27/05/2019 – Travel day Pasto, Colombia to Quito, Ecuador

We woke up to another early alarm. It was a good rest, although the mattresses had proper waterproof covers that were very crinkly. Josh said we may have ended up in a lady of the night hotel by accident! We checked out and got a quick taxi to the bus terminal. We found a company called ‘Transipiales’ who took our money and shoved us straight on the full minibus and we were away! Not even time to blink which was great! We both fell asleep for most of the first journey. We had expected it to be 1.5 hours but it ended up being nearly double that. There are a lot of roadworks going on throughout Colombia it seems. We went into the Ipiales terminal and found somewhere for a coffee and a weird bready croissant thing (At this point anything tasted good!) We used the facilities and then Josh tried a final attempt at scouring the shops for a magnet to no avail! He says he is going to have to order one on the internet hahaha!!! Then we got a taxi to the Rumichaca border where we wandered around a bit lost. We changed up the last of our Colombian pesos (COP) into USD (Ecuadors currency) goodness knows what exchange rate we got but it was still more useful than having leftover Colombian money! There were some huge medical tents, nurses giving injections, and lots of Venezuelan families with their whole worldly possessions with them. The kids had too small/too big dirty clothes on and I wandered how long they had been traveling for to get to this point and what their stories are. Their entry papers looked like little receipts. We only saw one other European looking couple in the far distance. We were guided into the correct queue by a nice policeman and got our Colombian exit stamp before crossing a pedestrian bridge to queue up for our Ecuador entry stamp. (We had actually tried to go straight through to the Ecuador bit but a kind official man explained we needed to get our exit stamp from over the road! Woops! Of course! It made sense once he had told us!) Thankfully not understanding much Spanish we were the only ones let inside with our big rucksacks on (this is a win as apparently a big no no to leave the bags outside unattended, and if we had gone one at a time would have obviously taken twice as long.) There was a separate queue for kids and the elderly and then we were amongst everybody else. The queue was moving pretty steady and then seemed to stop for quite a while. We later realised that all the staff had had their lunch break at the same time! Whilst we were in the queue the lady behind us started shouting at a man by the door who ran over and picked her up and she fainted a couple of times in his arms. He ran outside with her but I later saw her walking back to join the queue again so I guess she was o.k.! Eventually we got our stamps and went through the other side, we were in Ecuador! We got in to a taxi to the Tulcan bus terminal where yet again we were ushered straight onto a coach heading towards Quito. It was a big air con, Wifi coach again so not a bad way to travel. From what I could tell we were the only ones without Spanish as a first language. By this point we basically had had no time for the toilet or food since that first pit stop this morning so we were pretty drained. We snoozed on and off throughout the scenic journey. It didn’t really feel safe enough to get the ipad out as the bus driver seemed to stop every 10 minutes to let street vendors on and to pick up and drop off locals along the way. We got off the coach at the Carcelen terminal in Quito, grabbed our bags and got ushered straight into a taxi who took us to our hostel ‘Hostal Killalullu’ in ‘La Mariscal’ area. We were welcomed by our host into the hostel and to our room. It is a big old-fashioned room with an en suite, it feels traditional! We joined the wifi and found a restaurant around the corner for some dinner. We went to ‘Cosa Nostra’ an Italian place recommended by the lonely planet. It was a bit pricier than what we are used to but it was delicious pasta/gnocci/salad and filled a gap as we were running on empty by this point! Then we walked back to the hostel and got settled in and tucked up for (hopefully) a big sleep tonight!