Breakfast in Quito, dinner in Ambato

It’s nice to be in Ecuador, I had a good sleep and woke up to hear Julia and Aureliano. They were so happy to see me, it was lovely. Julia won’t leave my side and Aureliano is just excited by the whole thing.

It’s good to see Nidia again, she’s been so good to us and she looks really well. She is staying at her sister Margi’s house while hers is being built and she has a self-contained flat on the ground floor. I remember the house from Tom and Lucy’s wedding, we went there for a welcome party to meet the family.

My welcome breakfast was pan de yucca and eggs; and it was also great to have a shower. After breakfast, we went to park in central Quito, where there’s lots of family attractions, including a boating lake and electric cars. We took two pedalos around the lake with Tom, me and Aureliano in one and Emelia, Nidia and Julia in the other. There are fountains in the lake which weren’t working when we set off, but which switched on unexpectedly and soaked Nidia, Emelia and Julia. I may have been quite comical had we witnessed it and if Nidia hadn’t been quite so mad.

We set off for Ambato in the afternoon. There are a few new roads in Quito and it takes ages to leave the city. It’s stretched out long and thin in the valley below Pichincha volcano and we were travelling from the north of the city to exit at the south. It seems to have grown since I was here five years ago and some of the developments seem precariously perched on the side of crags. In a land susceptible to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, some of them seem like very dangerous places to live.

On the trans-American highway, we were able to get a good view of Cotopaxi as the clouds gradually shifted from its slopes. I wonder if I would ever stop being stunned by the view.

Tom and Lucy have an apartment on the top floor of a building at the Foundación Alli Causi hospital and they have a lovely garden and lots of space for the children to play in. We met Carlos, Jenny, Arlen and Camila later in the evening (they’d all been to Baños for the day). My Spanish is OK for straightforward requests and orders, very simple conversation, but it isn’t good enough to converse with non-English speakers in everyday complicated conversation. I hope it might improve a little while I am here.