Quito days

Arriving in Quito at 11 o'clock at night I noticed that my foot was starting to get a little tight in my shoe. At the hostel I took off the shoe and was greeted by a very, very big bright red foot. Taking this as a bad sign I went off to bed with the determination to go down to the clinic in the morning if things hadn't improved over night, as with long bus and plane rides your feet tend to swell up anyway. In the morning it had turned kind of purplish and there was now a dark blue circle where the bite had been, definitely time to go to the clinic.......

In the clinic the doctor took one look at it and sent me straight upstairs to the hospital to go on an antibiotic drip, and this was where I would spend the next four days, watching TV in spanish, eating mushy, salty food and pretending to understand what the nurses and doctors were saying. There were maybe ten different nurses and four doctors coming in from time to time, each saying and doing different and sometimes seemingly contradictory things, which had me a little worried, especially when they would do things like forgetting to turn the drip on, plugging the tubes into the wrong spots, etc......

I did have a private room though, with a nice view of the city

The worst part was on the second last day when one of the doctors popped the pimple thing on my foot. By now it was a big purple lump about as big as a 50 cent (Australian) coin and of course the pus was way down deep inside, needing a good twenty minutes of digging around with a needle and tweezers to get it out. It actually made a loud popping sound too, gross.

After two days of antibiotics


Still, on the fourth day I walked out into the sunshine feeling a hell of a lot better and got straight onto my insurance company to pay the bill ($1147 for four days!!).

After being out for a couple of days my right arm where the drip had been was still swollen and sore so it was back again to the clinic, this time it was just a bad reaction to the drugs in the drip and they gave me some creams to put on it for a few days, after which it felt a lot better, although my vein is still rock hard now, almost a month later.

While I was waiting for the insurance company to pay out and to be able to go and collect my passport from the clinic (it was being held ransome!) I was lucky enough to be staying in a great hostel with a really cool bunch of people. Every day we would go out and do something, and Quito is actually a pretty good choice of city to get stuck in, with a world heritage listed historic centre, huge mountain peaks with great hiking all around and a big backpacker party scene. This was all helped along nicely by free rum and coke three nights a week in the hostel, with 24hr toasted sandwiches in the TV room......

At the hostel getting ready for a night out



One of the must do's in Quito: the equator line! (the real equator is actually 1km away)




In the basilica tower with Ramses, Carrie and Denny from the hostel



Stairs up were a bit dodgy though (on the outside of the tower...)







The santuario de Jesus, with over seven tonnes of gold leaf!






Up the Teleferico two and a half kilometres above Quito to the start of the Rucu Pichincha (4700m) hike (I did this twice as acclimatization runs for Cotopaxi)


Rucu Pichincha

the friendly eagle eyeing off Denny's sandwiches



The summit

It would be almost two weeks from when I got out of hospital to when the insurance paid out and I could collect my passport, so with little left to do in the city and most of my friends moving on I left town for two days to climb Cotopaxi (5897m) a huge, snowclad, active volcano two hours from town......