We made it to Canoa, Ecador!

We made it. And it was definitely a blog-worthy journey.

We spent our first day in Quito wandering around aimlessly trying to take as much of the city in as possible in just one day. I learned that Quito is the highest elevated capital city in the world, making me feel a little less embarrassed about how out of breath I was walking up the stairs to our hostel room.



Quito was oddly similar to how I imagined it would be: a typical South American city surrounded by mountains partially hidden by clouds.

Most of our afternoon was spent in an attempt to find Terminal Terrestre, what we thought was the main bus terminal in Quito, and where we would need to get a bus to Canoa. After several people gave us different directions, we came to the realization that “Terminal Terrestre” was in fact not a bus-hub, but rather the name of every bus station in Quito. After hours spent searching, we found the bus we needed and discovered it only left once per day, at 10:45pm.

We decided to buy a ticket for that night and by 10:45pm we were on the bus headed for Canoa. The person who sold us the ticket told us that we’d arrive to Canoa at 6am, so you could imagine our surprise when the bus came to a stop at 4am and everyone got off. “Canoa,” the bus driver announced. We had arrived…at four in the morning…to a town we knew nothing about…without any place to stay for what was left of the night.

Everyone grabbed their backpacks and went off on their way while Dan and I stood there in a half-awake state of confusion. Turns out this weekend is Carnaval in Ecuador and Canoa just happens to be one of the places where Ecuadorians flock to celebrate. So, the streets were bustling with people.

As Dan and I wandered around, we might as well have had “GRINGOS” stamped across our foreheads. If our huge backpacks didn't give us away, Dan's baseball hat and my yoga pants sure did. We knocked on some hostel doors and were met with the same response, “No hay habitaciones.”

And just when we thought we were out of luck, a man dressed in all white, with a Ecuadorian style hat (which I will most likely think is stylish in a couple of weeks) approached us.

“Hola,” he said with a large smile.

“Hola,” we replied.

“No hablamos,” (“We no speak”) Dan replied.

(For some reason Dan always forgets to include “Espanol” at the end of this statement).

We made our best attempt at a conversation with this man (in a terrible mix of butchered Spanish and English), who we later learned was named Christian.

Pretty soon he was calling us his "amigos."

He told us that all of the hostels were full because of Carnaval and offered us his car to sleep in. We took him up on his offer and spent the early morning sprawled out in his car (Sorry mom, but I was surprisingly more hesitant than Dan!) We slept about 3 hours before the sun was glaring through the windows.

We decided that it was best not to wait for Christian to return. We left him a “thank you” note and were on our way…

Walking down the streets carrying all of our belongings and dripping sweat, we were lucky enough to run into some English speakers who offered us a place to stay for the rest of Carnaval. The rates are a bit higher than usual ($40 a night) because of the holiday, but they told us they'd be dropping once the holiday was over...