My South America Adventure Part 2: Interesting Towns, Cities, and Sights.

Hello Everyone.

Here is my final piece on my Ecuador adventure. Again, I post this to encourage you readers to go out and have an adventure. You do not even have to leave the country to have an adventure. There so many neat places to go and things to do right here in America!

Anyway, here we go...

One day, I had an opportunity to travel with my friends to the capital of Ecuador, Quito. Above is a picture of Quito as we were driving in.  We spent half a day there walking around a neat museum; including where the equator is and the latitude and longitude is 0.

Quito

Picture below, is me at the museum and where you can straddle the equator.  The museum is pretty cool! I did not take many pictures but some of the things we saw included an authentic shrunken head, some guinea pigs and we learned about how they are an important food source. Sort of like a lobster dinner is to Americans.

At the Equator.

A neat thing about the museum was that we had a guide and that there were different activities going on. I do not remember what activity I was doing pictured on the bottom right.

The big activity there at the museum is trying to balance an egg on an nail. I did not succeed in this but a friend in the group did :)  So we spent rest of our time at a mall as well as a few other shops. So, it was a fun day in Quito.

More of Quito

The next neat place I got to travel to was Pacto. This is where I saw the huge beetles I wrote about in my last blog. Here we got to hangout with some locals and hiked to a beautiful waterfall and spent a few hours swimming.

Cool Tree seen along trail to the waterfalls.

Waterfalls.

Swimming Area

This was a pretty awesome place to swim and explore at. I did see some fish too! A really cool thing I got to see there was some ancient writings left behind by the natives. I know the Incas were in the Ecuador Andes at one point, but I do not know if the writings are from them or not. I do believe these writings are at least 1600 years old!

Ancient Writing

So, as you can see, the Andes in Ecuador is an interesting place with lots of cool things to see and do,  Another place I got to see and explore was Otavalo. It was a neat place. We rode in a van there and spent a full weekend there. It was about a 3 hour drive. The scenery on the way was cool and I even got to see a few volcanoes!

Volcano

Otavalo is a unique place in that it is excellent place to shop. There a lot of places that sell leather- made items. Other places that make items from wood. Plus, locals bring out their own handmade goods to sell. It is neat,




Pictured below is not a live animal; it was carved out of wood by one of locals, who was kind enough to allow my group to get some photos.



Here are some pictures of just some areas of Otavalo, I did not get any photos of the marketplace sadly.

Statue in Otavalo

Out front of a restaurant 

So, those are sort of the highlight places I got to see and explore. Ecuador is a really neat country to explore, the Andes in particular.  Again, if you have any questions, feel free to ask.