Day Twenty Seven - Montanita to Quito

I woke up this morning feeling more than a little bit hungover. I've learnt to realised that I can not drink as much as I did when I was 18 and still feel fine the next day! This was a sad revelation!!

We packed all of our stuff, skipped breakfast and checked out. We said goodbye to Nico (the owner) when we left but everyone else was still fast asleep! We got to the bus station for our 10am bus leaving Montanita to Guayaquil. It was a pretty uneventful journey.

When we arrive in Guayaquil, we caught a $4 taxi to the airport less than 1km away!! Unbelievable! Turns out, although Guayaquil is a bit of a hole, the airport is actually super nice! It's split over two floors with huge glass walls overlooking a pond full of humongous goldfish!! We printed off our boarding passes and then headed over to a little cafe to get a sandwich and a drink. Two sandwiches and two orange juices came to around $19!!! Guayaquil is expensive!

After checking in our bags, we went through security for Brendan's backpack to get flagged up and searched. He immediately turned to me and said 'my penknife is on my hand luggage!' And sure enough they whipped out his personalised penknife and asked him about it! He played the gringo card and apologised saying he'd forgotten! Thankfully they were amazingly nice for security guys, and instead of telling him they had to throw it away, they let him go back and check his backpack on as hold luggage!! Definitely learnt his lesson!

In the airport, we hung around for a while, trying desperately not to spend any more money on extortionate food or drinks and hung about on the iffy free wifi.

Once on the plane (that takes 45 minutes) we were given a drink and a sandwich which we weren't expecting and were literally in the air cruising for 20 minutes before we began the descent back down!

We got a taxi to our hostel which was super super nice - the guy Paul is Canadian and so helpful. We got a double ensuite with breakfast for $15 each!

It was pretty late, so we went over the street to the Secret Garden hostel which is very popular with proper backpackers (unlike us!) and got some dinner and a drink. A couple of the German girls from Montanita were there also, they had just returned from the jungle!

We didn't stay for long and we're very soon back at our hostel and tucked up in bed. Travelling days can be exhausting!!