Hotel on jtalbot/blog

Quilotoa

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 22:30:00 -0600

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.

Arriving in Quito

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 22:30:00 -0600

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.

Amman, Jordan

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 22:30:00 -0700

Another Sweet Marriott Suite

Driving into Amman was an interesting experience. It’s a big city. It’s a modern city with skyscrapers. All the buildings are white and/or glass. We wound around the city until we arrived at the Marriott Amman. It’s a very nice hotel, but there are very few properties that can compare favorably to where we stayed last night (the Al Manara in Aqaba). That was really something. The staff here in Amman were extremely generous. Not only did they upgrade us to a suite, but they also provided a gift card to eat free at one of the on-site restaurants. We went to the sports bar and had a reall good hamburger before heading off to bed.

Chichicastenango

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 18:30:00 -0600

Twice a week the main square and surrounding streets of Chichicastenango are transformed into the largest open air market in Central America. People come from miles around to buy and sell goods. Some are grown, some are reared, and many are hand-made. When we have visited in years past, there have been hundreds to thousands of tourists combing the market for bargains, but this year was very different.

We have always wanted to stay at Hotel Santo Tomas, but it was always completely full, forcing us to stay in some of the other hotels in town. This year we had no trouble booking 2 large rooms. And when we checked in, we found out we were the only guests in the entire hotel. They told us if we wanted to use hot water to call them and they would turn on the boiler for us. They were not running it because the hotel was empty. That probably meant the other hotels in town were also empty. And that probably meant there were no tourists in town for the market.