Monday, October 16, 2006

Update from: The Equator

Ecuador's a real varied country from what I can tell and I've only seen a corner of it so far!

Quito's cool and I'm enjoying doing some voluntary work in a centre where kids (5-16 years old) come outside of school hours. Don't worry though, I'm not working hard! We tend to play basketball, football, dance, cook, I help with their homework - mainly their English - and other random things like today I taught two girls to play a bit of guitar.

Just to emphasize that I'm not working toooo hard I'll tell you that after the first week I decided to take a week off and travelled around the north east of the country for 9 days which included some stunning countrysides of cloud forest where I saw loads of waterfalls, hummingbirds, various other brightly coloured birds and heard the howling of a troop of Howler Monkeys echo through a valley. I also briefly swam in a lovely, wild, caiman infested lake.

After that sort of scenery it was off towards the coast where I sampled some truly fantastic food (the general South American food isn't great but this was damn good) including lovely shrimp and prawns and fish dishes (one in particular in a fresh coconut sauce). Spent a good few days in the mangrove region in a tiny community, chilling a lot on a hammock watching the fishing boats pass, crazy kids play and supping on beers.

The mangroves were all new to me and real interesting but not the most beautiful of areas since there's plenty of mud and insects but impressive to see.

One of the biggest shocks was that the community had a club! Furthermore, it was fooookin awesome! Definitely in my top 5 favourite clubs in the world. A very mad night was had for a local's birthday.

That's about it right now. If all goes to plan we're both off to the Amazon Jungle in two weeks for 1 month! (For the attentive of you, the original plan whereby I should already be in the jungle fell through so shuffled things round).

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Satelite Views of Top Places..so far

We've past the half way point in our trip now so looking back, these images show views of some of my favourite places over the last 6 months:

Lakes Lago Posadas and Purreydon in Patagonia, Argentina:

Ollantaytambo, a village in the Sacred Valley near Cusco, Peru:

Bahia Negra - the village up the river Paraguay - where I was stuck for a week:

Impressive Inca terracing in a valley near Ollantaytambo:

The glacier Perito Moreno in Patagonia, Argentina:

The unbelievably rainy village of Petrohue set on a lake near a volcano:

The pics are taken from Google Earth which patches together satelite images from all over the globe to varying degrees of detail.