From the middle ...to the end?

The day trip to the equator line and ¨el mittad del mundo¨ (the middle of the world) marks a geographical extreme and hopefully makes our trip stretch from ¨el mittad del mundo¨ to el fin del mundo¨ (the end of the world) at the bottom of South America.

Renee visiting both hemispheres at one time.

(well, according to the measurements made in the 1700s!... With the instruments they had and being only 2-300ms out, I´ll give it to them.)

The view east along the equator line from the top of the monument.

Amazingly enough, the original surveyors from spain and france (and helped by locals) were only a few hundred meters out despite only using the stars and triangulation!

(There is also a ¨real location¨museum where they also do dodgy experiments with drain water circling around each way when you pull the plug (and straight down ¨on¨the ecuator) ... despite the bowls being only 20ms apart! Hah! Yeah right!

A rose amongst thorns! :D

Some typical cacti in between the ¨mittad del mundo¨ theme park where the original cartographers measured the equator to be ...and a smaller newer museum that claims to be on the ¨true¨ location of the ecuator.

Mr fix-it at your service.

The water heater at our Quito host families house died and I dont think they have 24h repair guys here. It was fix it myself or face the weekend of cold showers!

All I had was two flathead screwdrivers (despite everything being phillips heads) electrical tape and a bread tie. And for all you synics out there.... I got it working again despite never seeing one before! (blocked gas jets and a sticky solenoid... the heater had problems too.)

¨Choclo y queso¨ (corn and cheese). Renees scrummy lunch at the middle of the world.
One of the few vegetarian dishes you can get here in carnivore-land when not in the city. As you can see.... this is one of the more dodgy interpretations of it!
(same price as my home made hamburger, chips & coke combo mind you! ... a whole $1.50!) You can get awesome 3 course set lunches from between $1.50 and $2.50 with a fresh juice or beer.

There is a drawback to learning spanish. At the moment I (Tim) have found myself thinking in ¨spanglish¨ which even confuses myself sometimes and lately I have found I have been speaking both spanish AND english poorly.

But thats only half the story. Renee has had more interesting language issues lately.

Her spanish is good enough that she has been having indepth girly talks with our ¨host mami¨. In one discussion, it was mentioned that the son was currently in his first sexual relationship and she didnt really like it since he still lives at home. The house is quite open and many of the rooms dont have walls all the way to the ceiling. Renee decided to ask ¨...can you hear them?¨

Unfortunately for Renee, in spanish, the ending of a word often changes who the action or reference is directed too. Our host mums eyes grew the size of saucers and with a very puzzled look on her face, it didnt take Renee too long to realise she had formed the words... ¨...can you hear us?¨ !!!

Luckily the misunderstanding was easily corrected and everyone got a good laugh out of it.

The fantastic scene of low level clouds swallowing huge mountains isnt uncommon here.

We are taking a break from spanish classes this week and heading into the amazon jungle to wrestle caiman (alligators/crocodiles) and fend off pirahnas. (Its OK, there are no Anacondas in these parts Sue!)

Hopefully we will be back to continue this blog in a week or two!

Un poquito in Quito

We have settled in and really like our temporary home here in Quito, Ecuador.

We were picked up from the airport by the host family that we are staying with (much to our host mothers amazement there were two of us and we weren´t from Belgium like she was told by the spanish school...)

The schools have told her just as innaccurate information about other students. Currently there is another student staying with us that was meant to be Italian. Turns out he is a citizen in the US originaly from Pakistan! When we first arrived there was a two students from switzerland and one couple from france and Germany. Everyone has been great fun to meet and chat with.... mostly practicing our spanish with each other so its even better.

Since we arrived on the Saturday night, we had a free day to explore some of Quito before we started classes on the Monday. We walked from "gringo central" with all the back packer places, travel agents and international restaurants to the "old town" with the original style buildings plus lots of large, intricately constructed and decorated catholic churches.

