Arriving in Ecuador was one of the most exciting times in my life because I was actually going to the magical continent of South America. I was supposed to land in Quito but because of cloud cover we had to land in Guyaquil, which is actually the biggest city in Ecuador. We all got on a bus to a really nice hotel. I got my own room with two beds, cable TV and a nice bathroom. I was totally stoked to be staying in a nice place like that for free, but the other people in the plane were mad because they just wanted to go on with their short vacations. There were a couple of American women who were doing a tour of the Galapagos islands, and an English engineer who was there on business helping design bridges. I went to the hotel gym on the roof and saw another American guy from the flight who shared the same excited sentiments as myself. We lifted weights for a little bit and then I went to my roof and watched TV until late. The next morning we had a nice buffet breakfast in the posh dining hall. I saw my pilot who happened to be the indian cyclist who gave me directions to the airport in Panama. That was pretty wild. Then we boarded and flew to Quito.

I ended up staying in Quito for three weeks. Quito is one of the coolest places to visit because it has a lot of unique characteristics. It is really high at 2850 meters and only 22 kilometers from the equator, so it has perfect year round weather. There are 4300m mountains just to the west of the city that are green all the way to the top. Quito is the city with the most market difference between the historical center and the commercial center. I usually get a hotel in the historic part of town, but I heard that the hotel ''center of the world'' in the commercial center was a fun place to go. The guy who ran the place, a gay French Canadian dude, did the brilliant thing to turn the place into a big ''do it yourself'' travelers resource center, and party place all packed into one. I think every city should have a place like this. He had photos and descriptions of all of the cool places to visit pinned up all over the walls, and a lot of big rooms filled with bunk beds. And had a kitchen that we could all use and a patio in the back. On Fridays he would fill up a glass tub with Cuba libres (Rum and Coke) and have competitions on who could identify travelers photos. He divided the whole place into two groups of about ten people and we had to take turns deliberating on where a photo was then make our guess. I was excited to play and thought we were going to win, but I was the guy who was delegated by my group to say where it was, and I was really drunk and accidentally said the wrong place even though I meant to say the right place and we lost.

My first day there I did a tour of the historic center which was interesting. It was built up against a hill which marked the south end of the city before it descended into the valley which leads to the south. There are a lot of old traditional buildings there. There was a traditional plaza and a big parade happening when I was there which happens a lot in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. I did a tour of a colonial art place and the girl who did the tour for me told me that the difference between North America and South America is that the Catholic church brought people to South America, but people went to North America on their own volition. I did another tour of an old house of an aristocrat. The my first Saturday there I tried to ride by bike down to where they have the bungee jumping, which is 90 meters high off of a big bridge but I went the wrong way so I did it the next Saturday, wich is the only day they do it, by bus. I went there alone, and got their just in time to see a girl standing on the edge for a couple seconds and then jump. She fell for a good few seconds before stretching out the rope and she continued to fall for a really long way down. There were about 50 Ecuadorians watching from the parking lots on both sides of the bridge who had apparently come there just to watch the tourists jump. Then I walked up and didn't have to stand in line behind anybody. They took my 50 bucks and told me that if I chickened out they weren't going to give my money back. So I got hooked up and they explained to me how they were being really careful and the I was not only hooked up to the rope by my feet, but by another normal harness around my waist and legs. The guys who worked there did a count down from five and I jumped about a second after they all said 'go!'. The fall was the most intense experiences of my life, even more intense than what I expected, because in no time I was falling headfirst so fast that I could hear the loud wind rush through my ears as if I stuck my head out of a car going 60 miles an hour, so the screams were ripped from me. I screamed uncontrollably as loud as I could for the entire fall until I slowly slowed down from the stretch of the rope, and then started screaming again as it pulled me way up again to were I could see the faces of the people on the bridge and fell again. I screamed a little more on the third rebound, and rebounded about a half dozen times before I lay hanging for about a minute not very high above the river below me. They all pulled me up by getting volunteer spectators to grab the rope and walk along the bridge. When I got back to the top I was still in shock and they were kind of laughing along with me. I left right after that and didn't see anybody else in line to jump after me.

I met a lot of people who were there for about the same amount of time that I was. Towards the beginning of my time there I climbed Mt Cotopaxi 5800m with a South African guy. We rented the gear from a place about two blocks from the hotel, and then stocked up on food at the supermarket, and left really early the next morning on the bus to the next town over where we got a taxi to take us up the dirt road to the parking lot a couple couple hundred meters below the shelter. We hung out that night for a little bit with a Columbian couple and an American guy and his friend and a girl from Boulder who had traveled there alone but had a harness and hooked American guys rope. Cotopaxi is a volcano that is covered in glaciers and has crevices on it. The American guy was trying to talk us out of going the next morning because we didn't have a rope, but they all let us hike up with them the next day. We hiked up the scree slope in the dark, and the sun started to rise about the same time we started walking in the snow. We got to a point in the middle of a mellow area where we had to cross a crevasse that was about six feet wide over a bridge that was about six feet wide. I looked down it and just saw blackness. After the five roped together people walked across it no problem, we scampered across it as light footed as we could. Then it started to get steeper and we got to the sheer rock cliff which you can see all the way from Quito and walked around it. After that it was a straight shot to the top up a 50 degree slope. We got to the summit just as the sun was rising over the mountains, and we could see the giant cone shaped shadow the mountain made over the terrain. I could see Mt Chimborozo about 50 miles to the south, Quito to the north, and some other high mountains to the north east. We could look down the caldera which was smoking a little bit. We hung out up there for almost an hour and then hiked back down. That night the others got away because their drivers came, but hour taxi who we pre-paid for half of the ride never showed up, so we had to pitch a tent and catch a ride back the next day with some American English teachers who had tried to climb the mountain the day after we went but couldn't because the weather wasn't good enough.

