"Quito" a Quito Travel Page by J_P_B

This was the starting point for our round the world trip. Our time here wasn't helped by Iberia leaving our luggage behind in Madrid, which, as you can imagine, caused us much consternation. Furthermore, we let ourselves be swayed be guidebooks and scared ourselves stupid at the prospect of venturing out. Ridiculous but true. Once we were acclimatised and the culture shock waned, we got out and about a bit and did see a few things - not as much as we would have liked with hindsight. Our main reason for going here was to sort out a trip to the Galapagos Islands, which we did without any real problems at a fraction of the cost of what we would've paid in the UK for the same trip.

The people are friendly and it's a pretty setting, being surrounded by all those volcanoes and mountains. It's just a shame about the level of poverty, but then Quito is not extraordinary in this respect in a global sense.