The most impressive was the Basillica with tall gothic towers (pictured above) that you can climb. The levels and stairs just keep going and going and going (plus for extra fun there is a rickety plank to walk across, through the roof cavity to get to the tower on the other side).

Spanish school has been great with our learning rate rapidly accelerated (which I guess is to be expected since we have gone from 4 hours a week to 4 hours a day!) We both like our teachers and have lots of funny, interesting and suprisingly in depth conversations all in spanish! (we can both understand more than we can speak, but we get by with a few extra hand guestures and pictionary skills. Tim using pictionary methods more so than Renee)

The school organises activities during the nights or weekends a number of which we have joined in on, including cooking classes, a trip to Pasochoa (an extinct volcano in a national park) and to Renees excitement, salsa classes.

This is a few shots from us climbing up the densely vegetated volcano "Pasachoa" ...well half way up... it was hard work in places and it apparently takes 2 days to go to the peak and return (A weekend day trip arranged by the school.)

Renee has already had her first interesting translation "incident". I needed a shower after our days outing and our host mother Silvia was almost ready to serve dinner. She asked Renee if we were ready. Due to the subtlety of reflexive verbs in Spanish, instead of telling Silvia "Tim wants to have a shower first"... she instead said "Tim wants to shower you first". Luckily that resulted in laughter... rather than us being thrown out on the street! :)

Since our classes have been in the afternoon, one fine morning we decided to catch the "TeleferiQo" cable car up the closest volcano to Quito called "Pinchincha". At an impressive 4100m above sea level, its the highest we have been (no snow though... it wasnt really even cold!) There are warnings all over it about altitude sickness and children under 1, pregnant women and people who have only just flown into Quito (and havent yet aclimitised to its 2600m altitude) arent recommended to go up it.

This sign says ¨Caution - 4100m altitude. Go Slow, Dont run¨

What?? ... run down?

We have made friends with a few little girls that sell chewing gum on the streets (one step up from begging. They say its school holidays but how do you tell if their parents let them go?) and despite all the requests from little boys with brushes and boot polish (black and tan only) we have not had our shoes cleaned yet (Our shoes are white and green so I dont know what they want to do!)

Bus rates here are great value and easy to calculate - $1 per hour.
The town is 8 hours away? .. .OK thats $8 thanks.
Its a set 25c for the metro busses that go along colour coded routes, similar to metro railway and for smaller trips to nearby citites it seems to be 1c per minute. The 45 minute ride to Pasachoa was 45c!

Chilly in Chile

¡Hola Amigos!

In an attempt to alleviate our jetlag from 40 hours of travel on our way to Ecuador, we decided to have three days stop over for rest and relaxation in Santiago, Chile. Besides a lot of sleeping, we hired some snow gear and headed up the very impressive Andes mountains, just an hour from Santiago.

It was suprisingly warm in the snow. Especially for us since we kept falling off the T-bar towing things they use to get back up the hills whilst still on skis/snowboards. That meant we had to carry our boards back up the slopes on foot while everyone else cruised past us on the ski lifts!

It was heaps of fun and amazingly I (Tim) could keep balance enough to make it half way down the mountain! Renee took to it like a pro and with another day or so would have been doing flips over jumps I reckon.

Although impressed that we could manage to stay up for a reasonble time, our self pride was instantly crushed when all these little kids went flying by. (one little tacker was only 4 years old, about 2 foot high, and was learning to do jumps!) Very cute, impressive and jealousy evoking at the same time!

Hot Snowboarding chica (after carving up las montañas)

The first ski field we went to - Valle Nevado in the Andes.

(Expensive and international touristy, but excellent facilities)

View back towards Santiago and the sea from Valle Nevado

The view out the window of the hostel.

The same hostel window view (zoomed in) of Santiago emerging from the clouds and the sea of clouds behind it. (A pilots nightmare with mountains hiding and popping out all over the place!)

One cool dude. (because he kept falling over in the snow)

Thats enough for only 3 days.

Off to Quito, Ecuador next for spanish school and many more cool adventures!

Hasta luego,

Tim and Renee