Quito has a nice park with a big skate converted from an old fancy pool, and a BMX race course and a big half pipes were full of people as well as the whole park which was huge. We went to the park in a group of like 15 people once. We did everything in huge groups. On the weekends we went to the Discos which were just a couple blocks from the hotel. While I was there I went to the a dentist on the main commercial street to have my teeth looked at, and she put in like eight fillings. I asked her to fill in a chip on my front tooth that my uncle had put there three years beforehand but I had broken off five months earlier when I was eating a cake stoned and put the whole fork in my mouth and bit down on it. At first the lady told me she couldn't do it so I told her that my uncle did it, so without asking she started drilling into my tooth. I was kind of stupid and let her do that for a second until I realized what she was doing and told her to stop and she said she had to to make it work and I said she didn't. Then she splooged on the stuff on my tooth in a haphazard glob and charged me and set me off. It was a really bag job because it wasn't even on my tooth at all and fell off about five months later.

After my trip to Cotopaxi I wanted to make another one to the top of Ecuador's highest mountain, Chimborazo, which, standing at 6310m, is the closest point on earth to the sun because it is so close to the equator. I got some people interested in climbing it and then a lot of people signed on so we got a couple of guides to take us up in a van. It was my first trip though the rolling Andes hills and I saw the Llamas for the first time which make South America unique. After we climbed out of the green pastures and into the barren rocks and moss we started driving on snow that had been falling for the prior couple days. At one point we got stuck in a switchback and everybody got out to puke except me and then the guy just kept driving which wasn't necessary. I told him to weight but he said the hotel was just a little bit further but it wasn't. The others had to hike about ten minutes to get there. The guides cooked for us and we hung out at a nice fireplace. The next day we hiked a couple hundred meters more to the next refuge. We spent a day walking around the snow and sliding down the snow and practicing self arrests. We got up at like three the next morning and hiked about an hour up to a steep place and then turned around because they said it was storming on the top. There were some Indians in a group behind us who continued but turned around a couple hours late. Our guides told us they thought that was weird because Indians are usually superstitious of the mountains.

The ride out of Quito was interesting because I descended a lot to get into the valley that led to the south. It started raining really hard on me before long and I didn't have a rain coat so I was kind of uncomfortable. I saw some train tracks coming up and I knew that because it was raining if I didn't want to wipe out I would have to pick up my front wheel while I went over the tracks that I was hitting at 45 degrees. I lifted up my front wheel, but my back wheel slid all the way down the tracks until my bike was at 45 degrees and banged the road pretty hard as if I was landing a high jump; I didn't wipe it though. I saw a sign for a bed and breakfast on the side of the road so I rode up to the place but it was a guy alone in a nice house. He claimed to not have any food in the house at all which I found puzzling because he had to survive there. He told me about a place nearby where I could buy food but I couldn't find it so I sent him to get me something. I hung out with him that night which was cool because I hadn't had many opportunities to practice my Spanish before then. The next morning I rode into the town south of Quito and stayed the night there, but the next day I took the bus to the next town, and then rode my bike down into Baños. Baños is a cool place because it is a nice little tourist town in a deep valley, in fact a very deep valley because it is at the base of a 5000m mountain. It is really lush there and caters to tourists so there is a nice pedestrian mall and a lot of good restaurants with pizzas and stuff. I stayed there one night and went to the local natural hot springs which offered a nice view of the valley. I didn't have the motivation the next day to ride out of the valley so I got a bus. While I was sitting in the bus lot waiting for my bus I saw the weirdest traveler ever. This gringo kid rode his bike past me with a box strapped to his back rack with a happy boarder collie sitting back there. The guy took his dog bike touring with him!

I took the bus to the big southern town of ?. It was an all day ride and probably the most beautiful of all in South America because it was up and down misti green mountainsides on narrow roads. The hostel I went to in that town was unique in that my bed was right next to the bar restaurant party place. I was kind of tired and didn't feel like drinking or hanging out so I went right to bed, but from the noise I might as well have been in the bar. It didn't bother me though, I actually thought it was kind of cool. I spent a day there riding around and checking out the markets. The city was beautiful because it was in a valley next to a pretty big river, and the buildings were colonial. That afternoon I got a bus ride out and over the mountains for another day of constant climbing and descending. It would have made great bike touring. I can't remember why I didn't have the motivation to ride, I think it was because I was so excited about going to Peru. I stayed one night in a small town that was pretty off the beaten path. I got a room next to the plaza and spent a day walking around. I was the only tourist I saw there. The next day I took the bus to the boarder to Peru.