us the gods were looking after us and we were saved from being pelted into the middle of the highway and run over by a truck. Memorable times!