Quito

The weather may have been atrocious as we travelled by taxi from another inconveniently located bus terminal to the centre of town but, despite the misted up windows, we could still see that Quito was likely to tickle our fancy.
We saw some of the old town more than once as, yet again, we'd landed a taxi driver who didn't know where we were heading.
This is a problem of seemingly epidemic proportions in the Americas and is at best wearisome to the traveller, at worst the precursor to expletive laden incredulity.

We finally pitched up at an hotel recommended by our guidebook, the Viena (sic) Internacional, described as "great value if you can look beyond the 70s decor".
Being male, I would have been oblivious to the chintzy wallpaper, parque flooring and OTT bathroom suite had it not been pointed out to me and with Kerry twirling around with her arms out by way of accentuating all the space the room afforded then it was alright by us.
Value and space over swank, every time.

The sun was out next day and so it was an opportunity to dig the flip flops out and get some air around our tootsies again. Ever since Bogota we'd been ensconced in trainers: whilst on the one hand safe and comforting, on the other a recipe for hot feet by day and an offensive cheesy pungency permeating the room by night.

Quito truly is a beautiful city. The second largest in Ecuador after Guayaquil and high in the Andes at around 9700 ft, it is chock full of churches, plazas and lovely, restored colonial buildings.
I'll say one thing for the spaniards of the  16th century: gold-crazed and fervently religious ethnic cleansers they may have been but they knew how to build a beautiful city.
Plaza Grande and Plaza Santo Domingo elicited soon 'oooh's and 'aaah's from us and a couple of the churches we went inside were so ornately beautiful that they stopped us in our tracks.

Inside one, "La Compania de Jesus", we stood and watched as people queued up to touch, pray to and rub a 2ft high effigy of Christ. One lady disappeared under the robes for a good minute or so and then spent far too long for decency's sake with her head near the effigy's groin. A young chap in his twenties kept rubbing the cloak and then his head and another lady nearly set herself alight as the effigy's presence made her oblivious to the myriad nearby candles.
It all made for fascinating viewing.

As lunchtime approached we made for perhaps the most iconic structure of the entire city, the Basilica del Voto Nacional. This is a wonderfully gothic, behemothic edifice which would perhaps be best viewed in a violent electrical storm, with bats flying around it or to the accompaniment of dramatic organ music.
For just $2 we climbed several flights of stairs before reaching the belfry. Standing on a creaking platform behind the tower clock faces was enough to put the willies up us but we then crossed a rickety 100m walkway above the nave, climbed a ladder and then another ladder outside the cathedral to reach another tower.
We were a good 100m up and the wind was blowing severely, from every possible angle!

After a hearty lunch of "mountain of rice with prawns, chicken and beef" we wandered north to one of the city's parks and sat awhile watching Quitenos about their business. Once we got too hot and the planks of the bench on which we were sat became too uncomfortable we walked back to our neck of the woods. On the way we saw a chap with a couple of geese and half a dozen chicks walking down the street, then crossing the road. We wondered if perhaps he was exercising one of those ancient rights that you hear of: 'People called Ted can drive a pregnant ox through the gentleman's smoking lounge of 34 Acacia Avenue on the 32nd of Octember each year', that sort of thing.

As we sat in the inner courtyard of our hotel that evening a quite glorious realisation engulfed me: Ecuador were playing Chile in a world cup qualifier in Quito tomorrow.
I'd long held this round of South American international football fixtures as 'possibilities' but with our itinerary being so loose I never really knew whether it would be viable or not.
As I sat there trying to work out how, where and if I could get tickets a group of chaps approached me and asked for the internet password.
I'd seen them earlier when they arrived, with Chilean addresses on their luggage and they were here for the match.

Ten minutes later we were the best of buddies: I'd shown them photos of me at the world cup in South Africa and told them how I'd admired the way that Ivan Zamorano belted out their national anthem at France 98. Hugo had explained how I could get my hands on tickets for tomorrow, had invited me to stay at his house and also insisted that I was now an honorary Chilean.

