Well, that’s all folks.

Today I would be heading home to San Francisco.

I mentioned in my previous post that I had planned on going to the airport with a couple who were also on my flight but of course when my alarm went off at 3am I hit snooze rather than actually getting up. Remarkably though I did get up shortly there after and wandered outside hoping that there would be a cab there waiting for me and lo and behold there was.

Once I got to the airport I saw the couple that was on the flight and we had a good laugh about me missing them. I guess I hadn’t told the guy which room I was staying in and he had looked around the hostel briefly looking for me but in the end just left. I was glad that they didn’t look too hard or wait for me as I would have felt pretty guilty about that.

I made it the airport with plenty of time and enjoyed my last S. American coffee before entering the boarding area.

The flight took off on time which was a relief and was pretty boring. I slept most of the time given how early I had woken up and when we touched down in Houston all I wanted was to be in San Francisco and not in the middle of nowhere, which is where I consider Houston to be.

My flight landed in San Francisco around 5pm and from there the lovely Bart train whisked me home. You’ve already seen this last video but it’s a pretty fitting end to my amazing trip.

Today is Thursday, June 3rd and as it is tomorrow I’m off to Panama for three weeks. If you can hold out you’ll be getting the same treatment I provided you here in “A La Orden” from my trip to Panama. Until then, thank you for following along and I hope you enjoyed my trip as much as I did.

Holy crap, my trip is ending! Today will be my last full day in S. America.

Like the previous day I didn’t really have much planned other than preparing to go home an done last three hour salsa lesson.

Once again the lesson was intense but I truly enjoyed and I think I gained a lot from it. Could I possibly try and dance salsa in a club? Well, that’s another story.

Honestly, after my salsa lesson I did nothing. I wandered Quito for about an hour so to get my last taste of S. America and that was it. I had made tentative plans to go to a salsa club that night and stay up until I had to leave for my flight home but whether or not that was actually going to happen I didn’t know.

So near the end…

As my trip wound down so did I. I hadn’t really planned on doing too much in Quito other than my salsa lessons at this point so I was pretty relaxed and content, not to mention kind of ready to come back home.

As mentioned in the video my salsa lesson was three hours long on the 4th. It pretty much kicked my ass. Afterwards I walked around the neighborhood of the salsa studio to see what was going on in gringolandia, as the neighborhood is called. I was pretty surprised to see a ton of western style restaurants and bars but clearly it has that name, gringolandia, for a reason. This is also where most of the hostels in Quito are. There were a few around The Secret Garden where I was staying but not as many as there were in this particular neighborhood. I got bored pretty quickly walking around here, there were just too many tourists and nothing really to see or do so I started to head back to the hostel where I was just planning on relaxing and reading.

As I was walking home I saw one the craziest things I’d seen on my trip yet. I was crossing a rather large street and looking down another when I saw a mass of people congregating and watching something or other. Well, I’m not one to shy away when something looks interesting and I’m incredibly glad I didn’t. When I approached the scene I saw a bunch of riot gear clad policemen hiding behind walls and a street riddled with the remnants of bricks and a fire in the middle of the street up a ways. Although I couldn’t quite figure out what or why this protest/disturbance was going on it didn’t stop me from taking a bunch of videos. It got pretty crazy when an armored truck rolled and pieces of brick started flying my way but it was incredibly exciting in a disgusting kind of way.

Protest videos are always fun, watch them…

I had had big plans for today but they didn’t quite work out, woe was me.

I set my alarm pretty early in the morning on the 3rd because I had made tentative plans with a girl who was staying at the hostel to go to a place called Mindo. The original plan was to get on an 8am bus, get to Mindo several hours later, do some badass zip lining and then get back on the bus to Quito at 4.

As it turns out, the information we had on the bus was all wrong. We walked to where we believed the bus would be leaving from only to find out that it was actually leaving from one of the terminals that was/is an hour outside of town. The trip to Mindo for the day was off. I had hoped that the following day it could work out but I was talked into skipping it later in the day.

Seeing as it was still early in the day when I got back to the hostel I was able to make some new plans for the day. I was actually eavesdropping a little bit and I heard a group of people talking about going to the Mitad Del Mundo or in English “middle of the world.” Other than being a giant tourist trap the Mitad Del Mundo is the geographic “middle of the world.” It is where the latitude is 00º00’00″. There are actually two spots that lay claim to the middle of the world although only one is correct.

On the first location, which is off by a couple hundred meters the french built a big monument marking the spot. Unfortunately for them, GPS wasn’t around at the time so they had no idea they were off a bit.

The French built monument

So close, but not close enough

The real “middle of the earth” is this way…

Freedom! Well, kind of. From here on out I would be traveling on my own, it would only be 4 more days but for the first time since I left the US I had no plans to meet up with anyone.

I woke up early on the 2nd with a full day of wandering around Quito in mind. It was Sunday so I was slightly concerned that nothing would be open and all the places I had in mind would be deadly quit or closed.

The first thing I wanted to do was climb the steeples of La Basilica which is a large neo-gothic church that was built in 1892. I had heard from several people that it was well worth doing for the views and that the actual climbing portion was pretty dodgy as the stairs or ladders are steep and small. When I first got to the church I walked up to it and was told by a woman working the door that I wasn’t allowed in because mass was going on at the moment. I was pretty disheartened because I wasn’t sure whether or not I would be in Quito in the following days at the time. I decided to walk around the perimeter of the church and lo and behold I discovered that there was a separate entrance to the spires and it was indeed open to the likes of me.

