Vacation: Round 2

Sunday August 31st, 2014.

Cusco, Peru / Lima, Peru / Quito, Ecuador

Its 5:30am and time to get up for our flight to Ecuador. Time of day no longer matters though. Our standards have changed and now all wake up calls past 3am are acceptable.

We take an overpriced cab to the small airport in Cusco and prepare for our flight to Ecuador (via Lima). The entire flight is long (a little over 5 hours), but we are not hiking, so we are both happy.

After a quick layover in Lima, we land in Quito, Ecuador for Vacation: Round 2. Prior to departing the US I had booked a driver through our hotel to meet us at the airport. We anxiously search the arrivals area, but we have been stood up (its okay, we are getting used to it). We find a taxi driver and explain where our hotel is located and he happily obliges us. Cab rides from the airport in Quito are a flat fee of $20USD. We are very surprised when the cab ride takes almost an hour to get to our destination (Wait a minute - did we just scam the cabbie?!?).

We are staying in a hip part of town and are ready to check in and explore. Our hotel is really more of a hostel and the desk attendant is asleep on a couch in the lobby when we arrive (its 1pm, also known as, a good time to take a nap). We begin to explain that we are checking in when it becomes clear that there is a major communication barrier. I am speaking what I thought was Spanish, but I am making no sense, whatsoever. Laura, is faring slightly better than me, but it’s a struggle. Many hand signals and overzealous facial expressions eventually earn us a key to our room and two shower towels. After dumping our gear in our very large room, we head across the street to a super cute pub/restaurant.

I am officially ready for my first post-trail alcoholic beverage. I order a Heineken and Laura gets a pina colda. I feel the effects of my beverage quiet quickly (we are still 9200 feet above sea level) and unexpectedly begin to laugh-cry into my beer. They are tears of joy – I am so happy to be out of Peru!

After our celebratory drinks, we take a short walk to the historical center of town. Central Quito is actually one of the UNESCO world heritage sites. It is beautiful, but, honestly, it looks a lot like San Francisco (but with more prostitutes). After a nice walk, and some silly, drunken photography, we head back to our part of town, where all of the bars and restaurants are located.

So far Quito is awesome. It’s beautiful, the streets all have sidewalks, it doesn’t stink… clearly society here is much more advanced than Peru. For this reason we are looking forward to a really good meal as we are both (almost) ready to start eating again.  

Unfortunately, the food here disappoints, severely. After reviewing an endless row of menus we go into a small diner that is playing 80s music videos on at least 5 different big screen TVs. It is way cute and we are looking forward to eating when the server informs us that they do not have any veggie burgers and their vegetarian options are extremely limited. Bummer. The search for dinner continues.

Eventually we end up at an Ecuadorian version of TGI Fridays. It’s not ideal but both of our stomachs are still hurting pretty badly and they have potato skins on the menu, so we take a seat. We split a big sampler platter, which is pretty bad. It has potato skins (with un-melted cheese on top), chips, cheese sticks, and few other snacks. We are both offended by the potato skins, but it doesn’t stop us from eating them all. After dinner we go out for a drink. Neither of us wants to, but its habit.

Eventually we end up back at our hotel room. I take a long, super-hot shower and, finally, start to recover from Vacation: Round 1. We fall asleep relatively early and will have to wake up early to get a cab back to the airport for our flight to the Galapagos Islands.

Tomorrow we will finally get back to sea level!