On the Road!

So we took a taxi back to the airport in Quito to pick up our rental car. I’m really glad we didn’t pick it up right when we arrived. Navigating the traffic and narrow streets ourselves would not have been a good way to start our trip. After a very lengthy process of paperwork, all made more challenging by the No English factor, a Hertz employee put our bags in a cute little compact car and drove us from the terminal to the parking lot. We were thinking, “Well, it’s small but it will do”. When we got to the parking lot we thought we were just dropping him off, but he promptly took our bags out and set them next to a toy car. Hmmm…He started pointing out each nick and scratch, and by the time he showed us where the toy spare tire was located I caught on that THIS was our car for the next month. Shawn and Baylie kept asking how much it would cost for an actual real car, but I was too worn out from the marathon of paperwork I had just gone through to start over. Anyway, we are now tootling around Ecuador in a wind-up toy, which on the plus side is perfectly suited for all the narrow streets!

We started our journey south and managed to skirt around downtown Quito. The highway here is very new and the road signs are good, but we still managed to get lost almost every time we hit a stupid round-about. You enter this circle that has about five ways to spit you out and before you know it you are going the wrong direction. We did finally manage to make it to Banos, but we had very vague directions to the place I had booked for us to stay. Basically all we knew was that it was “8 km de Banos”. We tried to ask in town, but no luck. With some random driving on a combination of cobblestone, mud, and gravel “roads” we started seeing signs to Las Orquideas – success! It was a journey that paid off with the most serene and lovely place. Our room has stone walls, like a cave, and big windows that look out over a valley where clouds drift by just below us. It’s cool, wet, and very green. Tomorrow we go in search of La Ruta de las Cascadas to see the surrounding waterfalls.