Brittni’s Blog

We thought about taking some more stops along the way, but since we’ve been hearing the beautiful beaches on the Caribbean calling out to us, we decided to do a straight shot from Quito to Cali, giving us another 21 hours of bus, bus, bus! (Writing this now I’m on the beach and can say it was worth it.) Cali is well known for being the salsa capital of the world, but unfortunately I’m traveling with the biggest non-dancing, any-excuse-to-avoid-it, two-left-feet bros in the world, so I wasn’t able to appreciate the salsa much. To redeem them I will say that at least I it never takes much effort on my part to get them out for a few beers at a bar and its almost always…mostly…usually…pretty good conversation

We got one funny story from Cali, though. The first night we stayed in a normal, main stream hostel with 10-bunk-bed-style dormitory, bar, etc., and while those are always great for meeting other travelers and having a good time, they aren’t usually the cheapest bed in town. So the first night we were walking around on the street and we met a guy (as usual asking for directions) and he happened to own a “hotel” that was about $5 cheaper than our current hostel. So the next night we move in and at first all looks good. …But after a little while we realize that there are some pretty funny characteristics of this place. For a few examples, the bed has a glowing red light under it (picture below), the bathroom has a window highlighted with blue lights (picture below), the showers have windows looking in on them from the bed, there’s an enormous mirror covering one wall, and instead of soap we got condoms. It wasn’t until later when we took a taxi back to the hotel that the driver told us that in fact its really not a hotel where people sleep, but usually just rent by the hour for….other purposes. If you need more explanation, e-mail me and I’ll spell it out for you.