I woke early next day, excited about the probables but nervous about the possibles. What if we couldn't get tickets? To be so close and not get in would be agony.
Kerry and I agreed a price we'd be prepared to pay and then we travelled by taxi to the Estadio Olimpico Atahualpa to see about securing the holy grail.

En route we bantered with our driver:
"Do you like football señor?"
"Si, CLARO" (roughly translated as "abso-bleedin-lutely")
"I was at England v Ecuador at the world cup in Germany in 2006"
"Si? Oh wow, Beckham, free-kick, England very lucky".

It was actually a doddle to secure tickets. In full view of the police, touts were waving handfuls of them at every passing car so it was simply a choice of whose palm to grease. We turned down the pushy arse who wanted $40, the wizened crone whose price was $30 and eventually settled on the jovial lady who spoke at a pace that we could understand.
Holding those tickets was a fabulous feeling, although you never know for sure until you're in the ground.
In Germany in 2006 I bought a ticket from someone outside the ground whose name was printed on the front: Beatte Drumm.
I was certain I'd been diddled though I got in without any bother.

There were six hours until kick-off and what better way to spend it than on one of those open top tour buses that my beloved is so fond of? By a wonderful coincidence the starting point was outside the Atahualpa so, having bought tickets from the 1970s VW camper van which served as the ticket booth for Quito Bus, we were off.

We hopped off after a few minutes to have a look at El Mariscal, the travellers haunt of the city and home to swathes of bars, restaurants and hostels.
We immediately disliked it. It was litter strewn, characterless and felt like Faliraki or Lloret de Mar or some other "ere we go" type Euro-Hades.
We had a quick coffee and forced vast amounts of cake down our necks before making for the next tour bus to complete the route.

By the time we reached the stop I was in dire need of a "gypsy's kiss" but we were in a heavily built up area. We walked up and down a couple of streets to no avail but there was no way I could sit for 2 1/2 hours on a bus like this so I had to do something.
I went down a side road and found a patch of earth near a car park, praying that no one would come along for the thirty seconds or so I needed.
Around ten seconds in I heard footsteps, voices after fifteen and with a good ten seconds still to go I saw the surprised faces of two men and a woman.
It was a tricky situation but stopping wasn't really an option. I elected to simply turn my back and when finished I offered them an "I'm guilty" show of my palm and a sheepish look, only then discerning that one of the guys was wearing some sort of uniform.
I was glad to get on that tour bus and mingle with the other gringos, just in case my witness had a thing about indecent exposure.

On the bus I took the last empty seat and got talking to my neighbour. Not only was he Chilean and here for the footy but he was the 32 year old official attorney to the Chilean national football team. He told me he'd secured his dream job, travelling with the team to all matches, watching from executive boxes and dealing with any legal issues the players or staff ever had.
I had to admit it sounded perfect, if you could lose that 'dealing with any legal issues' bit.

And so to the match. Though only yesterday I was declared an honorary Chilean I decided to keep this under wraps given that we were firmly in the home end.
We were directed to our area of concrete seating by a rifle toting soldier and enjoyed the pre-match banter with our neighbours, one of whom was wearing a Chelsea hat. We couldn't quite fathom why there only seemed to be space for one of us but I checked the painted on seat numbers a couple of times, yep, 35 & 36, someone has just hoochie-coochied along a bit too far, it's nothing to worry about.

The teams took to the field, lined up and the ref put the whistle to his lips.
At that precise moment a young couple came and stood in our space and the upshot of our positional altercation and mutual ticket waving was that not only were we in the wrong seats but we were two rows out too.
It wasn't an easy passage, thirty odd seats to the left and two rows up and I'm sure everyone I stood on was as vexed as I would have been in their position.
We never did find our true seats, we saw a bit of a gap and I nudged the old timer to his right to make room for us. As the game had started he didn't seem to mind.

