Ecuador

We drove from Quito to Baños by way of Quilotoa today. When the plan was originally pitched, I thought Quilotoa was (mostly) “on the way” to Baños. When you’re zoomed out far enough on Google Maps, the detour from Latacunga to Quilotoa doesn’t look like a big deal, but it’s a narrow, super windy road through the high mountains with a lot of steep ups and downs. It added an extra 3 hours to the drive (plus the amount of time we spent in Quilotoa). We wound up spending most of the day driving with a pretty good hike to break things up. It was just about perfect. ...

At over 19,300 feet, Cotopaxi is very high. It’s the second highest peak in Ecuador (after Chimborazo). It is the third highest active volcano on the planet. Because of its proximity to the equator and the equatorial bulge caused by the spin of the earth, its peak is nearly 6,000 feet further from the center of the Earth than than the center of the earth is from the highest point on Mount Everest. ...

We skipped breakfast today because we were headed out to an all-day walking food tour of Quito. Breakfast is included with our room, and it’s probably a nice spread, but we decided to get a little extra sleep this morning. We ate late last night and really overdid it and we will probably be eating early and often on the food tour this morning, so eating breakfast would have been a mistake. Instead, we just met in the lobby of the hotel and then grabbed an Uber to take us to the center of the old town where we would start our walking tour of the city. ...

This is going to be an interesting trip. We bought our airplane tickets just two days ago. We drove home late Monday evening after camping in Canyonlands. Wednesday around noon Brett said he found cheap tickets to Quito this week and we had 2 hours to decide if we were going. We have talked about visiting Ecuador for years. Our only choice was to say yes. So we bought tickets Wednesday afternoon to fly out at the crack of dawn Friday morning. We drove to Salt Lake Thursday after work and started planning the trip that night. We figured out a good outline of what we wanted to do and see, booked the first few hotels and activities, and went to bed sometime after midnight. About 4 hours later we were driving to the airport. I think that’s a record turnaround for us. ...