Otavalo - Quito

Hmph. Katherine gets an intricate hand-woven indigenous-American bag and traditional top, and I get a bag of beans and a cup of rice. Great. :-).

Actually, I was this close to buying a panama hat ($7), but lost my confidence at the last minute. We're passing through a couple more market towns as we head south, so I may reconsider at a later date...

We arrived back in Quito and checked into a hotel (this one does have hot water, but costs a couple of dollars more). Then we took a trip into town and bought an Ecuador guide book - up to now we've been making do with a general "South American" one.

There's supposed to be a lunar eclipse tonight, which you can see from Ecuador (and Europe as well, I think), but it's pretty cloudy and miserable at the moment, so there might not be much to look at!

We've got various things left to do around Quito. We'll probably explore the Old Town tomorrow - a UNESCO site of something or other -, and take a trip north to the Equator the day after. The so-called "Mitad del Mundo" is just over 20km north of Quito. It occurred to me that I hadn't crossed the Equator before a couple of days ago - there's a first time for everything! I'm tempted to take a big pot of water to drain out on both sides of the line...