A low point.. and another relocation

Chile, thursday 19th May and disaster strikes - while we are innocently enjoying the nightlife in downtown Santiago, a bounder of indeterminate nationality is nicking Laur´s backpack out of our supposedly secure, locked hostel. By bye laptop, credit cards, camera leads, passport, cash and, most gallingly, a box of essential oils which were making our sometimes manky budget hostel beds smell tolerable.

We tried to put it all out of our minds with a short overnight trek to the amazing, UNESCO-rated port city of Valparaiso, some 150kms from Santiago. When we arrived, we´d been walking for a short time when our throats and eyes started to burn. We´d been warned by friends the night before (the lovely Peter and Tanya Pope and a Chilean friend) that there was some heavy, demonstration-type of stuff going down in Valpo that weekend; it is the seat of government and a target for street protests. Basically, the police had spent the day tear-gassing local teenagers, and we were still feeling the fall-out the next day!

Back in Santiago, we said our goodbyes to the city and tried to get over the feeling of being violated/losing our trust, as we had been done over by a very professional thief taking advantage of the easy-going environment of the traveller "community". We flew to Quito in Ecuador the next afternoon, on what turned out to be a 7-hour flight (I had mentally prepared myself for 3 hours), and arrived tired and spaced out at our hostel in the hectic Mariscal area of downtown Quito, sharing a taxi with a young american medical student.

Main square of Quito in the centro historico

Tumbling bouganvilleas in our side trip to Banyos

The next day we checked into another hostel, and started to repeat the process of finding a longer-term stay and a spanish school. Quito, like La Paz, is in an incredible location, with towering green Andean mountains to one side, and is huge colonial historical centre, where we wandered into the Mercado Central, dodging the frantic buses that hurtle down the middle of main roads oblivious to wandering school-children. Apart from another nasty shock as a delayed bank statement showed that our stolen debit card was used to take money from our account the day that Laur´s bag was stolen, it´s been a sunny and fascinating stay in Quito so far and we are looking forward to possibly settling in here for a while.

A museum in Banyos

Interior of the Compania de Jesus church in Quito