The game was a belter. Chile started well but then Ecuador came into it, hitting the bar and going close a couple of times to get the crowd going.
A rare Chilean attack down the right was spectacularly and quite hilariously thumped into his own net with aplomb by Juan Carlos Paredes to stun the home crowd but Ecuador weren't behind for long. Ex Manchester City flop Felipe Caicedo scored a pearler before half time and then added another after his much delayed penalty had been saved in the 54th minute.
Chile were down to ten men as a result of the penalty and were never really in it from then on. Alexis Sanchez showed flashes of brilliance but a third Ecuadorian goal seemed inevitable, particularly after Chile lost another man.
3-1 then, a fantastic game, a happy crowd and the two gringos courteously spoken to at length by the young lads in front, in English, in between their boinging up and down and gesticulating.
Marvellous stuff.

One of the things we want to do on this trip is to walk the Inca trail from Cuzco to Machu Picchu in Peru. We've begun looking into this and one aspect we have to deal with is the fact we'll be yomping for four days at altitudes of up to 12000ft. As climbing two steps in Bogota (8500ft) and Quito (9700ft) has rendered us doubled up and wheezing like a 60 a day Capstan man we are a tad nervous about this undertaking but realised that Quito was a perfect place to do a recce.

The forward thinking authorities have invested millions of dollars in a cable car from the city up to a height of about 12500ft and from there, if one is so inclined, you may trek for six hours up to the top of a peak at a height of around 15000ft.
We decided to go up in the cable car and just have a little walk around but once we were there we couldn't resist a stab at the full trek. Unfortunately, we weren't really equipped for it and had to concede, at 14500ft, that the additional hour required to make the top wasn't going to be possible without a coat, hat and more than one meat pattie and a melted chocolate bar.
Whilst it was pretty hard work it has given us the confidence to tackle the Inca trail so watch this space for news on that.

On the long walk back to the cable car we stopped at a thatched shack where ruddy faced mountain people were cooking up all sorts on rustic barbeques and selling drinks.
We invested a dollar in an alleged elixir to combat altitude sickness, not something we were particularly suffering from although we both did have a mild headache.
The drink was boiling hot, alcoholic and pee coloured; not entirely unpleasant to taste and certainly nice to hold in your hands in the cold mountain air.
Kerry had just a couple of sips and I necked the rest, only stopping when the dregs became a little off putting.

There were two queues to take the cable car back down: express and regular. As the proud holders of express tickets we expected to be whisked down in a trice but for various reasons our queue was slower than the regular and there was no control exerted by the disinterested operative.
My head had begun to pound as a result of the elixir and I was in no mood to hang about. When we were finally shown to our cable car the young lady supposedly managing the queues was left in no doubt what I thought about things and the rest of that evening was spent feeling like I'd had a ten pinter the day before.
We also both got perished to the bone and luxuriated long in the boiling shower in our room.
We learnt some valuable lessons though (mainly about not drinking urine-like, headache inducing drinks served from a vat) so it was a very worthwhile exercise.

Our final day in Quito was spent at Mitad del Mundo or Middle of the World.
22km north of Quito lies the equator and at the very spot where clever clogs scientist Charles-Marie De La Condamine determined this in 1736 now sits a rather tacky visitor centre.
Tacky or not, the equator is the equator so we took the obligatory photographs of us in front of the 0* latitude signs and ticked it off as another thing done.
Whilst here we watched a guitar/panpipe band play and sing and a dance troupe perform and they were great.

We had a bit of a disaster on the bus home as it inexplicably turned back north about two miles out of town, forcing us to disembark on a dual carriageway and walk the rest of the way. It would take more than that to taint our memories of Quito though.

As we collected our bags from the Viena Internacional and prepared for the overnight bus to Puerto Lopez on the Pacific coast we bumped into Hugo in reception, himself checking out and preparing to fly back to Santiago for Tuesday's match against the Argies.
He reiterated his desire for us to stay with him when we get to Chile, though whether we can spare the fortnight he is anticipating our being there remains to be seen.

We've had a pretty hectic time of it lately. Long bus journeys, city walks, altitude and full-on days.
What we would do now if we were still in the Caribbean would be to make for a nearby paradise, blow up the airbeds and top the old tan up.
Well, we're near the equator, we're pretty near to the sea, Puerto Lopez is going to be boiling - right?