Ecuador

I'm not principally in this country to travel or explore, but after a week of Quito's buses spurting suffocating black smoke at you and people stalking up to you at all hours to sell you something or steal everything you have, the country outside the capital city is more than a little bit tempting. So at the weekends, we go places.

Leaving Quito in any direction is always an experience - the city draws your eyes into it, and there is seldom time to stare up at the horizon, but we really are surrounded by mountains, and as we drive out of the city the Andes yawn open, the valleys drop away below and the peaks sore up into the sky. Not far from Quito, up the enormous valley known as the Volcano Avenue, is the hostel we stayed at when we went to climb Corazon, Illinizes and, finally, Cotopaxi. It's a converted farm, and it's lovely, but the main attraction is the views. From the front gates the entire width of the Avenue gapes up at you, with Quito swimming in smog, dammed up against the Pichincha volcanoes before the Avenue begins its 2800m descent to the sea. At the other end, the valley snakes up into the Central Highlands (they have them here too!) where it is flanked by Cotopaxi, Antisana and, eventuall, Cayambe. On the opposite side of the Avenue to the hostel is a huge three-peaked ridge, part of the edge of the crater of a long extinct volcano, and, rising shear up to over 4000m, it cuts into the sky as if a section of the sky has been torn off the scene. It makes for some pretty impressive sunsets.

The Teleferico, a cable car, rises straight out of Quito to 4200m, and from this point it is possible (we discovered) to make the ascent of the Volcano Rucu Pichincha (dangerous - 3 people have died on it since we climbed it, all as a result of not taking a guide...neither did we) in a day. As the cable car ascends almost vertically out of the city, and the eyes drift from the streets and blocks below to the mountains on the other side of the city, the Andes really hit home. Quito, so demanding, so imposingly dangerous, is dwarfed and then swallowed as you reach the end of the cable car, leaving only the climbing peaks and a vast abyss to show where the city nestles below. At the top, a bowl-like plateau prevents us from looking down, forcing the eyes up at the peaks, but a short (but very, very hard) walk takes us to the ridge, where the Andes stretch out and the belief that a capital city could possibly be so close is tested to its limit.

But the Andes aren't all this lifeless majesty, and lower where the altitude permits life a different kind of scene awaited us. Driving down to the coast on the way to the beach we reached the cloud forest at dusk. Cloud forest is basically rainforest, but higher up, on mountains, and very, very cloudy. At dusk, it was amazing. From the road, clinging to the side of one of the precariously steep mountains, the view up the hillside was straight into a cloud, from which the twisted branches of rainforest trees and vines give a ghostly definition to the hill, implying a vast depth to the turmoil of grey-green the masked the ground itself. Out the other window of the bus the valley plunged down out of sight, so steeply that the other wise of the valley was only a hundren yards or so away, but the drop was immense. Of the other side, only the faintest definition of the hillside could be seen, but much higher up the clouds admit a glimpse of more tangled limbs reaching out through the murk. Again, higher, another sliver of floating forest, and higher up, another, each one further up and further away, leaving neither doubt nor actual proof of the mountain's incredible size. Higher, just above the highest greyscaled knitting of far off branches, the sun, glowing huge and red through the cloud, is setting behind the peak, defining it perfectly for a moment and shooting off blood red beams into the clouds before setting completely, and leaving us to the tangle of undergrowth at the sides of the road, seeming to get nearer and nearer as the light fades.

The coast itself, when we finally got there, is like a different world. Palm trees, or vast stretches of desert-like wilderness, and the world eventually severed by the beach. The Pacific Ocean, too vast to comprehend, cuts half the concern out of life - while the world goes on on one side of this terrible border, the other world, the other half of everything that you perceive, everything you sense and acknowledge is this eternal rhythm of the sea. It's not like the Atlantic, which one can imagine sailing over to America, nothing like the Channel or the North Sea, spotted with ships and oil rigs - with the Pacific, the horizon is where the Earth curves out of sight.

There is more left to see - the erupting volcano at Baños, where every night from a viewpoint searing orange and red lava floes can be seen worming down the mountainside, the Amazon basin where it steps out from behind the shoulder of the Andean Cordilleras, and the Andes themselves where they meet Peru, and the mountains turn dark as they slope Southward to Machu Pichu and Chile, far, far beyond...

With any luck...