Ecuador, ect.

The last week or so in Ecuador has been great. I`ve been hanging out in Quito and am really enjoying the city. I`ve seen some cool sights, met some cool people and really enjoyed the city. Tomorrow I`m headed to this little town called Mindo. It sounds like a great place to hike, tube the river, monkey around in trees, ect.

The first few days in Quito I took it pretty easy as I think the altitude got to me a bit. Either that or I was a little sick. I got through a couple of trashy novels that my hotel had. One was entitled The Tiger of Desire, that had the tagline ¨When it strikes, it is often deadly.¨ I couldn`t pass that one up, mainly because it was one of only two novels they had in English at the hotel. They were well stocked in German books, strangely. I`ve been trying to stick to book exchanges as used books are pretty pricey here. The trade off has been a steep decline in the quality of literature available. What can ya do?

In the last few days I`ve done some sightseeing, managed to delete all the pictures on my camera`s memory card twice and done some searching for a job. Yesterday I went to the top of this mountain on this gondola system called the Teleférico. It lets you out in at this building at about 13,000 feet with a few cafes and whatnot, and you can walk around. I decided to hike a couple of miles to this other peak that tops out at a little over 14,000 feet. I almost reached it before a combination of: a sketchy looking super-steep trail, dense fog, peals of thunder in the distance, a headache, poor selection of footwear, and a breath that I was having trouble catching convinced me that perhaps it was time to turn back. I`d never been up that high and really didin`t appreciate what that kind of altitude entails.

I want to do the Cotopaxi volcano (tops out above 19,000 feet) trek after my upcoming trip to Mindo, but my little adventure yesterday made me realize that I better hang out at altitude and get acclimatized if I`m going to be able to summit. I met this guy last night who tried to do it without acclimatizing and he said at one point that he couldn`t even stand.

There were to be some pictures in this post, but there has been a repeat of The Great Camera Disaster of 2010.