Trying to survive at 10.000 feet

until we descend into the jungle tomorrow. This elevation change is crazy. We walked in Quito this morning, which is at 8,000 feet and I felt mostly fine. So fine in fact that in the current town, I decided to walk 2.5 mile to the town at the bottom of the hill and then come back up. 5 steps into the "coming back up" I knew it wasn't going to happen. Climbing back up, I could only go about 20 steps then I was down on one knee panting like a dog and feeling as though I was taking my last breathe. After the third time of this, and it was getting dark, I knew that I would never make and I said the first person to offer us a ride, I'm taking it, I don't care who. Believe it or not at that moment a nice man, his wife, and her mother came around the corner, stopped and looked at us and rolled down the window to ask if we needed a ride! Thank you God.

We left Quito this morning at around 1130 and took a "chicken" bus to the village of Papallacta Hot Springs.This is where my tragedy occurred...heeee. We are staying here overnight, then we will take another chicken bus and descend into the jungle for two nights. That elevation is very low so not altitude to worry about there. The good thing is, my meds have kept me from getting dizzy or physically sick. I only have the shortness of breathe when trying to climb up a hill.

I do have to say this, Ecuador is absolutely beautiful and very clean with only a few stray dogs running about. I mention the dogs because when I went to Russia, they were everywhere. The people here are very nice and helpful. Most do not speak english but some do. Oh and the weather, that opposite season stuff was crap. Now that I am here, the locals say, it is our winter. It was raining last night when I got here and it was raining this morning, although it stopped before our walking tour began. It is colder than anything up here in the mountains, I believe it is in the 50s. For me, that is frigid. But, I have new stuff to look at and great pictures to take so I suppose I will be ok.

Our tour guide, Fernando, a little 25 year old sexy Peruvian, went over our activities for the next 14 days and I thought, man, when I read it, it didn't sound so overwhelming. Now it freaking sound impossible. Get on the bus, get off the bus, go hike, bike, white water rafting, blah blah, then get on a plane, get back on a bus, do a little shopping and then go hone.

About the pictures I promised to post, well you can see that I do have access to the internet, but you cannot see that it is not very fast. It isn't and every time I try to upload my pics, Picasa crashes. So, when we are back in town in a few days, I will try to go to an internet cafe and have them put on disk or something.

Tomorrow we leave Papallacta and head for Tena for our stay in an Amazon village. I doubt that I will have internet access so I will post again in 2-4 days!

Love you all - Hi Marie, you had better be reading this:)