Helen Arrives

I arrived safely in Quito after my 50 hour journey from Auckland to be met at the airport by Chris. I was relieved that my bike and luggage also made it, I had had 3 flights to catch and wasn’t that confident that they would arrive with me.

We stayed in Quito for 6 nights. The city is split into ‘old’ and ‘new’ areas; the new area is pretty touristy and more expensive, whereas the old area is much less touristy, cheaper and has plenty of beautiful old buildings, as well as steep, windy cobbled streets and plazas to explore. We spent most of our time wandering the streets, people watching and trying to learn Spanish. Very few people in South America speak English – even at Santiago airport I was surprised that people at the desks etc didn’t speak English. So, we are trying to teach ourselves the basics. We haven’t done too badly, and I usually feel quite confident after we’ve done some learning until I try to speak to someone and they reply too quickly for me to follow, and then all I can do is stare blankly and say ‘no entiendo’ and start to mime, while they try to explain in even faster Spanish. I think we will gain much more from the trip if we can converse with people, so we will keep learning and are planning on having some Spanish lessons somewhere along the way.

Despite our poor Spanish, the people in Quito were really friendly and always willing to help us out. I was surprised to see a lot of people (especially women) in traditional dress, it is a very colourful outfit consisting of long socks, a skirt and poncho, and completed with a small trilby hat with an extravagant peacock feather pinned to it. Often women had small children strapped to their backs with long strips of material – I only saw one pushchair while we were in Quito! There were very few beggars on the streets, which was another surprise for me. I had expected to see quite a lot. There were, however, plenty of shoe shiners. People who live in Quito must have the shiniest shoes in the world, on every street and in every plaza there were shoe shiners! People of all ages had their shoes shined; I think the youngest person I saw was a boy who looked about 2, and the oldest about 80! We were sitting in a plaza one day and were approached by two shoe shining boys. Although we were wearing flip flops, they offered to shine our shoes! They were very determined and even when we declined they got their polish and tried to shine the sides of our shoes. We eventually managed to send them away.

After an enjoyable time in Quito it was time to build our bikes, pack and leave. I was almost certain that I’d be unable to fit all my stuff into the two small panniers and one rucksack that I will be travelling with for the next few months (a challenge and a difficulty for any girl). Chris kindly said he’d take some of it for me, but between us we still seemed to have too much to carry! An amusing (in hindsight) few hours followed where we asked each other questions such as: “Do you think I’ll need this saw/ perfume/fishing rod/3 books/adjustable spanner/llama wool jacket?” The reply was usually “Do you think you’ll need it? Have you used it?” To which Chris usually responded “Well... I haven’t used it since Canada. But, you know, might come in handy somewhere.” We ended up being fairly ruthless and leaving the hostel staff with a nice pile of rejected items. The rest we managed to squash in or strap on somewhere.

It was time to leave! We decided to cycle from our hostel to the main bus station, and get a bus to our next destination - a town called Machachi, which is about 25 miles south of Quito. By doing this we hoped to avoid much of the traffic in and around Quito, and on the 4-lane highway out of the city. BUT...we still had to negotiate the busy streets of Quito. I felt quite apprehensive, mainly because I have no front panniers (bags) on my bike, so all the weight is at the back. Lifting it is almost impossible, and I had frightening images of myself doing wheelies while going up steep hills, and then falling over backwards while Chris cycled ahead obliviously. Luckily that wasn’t the case, and once I had got used to the crazy steering on my bike I was fine. We unknowingly picked a brilliant day to leave Quito (I wish I could say we planned it). Twice a month, all the streets in the city centre are closed to vehicles, and there is a cycling event. We picked one of these days! Even better – most cyclists were travelling the opposite way to us, so we had half to road almost to ourselves. There was a real mixture of people taking part in the cycling event, and some very unlikely characters too. The most memorable person was a guy who instead of having panniers on the back of his bike, had two huge speakers and a sound system! Very inventive I thought.

We managed to get a bus successfully, and paid only $1.50 for both of us and our bikes! We arrived in Machachi to find there was a huge food market going on, where we tried a lot of new food, most of it delicious. We also met a very giggly, chatty old couple (we didn’t understand anything they were saying) who we laughed with. After they had walked off the woman scampered back and stuffed $5 in Chris’s hand! He tried quite forcibly to give it back, but she was having none of it and just laughed as she trotted away. Everyone else was laughing too, and we felt quite bemused, but very grateful for her small and incomprehensible act of kindness.  After the visit to the market we headed back to our hotel which we realised as the night wore on was actually a brothel, but for $7 who's complaining!  The next morning we headed south towards Cotapaxi National Park.