Travel

Remembering Places

I am off on my travels again this weekend, leaving on the 17th, and coming back on the 25th. This time I am going back to India :-( , not one of my favorite places in the world (apologies in advance, it's Calcutta (Kolcata) that does it!) but at least this time it is a different area of the country, and I don't have to go to Calcutta. Anyone know what Hyderbad is like????
But that is in the next few days, it got me thinking as to the places I did enjoy going to and one place came up straight away Guapan in Ecuador.

Now Ecuador is a country that is just 2 hours flying time from the Galapagos Islands home to some of the most fantastic and unspoiled country in the world, and abundant with all manner of wildlife.

One of the Islands

Then you have beautiful unspoiled beaches on the Pacific Ocean side of Ecuador, 1,390 miles of coastline, so your sure to find an empty spot on the beach. Go a couple of hours inland and you come to the sprawling cities, which are quite nice. Then as you move further inland westward you come to the Andes, and this is where I was in Guapan. If I carried on further westward I would have been in the Amazon. So there you have all the main types of terrain spaced 2 hours apart!

What of Guapan? Well it is a small town in the middle of the Andes, which means you are about 3000m above sea level. Because of that I had a headache for three days, not a "God my head is killing me, I wonder if I push my hands against my temples I will be able to stop my brain from leaking" type of headache, more a dull thud, uncomfortable, but livable. I was also short of breath for a while. Trouble is I was only up at Altitude for 4 days, so just as I was acclimatised, I had to go back home!

I stayed in Quito, which was only a 40 minute drive from Guapan, and is a lovely place to visit, with plenty to eat! It is also very close to the volcano Pichincha, which I was unfortunately not able to visit due to time constraints. Here is a picture of me, at a typical roadside eatery where I enjoyed probably the nicest plate of pork I have eaten in a long time. No wonder I look such a Lardy arse!

And here is a side view of the very same, with the lads I worked with.

This trip was to do a couple of systems, and involved the first to utilise an Ethernet connection within our equipment. Halfway through commissioning the system, and the day after we had just managed to get the Ethernet system working, Xavier my interpreter said to me, that the papers wanted to come and see the system, and also give me a short interview on the system and the commissioning. Papers! I said no problem, as long as he didn't mind as he was going to be doing the translating (I know very little Spanish - Gracious, Buenos noches, is about my limit!), he agreed so we waited. Then 10 minutes before the press arrived, Xavier came to me and said " Sorry Dave, it is not only the papers, the local TV news wish an interview too!", Silence for 30 secs as this piece of news sank in. Then I said "No problemo!" (I learnt that from the Terminator). So in came the film crew, and I got 5 minutes of fame on the Ecuador news channel, LOL. I just hope Xavier translated exactly what I said, he looked a lot more nervous than me, LOL.

The rest of the trip went pretty much as normal, but it wasn't just the film crew that made the trip memorable it was the country itself.

Here are a few more photo's

They have another trip coming up in the near future to Ecuador, and I have got my name put down and my dollars booked already!