Off to save the Planet

Tomorrow (Tues) just before 6am we´ll be setting off to WORK in a cloud forest reservation for 2 and a half weeks. Over 90% of the cloud forest has been destroyed and it´s also the natural habitat for the brown headed spider monkey which is under threat of extinction with only around 250 left in the world. Foolishly they have called in Mr Incompetent for help.

Here is their website www.primenet.org.uk (professor is from Sussex Uni hence the ".org.uk") and www.reserveloscedros.org

It´s a 4 hour bus journey and then a 4 hour trek through the forest to the reservation so this may be the last entry for a few weeks as the internet connection is a tad tempremental we´re told.






Quick match report from Weds for Si, the standard was very good. There was a double nutmeg, olés from the home fans for every pass at 6-1, a defender bringing down a corner on his chest in the 6 yard box, a shot from 5 yards outside a player´s own area that had the goalie back peddling but it went OVER the bar, and of course the police escort at half time for the ref. They had riot shields to all sides and above his head. It was at the far end of the ground from me, the away fans were a bit annoyed as they´d had a player sent off for an off the ball incident (like Arsene I didn´t see it).

Back soon

Gav and Bec

Football and Shopping

So Gav sneaked out of school early on Wedneday to go and watch a random football match. He said it was a "6-1 thriller" the ref had to be escorted off by riot police at the end of the game. I think he's got it out of his system now so we can get on with the rest of our trip without football getting in the way. (Editor's note: NO WAY)

We finished school on friday. We had a really strict teacher this week( Mercedes), she gave us about 40 words a day to learn then gave us a vocab test each morning, then on Friday she said we'd have a massive vocab test of all the words we'd supposedly learned. We were a bit disapointed as we'd thought it would be like the old days when you brought games in on the last day of term. So there we were having our jumbo vocab test and enduring even more new spanish grammar when Mercedes whips out the scrabble. Gav's eyes lit up.

Gav met his match, Mercedes didn't concede an inch, she was scanning (our) dictionary for words. For thoss of you who haven't had the pleasure of playing scrabble with gav, he is a master, he's memorised the scrable handbook and knows an infinate number of high scoring 2 letter words that he likes to jam between other words so that he scores for 10 words at a time. "pi" and "id" are 2 of his favorites and sadly they both work in spanish too. Mercedes was not happy, especially when he came up with "Lavese" (a reflexive verb that joined onto another to make a plural) . Mercedes was the eventual winner, Gav still claims that this was only because he didn't have any vowels, nothing to do with the fact that he only knows a couple of hundred words.

We left the family on Saturday morning and moved into a hotel. It's a bit like Fawlty Towers. We reserved a room on wednesday. We checked in and went up to the room we'd booked. It had someone elses stuff in it, so we went back to reception and they gave us a new room so we went up and started to un pack, when a chamber maid came up and said someone else had booked that room so we'd have to move (oblivious to the fact that we'd booked a room too). Ecuadorian efficiency.

We went on a trip to Otavalo on Saturday. It's famous for having one of the best indidgenous markets in South America. It's been going since before the Incas, the indigenous people from the Jungle come up to the Mountains to trade with the indigenous groups from the highlands. Of course nowadays there are a lot of tourists too. Gav wasn't that keen to go. But he wanted to get his mum something for her birthday so he agreed to come. It was amazing, we ended up getting Christmas presents for all our family. We had to go home early just to stop ourselves buying more stuff. Fingers crossed that the Ecuadorian postal system is up to the jub of sending it to the UK.

The pictures don't really do it justice, it was massive, imagine Northwich with market stalls down the centre of every single street. About half the stalls were aimed at tourists the rest were for the Ecuadorians. The majority of the Ecuadorians there were wearing traditional dress. It was an impressive sight.

Trekking in the Andes

Bec seems to be on strike so it´s me again. We´ve been out and about a lot more this week. We visited the old town´s musea, had magnificent views of the city from the Basilica (2nd to last pic), witnessed a fruit market during the Ecquador v Brazil football match, went to a Quito football derby and climbed a 5800m mountain yesterday. Plus, we carried on with our Spanish classes and so now we´re in our final (4th) week. The Spanish classes have so far enabled me to buy a new mobile (that won´t receive texts from UK), have a haircut and at long, long last direct taxis back to the apartment successfully.

The derby was great. A 6,000 crowd in a 25,000 capacity stadium, fireworks, an ex-premiership footballer, flares, weird songs and a 1-0 away win. The main reason for the low crowd, I suspect, was the torrential rain before, during and after the match with no cover. During the 2nd half Bec went to stand with our classmates around the half way line while I stood near the hardcore home supporters who began to aim fireworks at the oppositon´s goalie when they went one nil down. 10 mins before the end of the match about 30 of them lit newspapers, like torches, and waved them wildly in the air as they chanted. We were drenched but it was still a great experience and my first South American footie match. We´re thinking of going again on Weds.