La Basilica

Overlooking the sanctuary

Quito and I

Stairs to first steeple

It turns out that climbing into the steeples was pretty dodgy but not as dodgy as I had expected or hoped. I did pass quite a few people who were too intimidated to climb, but not I. It was well worth it for the pictures and the views of Quito so I’m glad I took advantage of going to La Basilica.

More photos and videos… keep reading

Waking up on Saturday I was pretty stoked for two separate reasons. The first being that it was market day in Otavalo and the second being that we were headed out of Otavalo and on to Quito.

I had kind of talked about the Saturday market in several other posts but up until the actual day of the market I really didn’t know what to expect. The artisans and food portions of the market were very much the same as they are during the week, only on market day the stalls expand well beyond the central plazas where each typically is. The artisans portion is by and away the largest portions and nearly every street near the center of town is full of stands selling all kinds of things.

My favorite part of market though was the portion where they sell live animals. It actually wasn’t quite as big I had anticipated and there wasn’t as much livestock as I thought there would be but there were a ton of little furry creatures. There were puppies, kittens, chicks, bunnies, guinea pigs, piglets and all sorts of other small baby animals. Don’t fret, for the most part they were being sold as either pets or work animals and not to be eaten, except for the guinea pigs and possibly the bunnies. The most amazing thing of all was that you could buy a puppy for $3, yes that’s 3 American dollars. Ok, now I don’t know much about dogs but I’m pretty sure it’s hard to find a $3 puppy here in the states. They certainly weren’t pure bred or any of that jazz but I do know that they were cute.

By the time we’d had enough of the market it had just started to rain so our timing was pretty spot on. We had to go back to the hostel to grab our bags on our way to the bus terminal then we were off to Quito.

Quito… this way…

The night before Elena and I had looked into what our options for day trips out of Otavalo were. There were actually quite a few but in the end we decided that we wanted to go to Oyacachi and enjoy some hot springs.

We had a bit of hard time figuring out exactly how to get there but we finally figured it out. We would first have to take a bus from Otavalo to a town called Cayambe and from there hire a car to take us out to Oyacachi. We didn’t anticipate it to cost us as much as it did but we decided to go through with it anyways.

When we arrived in Cayambe we were a little confused as to what to do, but again we figured it out and jumped in this guys truck who would be taking us to Oyacachi. When we first got in the truck he told us there was an emergency at his house and we’d have to make a stop there before heading out, who were we to say “no?” It ended up being a flat tire or something of that nature, a real emergency if you will and we consequently ended up picking up the drivers two kids who would be coming along with us. It was going to be a two hour ride in the truck on some pretty rough roads so it really didn’t matter to us when we got there or who rode with us. On the way out of town there were a couple of lions in a cage on the side of the road which was pretty bizarre. It turned out that there was a circus in town and they were promoting it by having the lions for everyone to see. Clearly it was going to be a more exciting circus than the one I had been to in San Agustin.

The ride itself was incredibly scenic. We passed through a lot of onion farms and other farms as well as some waterfalls and canyons. I think I tried to take a nap but that wasn’t happening.

Maps, videos and pictures, oh my! Keep reading…

Elena, Devi and I spent a good portion of our day wandering around the market, making a few purchases and seeing what was available to buy. I ended up buying a few little things and tried on a couple of hats (I had been searching for one for sometime) but didn’t come away with one today.

The day doesn’t end there, keep going…

Pasto, I learned once we woke up and left the hotel, is nothing to write home about. Elena and I went out to get some food and have a quick look around before heading out for the border. In order to give us ample time and because we were somewhat unsure of what laid in front of us, we left fairly early in the day.

When I had been in Salento I had seen some pictures of a place near the border called Las Lajas and I was hoping to be able to stop there on my way to Ecuador. Because it looked as though we’d have enough time to make a detour, Elena and I decided that once we arrived in Ipiales, which is more or less the border between Colombia and Ecuador, we’d take a cab there and take some pictures.

From Pasto to Ipiales it was a two hour bus ride. The ride was nothing special but both Elena and I were excited to finally be heading to Ecuador. Once we arrived in Ipiales we jumped in a cab and headed off for Las Lajas, which is only 7km from the bus terminal. Driving through Ipiales was pretty creepy. It looked like a pretty run down place without much to offer. On the other hand, it was a functioning Colombian town that was unlike many of the others we’d seen since it’s economy was not focused on tourism. We didn’t make any stops although we contemplated stopping to eat some cuy or guniea pig since it’s a delicacy in Ipiales.

Elena and I both were a little nervous that we wouldn’t be able to find a cab to take us to the border once we were at Las Lajas so we asked our cab driver to wait for us. We were also uncomfortable with leaving our bags in the cab while we were visiting so we took out bags with us which turned out to make the little walk 100 times more difficult.

We met a Llama on the way. It was friendly with Elena not so much with me.

Llama likes Elena...

Llama does not like Aaron...

The day’s not over yet, keep reading…

As you may have just heard in the video, I started the 27th pretty early in the morning. The plan for the morning was to meet Elena in San Agustin and from there head on to Pasto. Elena’s bus arrived around 8 or so and I was there waiting for her. Unfortunately for her she would have to backtrack about 45 minutes as the first leg of our trip would be from San Agustin to another small town called Pitalito, where she had just come from.

From Pitalito, Elena and I boarded another bus that would take us South to Macao. This portion of the trip would take us 3 hours and was rather uneventful. We did get stopped by the military once for a search but by this point in the trip I wasn’t too surprised. It had really only happened once before but seeing as we were now in the South of Colombia it was more or less expected.

Keep reading about one of my favorite days of the trip…