Where the sun had been | Ryan and Bri's South America Travel Blog

Ecuador – Quito + Semana Santa = Terrifying
May 20, 2009 by rbosinger
We stayed a week in Quito, Ecuador. I think I can say that so far it’s been the only bigger city in South America that I’ve actually liked. People generally left us alone (in most other places they try and sell us stuff with force), it was quieter (honking seems to be a major pasttime everywhere else), and I actually enjoyed the cooler weather after coming from Costa Rica and Colombia. Also, our hostal (Hostal Chicago) was awesome and we met alot of cool people on their roof top patio.

Our reason for staying a whole week in Quito was that we were able to take cheap personal Spanish lessons at the hostal, and we thought that would be a good idea. However, it just so happened it was Easter Week (Semana Santa) and in Quito they do some weird things to celebrate.

During the days leading up to Easter, Brianna and I would:

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Ecuador – The Quilotoa Crater
May 18, 2009 by rbosinger
If you were to look up “Quilotoa” on Wikipedia, I’m sure you would find something like this:

Quilotoa (IPA [kiloˈtoa]) is a water-filled caldera and the westernmost volcano in the Ecuadorian Andes. The 3 kilometres (2 mi) wide caldera was formed by the collapse of this dacite volcano following a catastrophic VEI-6 eruption about 800 years ago, which produced pyroclastic flows and lahars that reached the Pacific Ocean, and spread an airborne deposit of volcanic ash throughout the northern Andes.^[1] The caldera has since accumulated a 250 m (820 ft) deep crater lake, which has a greenish color as a result of dissolved minerals. Fumaroles are found on the lake floor and hot springs occur on the eastern flank of the volcano.^[1]

I would agree with that.

We were a little confused on how to get there on our own, and we never bought the Lonely Planet guide to Ecuador, so we went with a guide. It was worth it for us. However, if you’re ever in Ecuador and you want to do it on your own, it’s pretty easy.
- Go to the town of Latacunga
- Catch a bus to Zumbahua (at the terminal)
- Pay somebody to take you up to Quilotoa in their truck
It’s that last step that made us think we wouldn’t pull it off, but once you’re in Zumbahua, if you don’t look like a Latin American, there will be plenty of people offering to take you up for a few bucks.

Anyways, the day we went happen to coincide with main market day (Saturday I think) as well as a big political rally of some sort, so it helped to be in a vehicle with our guide instead of trying to get through the madness ourselves.

The road to Zumbahua. People were everywhere because of the political rallies.

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Ecuador – Biking Baños to Puyo (extended edition)
May 17, 2009 by rbosinger
In the last post about the same subject I wrote something like this:

In the town of Baños in Ecuador, the hip thing to do is rent a bike and hit the highway between Baños and Puyo. Puyo is over 60km away, but most of it is downhill. Along the way you see different waterfalls and sights.

Actually, that’s exactly what I wrote. At that time I only had a video (check it) to post of one small part of the journey. Now I have a few pic-tures online from Brianna’s camera and a little time to write about thangs.

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Ecuador – Biking Baños to Puyo
May 4, 2009 by rbosinger
In the town of Baños in Ecuador, the hip thing to do is rent a bike and hit the highway between Baños and Puyo. Puyo is over 60km away, but most of it is downhill. Along the way you see different waterfalls and sights. There’s also this crazy cable car you can take across a canyon for a dollar or two. I’d like to post more about this when the pictures finish uploading, but I haven’t done an update for a while and have free access to internet so I thought I would post this video.

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Santa Marta and the Lost City (Ciudad Perdida) trek
April 16, 2009 by rbosinger
We took a bus from Cartagena to Santa Marta so we could go on the famous Ciudad Perdida hike. Santa Marta isn’t overally impressive from what we saw, but the hotel we stayed at was near the ocean and the sunset was amazing.

One of the major cool things to do in Colombia is the Ciudad Perdida trek. It’s basically Colombia’s version of Manchu Picchu: an old civilization ruin on up in the mountains in the jungle from somewhere around 5th Century A.D. It was only discovered in the 1970’s and for a while people were fighting over it before the government stepped in. I think it’s only been safe to go up there since the late 80’s, but even since 2003 there had been some cases of tourists getting kidnapped. It’s different now. In fact, almost every backpacker we ran into in Colombia had done this trek or was planning on doing it at some point. I think the only danger might be having a heart attack on the hike or going off the cliff on the crazy bus ride up and down to the starting point. Anyways, we decided to do this because it’s much cheaper than Machu Picchu and less touristy and heard of (although it could very well become the next Machu Picchu by the way things were looking). It cost us about $200CAD each for a 6 day, five night hike with guides that cook three meals a day and donkeys that carry out the hammocks and other essentials. The only thing you carry is your backpack with clothes and camera and any hiking gear you’d feel that you want.

Check it – I have uploaded quite a few cool pictures of this trek since I did this post. Check out my Flickr Photostream.

We got to see a lot of these types of views.

