The bikes showed up in Quito yesterday.  However we don't have them yet.  The bikes showed up pretty early in the morning but the Girag people told us to come to their office around 10.  None of the taxi drivers had any idea where the address was, and it ended up taking at least an hour to get there, so we were late.  They said that we would never get the bikes ourselves with the time we had left, we should have come in earlier - ¨but you didn't tell us to come earlier..."  So they recomended the people who charge $50 a bike to get them through customs, they were our only chance.  We went to their office and they made a fairly valiant effort at getting the paperwork done and getting the bikes, but it simply didn't happen.  Customs is closed for the weekend and we won't be able to get the bikes until Monday.  3 more days in Quito.  4 really, since we won't get the bikes until between 2 and 4:30 pm on Monday.

Even if we had recovered the bikes yesterday, we may well have stayed an extra day in Quito.  I got a bad case of food poisoning and am not quite over it yet.  I just ate my first food in 2 days, and though it seems to be staying down I've got kind of a cramp and wouldn't want to be riding today.

On Thursday we went to Mitad del Mundo, which sits directly on the equator.  They have an equator theme park there, believe it or not.  However we never found the displays that could only be made on the equator which were mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide.  All I really wanted to see was a tank of water draining straight down with no rotation clockwise or counterclockwise.  I'd already tried the experiment in the bathroom sink at the hotel, and got a clockwise whirlpool, and I couldn't believe they didn't have something at this park.  So I went to the bathroom that was all of 100-150 feet north of the equator and filled that sink with water.  I got a counterclockwise whirlpool.  Apparently you have to be directly on the equator to get no swirl.

While we were at this park we stopped at a cafeteria to get some lunch.  I got a hamburger.  It was gross.  At dinner time I wasn´t hungry and just skipped it, had a bag of M&M´s instead.  Then, in the middle of the night, the real problems began.  I won't go into details, believe me you don't want to know.  I was not in a happy place yesterday, but mostly all I had to do was sit around and wait for bike related things to happen.  All that was really needed of my presence was my signature 4 times, and to pay the Girag people $22.40 to release my bike.  Apparently the $650 in Panama City was not the complete cost.  When we finally got back to the hotel I just went to bed and tried to get warm again.  Oh yeah, I don't think I've mentioned how cold it is here!  Cold!  Cold!!  We're 15 miles from the equator and I'm wearing everything warm that I brought.  I might have to buy a sweater or another fleece, we are going to be going over some high passes that are likely to be even colder than here.

I have no idea how we will spend the next couple days.  There isn't an awful lot to do or see in Quito.  The old town had cool colonial architecture but there wasn't anything to do there.  The Mariscal has lots of decent restaurants and bars but food and alcohol are currently not high on my list of things I want.  I guess there is a Patriots game on today and the TV in the hotel gets a lot of chanels, perhaps we'll catch it.  I'm looking forward to getting back on the bike and doing some riding.  The scenery south of here is supposed to be pretty spectacular, but if the weather is similar to Quito we won't be seeing much of it.  Seems the sun is out maybe 5% of the time.  Maybe.
That's it for now, hopefully I will write next from the road somewhere to the south!

Saturday January 7, 2006 - 08:42am (PST)