Easter in Quito

Our journey begins in a travel lodge next to Heathrow aiport, when the sound of the most annoying alarm ever wakes us up at 5 am. The same alarm. From 3 separate phones. At the loudest voulme. We get up and gingerly make our way to heathrow airport, where we bord the flight without too much hastle (altough one of us did get spot searched on the way to America). After 10 hours and 2 meals we got to Miami, boarded another flight (and got another meal) and arrived in Quito at 9pm local time (3 am for us). A taxi got us to the hostel, where we unpacked and relaxed. Until the same alarm that had woke us up in the morning sounded again. It had been a long 24 hours.
Exhausted as we were, we would have had a sucessful night´s sleep had it not been for the Australian girl who was sharing our dorm, who traipsed in at three in the morning after a nearby Guns ´n Roses concert and loudly announced that there was an enormous rat crawling on the ceiling. Which there wasn´t. Having convinced her that there is no such thing as a giant spider rat we eventually went back to sleep and got the rest we needed.
The nextday was a general explorey getting the hang of things day. The Good Friday celebrations were the main highlight, lots of guys dressed in purple KKK style hoods carrying enormous wooden crosses with barbed wire wrapped around their chest whipping each other with stinging nettles. This went on for AGES, so tens of thousands of religious people later we got a smoothie then moseyed on back to the hostel, with a SLIGHT detour (or series of detours) given that we didn´t know the exact address of our hostel.
In the evening we met two American lasses who came to share our dorm and we went out for a night on the town, teaching them how to say tomatoes and vitamens properly. Other highlights were Ecuadorean cuisine, various beers and interesting cocktails, and a man dressed in a sombrero and a fake moustache who tried SIMULTANEOUSLY to sell us crack, pot, Mexican food and prostitutes. Tempted as we were to do an Angus Deayton, we politely declined and moved on. (Although there are still a few nights left in Quito...)

A trip to the slanty tree.

Hola, It was an admittedly grey thursday evening when I arrived at Alex's house the site for our field test of  the 2.8 Kilos which are to offer us shelter from the elements for many of the nights of our three and half months travelling the Andes. Quickly we decided on an appropriate location for the tent in the marshy hinterland of the Thorverton Brook and in the fading light we pitched up, followed by a hasty withdrawl into the warmth of Alex's kitchen to meet Max and eat the South American delicacy of Pizza for which we thank Karen. We toasted to our trip, and embarked into the darkness for a hot chocolate and a cup of tea on our expedition stove. Once inside the two man tent whic which I had decided was secretly a three man tent (and  indeed it is) greeted Alex's Dad, on his evening walk, and slept throughout the night, only being woken to hear of Max's dream of shark attack.

The Friday brought sunny and gusty weather, and we quickly made the most of it. Early on we set out for Alex's fabled "slanty tree" crossing several fields we encountered many funky looking sheep both living and... not. We wandered for several hours eventually reaching the small nothingness of Cadbury stopping only briefly with the assumption that there must be something better than the reindeer farm. Once back at Alex's house we stayed only briefly before embarking for a hearty meal at the Thorverton Arms, over which we discussed the value of the max's car - with max protesting at my low estimates. It was on the journey back that my point was proved, with some sort of mechanical failure occurring making the car undrivable. A short while later he left with his car on the back of a tow truck. This concludes our extensive field test, in which we can see that our equipment is more than prepared for the -8°C temperatures of the Bolivian Altiplano. Next stop Ecuador.