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Cartagena, Colombia and friends…
April 11, 2009 by rbosinger
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. In fact, we’re in Ecuador right now, but I haven’t done a single post about our times in Colombia. Hold onto your pantalones…

We flew into Cartagena from San Jose, Costa Rica at about 11pm, and we felt a little uneasy about that because everyone still seems to think Colombia is very dangerous, even though we read/heard different. Either way, it’s probably never the best idea to arrive in a foreign country you’ve never been to that late at night. We grabbed about $200,000 pesos (about $100 CAD) from the ATM at the airport and jumped into a cab.

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Bri Says:
March 18, 2009 by brianna

We have made it to the other coast! The sunny and dry Pacific Coast. We decided to go to Montezuma and the trip there was, well, bouncy. Three girls from our last hostel in La Fortuna were on the bus so we travelled with them and were happy to have their company. It was a long 10 hour trip. Bus then ferry then bus again. It was fine until the second bus. That was so bumpy. My boobs were flying every which way. I had to hold them down with my arm. We arrived safely in Montezuma around 10 pm and there were hundreds of people flooding the steets. People were friendly and trying to give advice on which hostels might be available. We soon noticed a pattern: “NO VACANCY!” We tried so many hostels with no luck and then finally, like it had just appeared out of nowhere, came this big hostel (Or as I call it the haunted house). There was this old man, shorter than me, with one glass eye, hairy, with big glasses and wearing only heart patterned boxer shorts who greeted us. It was like something from a twisted 80’s thriller. He couldn´t remember a damn thing either. The one girl and I checked out the place, decided it´ll have to do and came back to tell him. He said he´d given it away already. “Ya, to us!” we replied. “No, no, it´s gone”. After much explaining, he gave us the room (18 bucks per person, the bastard). He then started going on about how he wanted to die and he´s too old and has had multiple heart attacks. “Ummmm, okay, well good night then!” We´re pretty sure we slept where his hired goons slept but, whatever. We got a bed and that was good enough for us! It was more funny then anything. We did however sleep on our own sheets. Keep the buggies at bay. Lesson learned: Don´t show up to an already touristy spot the week of spring break at 10 at night and expect to sleep anywhere. Word.

P.s Speaking of spooky things, I did end up seeing a ghost in the haunted house that night. It was disgusting.

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I lost my anus in Puntarenas (Costa Rica)
by rbosinger
On our way back to San Jose from Montezuma we decided to stay in Puntarenas (Poont-ah-ray-nuss) for a night, just for the hell of it. Puntarenas in a post town, and most people would only come here to catch a ferry or boat to the Nicoya Peninsula and go to a place like Montezuma.

It was a nice place, and felt a lot more authenticate than everywhere else we had been in Costa Rica. The coastal towns in Costa Rica feel a little bit like a tourist amusement park. We thought this might be a good experience before we moved on the countries in South America where there would be far less tourists and English speakers than in Costa Rica.

Not much else to say about that.

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Montezuma, the pacific coast party town in Costa Rica…
March 16, 2009 by rbosinger
We had read about all kinds of places on the pacific coast of Costa Rica. This is where the sun really shines, and because of that the information we gathered was that a lot of the coast was getting more busy, more expensive and more touristy every year. With that in the back of our minds we picked Montezuma as our choice of town, and set off.

We took a bus from La Fortuna to San Ramon and it climbed up and up and up. A couple times we were so close to the edge of the road overlooking a cliff that even when I looked directly out the window it looked like the bus was flying. I watched as the altimeter on my watch climbed from 100ft to 3600ft. We took some pictures out of the bus window that don’t quite capture this, but I thought I’d post a couple anyway.

So here’s how we traveled: La Fortuna to San Ramon (4 hours), San Ramon to Puntarenas (3 or 4 hours), a ferry to Paquera (an hour or so and about $2US per person) and then another 1.5 hour bus ride to Montezuma.

Here’s some pictures from the ferry:

We met some people from Toronto and the States. It was nice to have someone to travel with and to be with while we dealt with a crappy situation to come…

Word of warning: don’t arrive in Montezuma at 9pm on a Saturday during Spring Break (we didn’t realize) and expect to get a room.

This place was hoppin’. People everywhere drinking in the streets having a good time. It seemed to only options we had for a place to stay were expensive room that had jacuzzi’s and all kinds of things we didn’t want to pay for. We spent hours looking for a place to stay – and of course, for the first time since the start of the trip, it’s actually sweltering hot.

Twelve hours of buses and boats, hungry and hot, running around with all our gear trying to find a room in the midst of a Spring Break mega party.

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La Fortuna to the moon!
March 15, 2009 by rbosinger
We spent a couple nights in La Fortuna which is suppose to be quite a touristy place. They have all kinds of Canopy tours and such, and it is the town situated by Volcano Arenal. However, it rained heavily the entire time we were there. I never got to see the Volcano, and this was Brianna’s second attempt (she did a tour of Arenal a couple years ago but it was clouded over). This is a very common occurence. We didn’t care though, we stayed in a really cool and cheap hostel called Gringo Pete’s. It’s very intimate because the main hang out area is the size of an apartment with the kitchen attached. There is free coffee, and because of the rain we got to talk to a lot of cool people while sitting around drinking coffee. Here’s some odd pictures I took of that Gringo Pete’s:

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Where the sun had been Ryan and Bri, South America, Two Thousand Niner