So where've you been? 40 Ecuador

... Okay. After six weeks of studying in smoggy Quito, I'm well up on all things ecuatorian. Including the great weird breads, fruits and juices, and the sodding ever present rice and beans.

The pollution was so bad I ended up leaving Quito every single weekend, in search of air that doesn't make you cough like a seventy year smoker of a Monday. So I visited:

• Baños (mountain biked downhill through the Andes - super pretty. Super tiring.)
  
• Latacunga (mad meat-laden Mamá Negra fiesta full of free booze, and virgins held aloft atop of split pigs and hamsters or what have you. Locals spit spirits all over you to 'cleanse' you. We had to leave early, cos the whole town was too pissed ...)
  
• Tungurahua (I didn't actually realise my government was warning people not to go visit extremely active volcanoes till a week after, okay?),
  
• roof rode the train from Riobamba to Alausí (didn't have a bloody choice, you can ride roof or cattle car. I spent the whole six hours clinging to a railing and whimpering with my mp3 player turned up high as possible)
  
• Imbabura province, where I climbed waterfalls with my eyes shut, and yelling 'puta madre' at my teachers,
  
• Markets in Otovalo (über touristy), Imbabura, and Saquisili, in Ambato (more authentic, though I hate the word. Nearly came home with a cow. $30. A snip)
  
• Pululahua Volcano, near Quito (am Ecuadorian family I'd got chatting to invited me to a reunion there, and I had two singular experiences: one was sitting in a 38 degree jacuzzi drinking and talking shit in spanish (I speak PERFECT spanish when I'm drunk) while a thick freezing fog rolled in around us down the crater rim; the other was overcoming my terror of horses to learn to ride. And actually finding that I'm a natural, I'm really GOOD on a horse. Hurrah!). They're starting up a hostel for mountain climbers, mountain bikers, and horse riders on the floor of the volcano (I was the 7th person ever to go there), for just $8 a night, and all the alfalfa farming you can manage to help out with ... but haven't actually made their web page googlable, for some unknown reason. If ever you're in Ecuador and want an escape route that's the opposite of Quito's smoggy citified blankness, go here.
  
• Mitad del Mundo, near Quito, or the big red touristy painted line that marks zero degrees (more or less, I think they got the geography a little wrong). Memorable because I got SO lost on the way, got off a bus early, and ended up hitching down the motorway to the place. (When the guys who offered me a lift offered me beer and weed, and detoured to their house, I got increasingly antsy, me and my then eight words of spanish. (They proffered the opinion that I seemed awful 'serious'. Scared of near death experiences was probably nearer the mark.) But they were - incredibly - decent folk, and got me where I wanted to go.)
  
• Galapágos. Incredible place. Only Tibet compares for weirdness.

  

  I went there to dive, primarily - diving in Galápagos is difficult, and is all about the big pelagics (read: sharks), so you either have the best dive of your life, or the emptiest. But the real charm of the Galápagos is the animal world above water - how unafraid they are of humans. Pelicans swoop overhead like something out of Jurassic Park, and swimming marine iguanas spit at you in a desultory fashion, as turtles, birds, sealions, the lot, swim up, sniff you, swim off without much interest. Mockingbirds follow you around, trying to work out what you are. I can see what science fiction writers mean when they say just a tiny change can twist the world into new shapes.

  
• Guayaquil and Cuenca: Big city, then pretty city. Wish I'd gone to study in neat, traditional, colonial looking Cuenca weeks earlier, then I wouldn't have had two weeks of the worst spanish teacher ever (La Brujita) in Quito. (They've asked me to give feedback on accommodation and teaching there. I don't particularly want to get anyone sacked .... but I don't need to lie either. When I listen to north americans and europeans these days, I'm struck by how happy they are to complain about everything and anything, and I don't particularly want to join that gang. What would you say? How bad would you let the review get?)