We´ve felt a bit frustrated being at school and stuck in Quito with the mountains, jungle and beaches out of reach with just the afternoons free so we were looking forward to trekking Cotopaxi, Ecquador´s 2nd highest mountain at almost 5900m (last pic). The first part of the trip to the national park is by train and you can sit on top of the roof for a better view (pic 5), which we did. I don´t know who had the better view of the traffic on the busy dual carriage way that we crossed, us or the driver, still he judged it well and perhaps there´s no need for level crossings in the UK either!

We "only" trekked from 4500m to 4800m but, believe me, that was hard work. I thought we´d be OK having spent the season in Courchevel (France) and also living here for 3 weeks at nearly 3000m but I found it really tough. Courchevel´s highest peak is Saulire at 2800m so that gives you some idea of the height we were walking when it´s almost double that of the peak of a ski resort in the French Alps. We started trekking just below the snow line but crossed it quite soon and although some of our party would have preferred a clear day for better views we loved being amongst the snowflakes again. Visibility was difficult but Bec´s dayglow yellow waterproofs helped us! As you can see from the photo I was quite pleased to have reached the refuge and not just because of the thought of cheese sandwiches for lunch (pic 3).

After our well deserved break we set out again to see the glacier (1st pic) that´s melting and causing avalanches quite regularly according to our 2 guides. Then it was back down to 4500m to mountain bike in the snow, dirt and mud down to the laguna (2nd pic is when we´d finished). We had a brilliant but exhausting day and as an added bonus I didn´t have any mishaps for once.

PS If Nige reads this at Maureen´s then hello to everyone in New York!

The Equator

We managed to leave Quiito city centre for once and went to visit the equator yesteday. It was our first out of town trip in South America on public transport and I must admit I was a bit nostalgic for the spittle of Laos!

After we changed buses nearly everyone got off at one place so we decided we must be there (the whopping great monument was a bit of a giveaway too) but I was determined not to miss our stop. Falling asleep on the train and ending up at Stansted Airport is one thing, arriving in the wrong hemisphere would have been shocking, even for me.

Bec is standing either side of the fake equator, a French explorer got his sums wrong and said it was here, so they built the thing you see, then GPS was invented and they realised the real equator was in fact 240m to the north. Bruno, any comments?

So, you leave one place go 50m along the road and enter another outdoor museum. Here you are shown various Jonny Ball type tricks: less gravitational pull on equator so easier to pull another person´s arms apart, water flowing in different directions just 1 metre apart and a 2 faced sun dial. No that doesn´t mean that if it doesn´t like you it gives you the wrong time.

The rest of the photos are refusing to upload, so that´s it for now. Funny though isn´t it that I never felt the urge to take any pics on Meridian Way in Enfield or at Greenwich, when we lived round the corner, of longitude 0` 0`0".

We´re trying to sort out a trip to the jungle and a stay in Galapogos at the moment for when we finish school so that the Spanish we learn here can slip from our minds while we talk to other English speaking tourists!

Quito at night

Since the Ketchup incident we've been a bit worried about going out with our valuables, so we've not taken any photos of the city. The school organised a trip to the old town last night so we went on that and took the camera (safety in numbers).

The old town is lovely, all Spanish colonial style buildings (mainly cathederals), that they illuminate at night. The guide spoke spanish and we think we understood most of what she said. Mostly stuff about the Spanish being cruel to the indians.

On the way back we stopped off to try some street food. We had a hot sweetcorn milkshake (not great) and a fried cheese and sugar pasty, strange, but actually quite nice.

On the whole the food here has been very good. Elena, our host is a good cook. They have a lot of soup and chicken and rice. Beans seem to come in more varieties than either of us imagained, (gav is doing a lot of "reading" in the ensuite). At dinner, we have freshly made fruit juice, it's a different fruit combo every night, most of the fruits don't even have an english name. The strangest thing is that they serve fried sweet bananas as a veg.

After our trip last night a few of us went to a bar for some cocktails (65p!) I went for a mojito but gav had an Ecose, beer and whiskey - eugh. It was nice to be out and about and feel the security of a group, especially as some of them could actually speak Spanish.

Birthday Boy

Gav is 36 today. Here he is wearing the new united top his mum and dad bought him. I let him wear it to school as a special treat.

So far he's having a good day. I made him breakfast. During morning break at school they brought out a huge cake with a candle, and the whole school sang "Happy Birthday" in Spanish.

The tradition in Ecuador is to bite a chunk out of the cake instead of cutting it. Gav obliged and got his face shoved into the gateau. Someone at the school took photos so we'll try to get them on the blog.

Gav gets to choose where we're going for lunch today so it will probably be cheese sandwiches in our local cafe. We're staying in tonight as we've got an exam at 8.30 tomorrow morning. But we're going out for a posh meal tomorrow. We tried to book a table yesterday, but (we think) the restaurant said they didn´t open in the evenings, despite a huge sign saying they were open 18.30-22.30. Either they didn't like the look of us in our unironed clothes, or our spanish is worse than we thought.