After 18 hours in on planes and in airports, we are here! We left Phoenix at 5am yesterday, flew to Houston and after a rather enjoyable 7 hour layover spent mostly in the President´s Club, we caught the night flight to Quito. As we approached, the lights of Quito’s metropolis-covered hillsides turned the infinite black of the jungle at night into brightly glowing waves.

 

From the airport we caught a cab to La Mariscal which was supposed to be a lively downtown area. We arrived to find near-deserted streets lined with clubs and bars that were blasting their music as if they were packed. It was almost midnight so we couldn´t figure out why things were so empty for a Saturday night.

 

While driving down a narrow one-way street, we saw some hombres looking in the windows of the rows of tightly parked cars. This sent our already buzzing sense of culture shock into overdrive as the few people observing this did nothing to stop these blatant car thieves. Out of nowhere and certainly not near anything that resembled a place we would want to spend our first night in South America, the cab driver stopped and announced he could go no further due to traffic. We immediately went into "scared tourist in unfamiliar city survival mode". Not wanting to wander the dark streets of an unfamiliar city wearing backpacks that screamed “ROB US!”, we ducked into the first Hostal we saw- Hostal Titisee. I have nothing to compare the seven dollar cement slab that was my bed to yet, but let’s just say we hope South America has better to offer us. We just woke up and are off to to eat some breakfast, set an agenda and do some sightseeing.