Well, here I find myself sitting in Quito, Ecuador. It is the capital of the country, and almost as big and sprawling as L.A. The city is much nicer than San Jose was. Our hostel is the oldest in Quito. It is amazing. There are several floors with balconies and sitting areas with spiral staircases. We will take pictures and put them up. At the moment I am putting more pictures onto Flickr. We will soon be heading to Coca where we will either rent a canoe or hop on a boat to go down the Napo river. That eventually joins with the Amazon and we will be crossing the border into Peru on the river. It will take weeks probably and we definately will not have internet access so if you all could be patient for those few weeks, it would be wonderful. So, we have safely arrived in Ecuador and are working out the details of our stay here. I just finished reading The Tesseract by Alex Garland. It is a great book, but at times confusing. If anyone has read The Beach, he wrote that as well. I recommend this book.

Phil