Hello everyone!!

Back again. It took us some time to find a café with fast internet but here we are. We are currently staying in a beautiful little hostel called Travellers Inn (formerly known as Amazon Inn http://www.amazoninn.com/Eng/index.html) located in the so called New City of Quito. The New City is the modern area in Quito with all the office buildings, hotels and hostels, bars, clubs and restaurants. We just love the atmosphere here, probably because we really have turned into 'city people' over the last couple of years. On Friday night, Quito is very comparable to Amsterdam, with thousands of people roaming through the streets and having a good time. We felt immediately at home.

And it was time for a positive break for us. After the issues we have had with the BCD (which is on its way to being resolved as the owner of the diveshop has proposed to send it back to Europe, (see last blog story for more background), we had a very hard time finding a replacement camera for our little Canon Ixus which broke down in Costa Rica. In fact we first brought our Ixus to the local Canon representative who told us that repairing the camera would be so expensive that it would not be worth the effort and we would be better off buying a new camera. Fine, we thought, we will do that. Soon we found out that digital cameras are extremely rare here in Ecuador and they only sell very old or hugely expensive models. It is really unbelievable but cameras that cost about $400 in the US will cost over $1000 in Ecuador...something to do with import taxes. So it took us a stressful day and a half of running from one camera store to the next and meanwhile doing lots of internet research to find an appropriate camera for a 'normal' price (still paying a premium of more than EUR150 over the price we would have paid in Europe, not to mention the US). It is a compromise and we probably would have never bought this camera back in Europe, but hey, we have to row with the belts we have...

And guess what; a few hours after our camera purchase we passed a very dodgy camera repair shop and thought what the heck, let's try it. The criminal looking guy behind the counter told us he could repair our Ixus for about $80 with a 90% chance of success. Mmmmm, we thought but let's see what happens. Who knows, maybe our stressful 1 day and a half camera hunt might end up to have been totally superfluous. On the other hand, as with the BCD we are likely to never see our Ixus again...

Last week, we did our trip to Galapagos Islands. It takes about 2x 1.5 hours flight to get there from Quito and the moment you set foot on soil you realise that this is a very special place. It was truly wonderful. Our boat departed from the port in San Cristobal, where we were immediately greeted by dozens of Sea Lions who live in the port and are not afraid at all of the many tourists that are stalking them for pictures. They are so cute, you could touch them if you wanted to, unbelievable (see pictures)!!

They spend the day hunting for fish and lying lazily in the sun. Thomas could immediately relate to their lazy lifestyle...

Our diving boat, the Deep Blue was great, it was the most luxurious and spacious diving boat we ever set foot on. Our diving group was relatively diversified in terms of nationalities (US, UK, AUS, SWE, BEL and HOL), but mainly included relatively young and highly educated people which is quite uncommon on a liveaboard. It is hard to compare the diving in the Galapagos to the diving on Cocos. In the Galapagos, the water was REALLY cold and there were much much much fewer sharks than on Cocos. On the other hand we got to dive with Sea Lions and we encountered 4 whalesharks (2 in a dive, WOW!!) and a Manta. So the jury is still out there. Unfortunately we could not make underwater pictures (because the Ixus broke down) but hope to be able to post some pictures later on when we receive them by mail from our diving buddies (Luke: here is where you come in!!). Obviously wedid a number of land trips as well and got to see many of the Galapagos highlights: Sea Lions, Blue Footed Boobies, Land and Sea lizards and of course the famous Giant Turtoises, again all without any fear of human beings, simply because humans never hunted these animals in the past (see pictures).

The landscape is also mind boggling, very dry and volcanic, providing for some spectacular sceneries (see pictures).

We spend the last week in Quito, which we find a very attractive city. Situated at 2.800m above see level and surrounded by volcanic mountains of over 4.100m, it is a very scenic place. Some of the activities we did include taking a big telecabine to over 4.000m, providing us with some beautiful views over the city and of course we also visited the famous historic centre, which as a whole is a Unesco preserved site.

Yesterday we did a daytrip to Otovalo, a town situated at a 2.5h drive from Quito. Otovalo is the capital city for the Otovalo Indians, who are famous for their handicrafts and up to today wear traditional clothing. Their Saturday market, which we visited, is world renowned and Mischa could no longer contain her latent shopping addiction and went berserk on the different handicrafts...we may have to cut our trip around the world short because we are likely to run out of money much sooner than expected...

Last week, we actually went to the gym a few times to get in shape for our hiking and trekking trip, which will take us to the top of some of Quito´s highest mountains in the next three weeks. Probably a bit too late... 30 minutes of spinning at 2.800m - and you die. So we are quite anxious about the coming three weeks...

Anyway, it will probably be hard for us to update our blog in the days to come. So we will be back in a few weeks.

Hasta la Pasta!

Love,

Thomas and Mischa