Iris, a British lady of considerable character and pluck, is on a 23
week overland truck expedition from Quito in Ecuador to Caracas in Venezuela.
After this, she plans to do a 3-month voluntary placement in Ecuador,
and then visit Central America for another overland trip between Panama
City and Mexico City, ending up with perhaps another 2-month voluntary
placement somewhere in South America again. This amazing journey will
take Iris one year. Here is an extract from Iris’ journey notebook.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
27th November 2002
Arrived in Quito at 1730 local time. Met 4 people from Madrid, 4 more
from the UK and 4 others at the hotel and today 7 of them plus me went
to the Equator. It was really hot, sun beating down and some had no hats
and were getting burnt up! On the way back, we had taxi race but my taxi
lost! All told good flight and meeting some great people. Hotel okay –
no spiders or cockroaches in sight! Everything very clean.
Pre-expedition meeting tonight – there are only 41 of us instead of
44 – I am on a truck with 20 others – does that mean I’m on my own
in a tent? Will have to see! (Beetle: we’ll hear a lot more
about this particular aspect of Iris’ trip!)
Left Quito at 1100 hrs after a frenetic time trying to get everything
packed into that locker! 77cm x 40cm x 30cm seems a large space until
you find it is made of hard wood! Everyone had similar problems to me,
but I got mine in with little problems compared to others and some still
haven’t managed to transfer their stuff to their lockers!! It’s
5 hours down to Baños, out first stop (still in Ecuador and we’ll
be here in Baños for 4 nights.
Am sharing with an Australian lady, Judith – 3 yrs older than me but
a kindred spirit. We did our exercises together this morning! Everyone
on the trip is so friendly and we really enjoyed the trip down here together.
The hotel is fine. It appears we will be staying in hotels most of the
time at the moment. We’ve been given a programme for the next 8
weeks (54 nights) and are staying in hotels for 37 of those. Apparently
we start camping after we’ve dropped people off in Santiago in Chile.
We are all longing for the camping to start.
Weather here is changeable at the moment however as it is the rainy
season and today we had our first real rain, which lasted all morning,
but now the sun is out. However, Baños is nestled below an active
volcano, which as I write is spewing forth steam! We saw it from all sorts
of aspects as we approached Baños – I wrote in my journal that
it looks so “innocently menacing”! Black and brooding above
this small town. In the church there are countless paintings depicting
disasters in the past, and when one looked at the earth in the banks on
the way down to the town, it was black earth, obviously from previous
laval deposits. We are chilling out here – all of us, recovering from
the journey to South America and some of us had really fraught times getting
here – Judith, my room-mate came from Australia via London and took four
days of constant travel to get here hours before we were due to leave
Quito! She is really jet-lagged and needs this time to recover.
Activities here are walking (I’ll participate); canyoning (abseiling,
sliding down ropes and swimming) planned for tomorrow (definitely not
for me – as Judith said, if it was the last week of the trip we might
risk it, but this early in? No way!); mountain bike riding (ditto for
canyoning!); rafting (ditto again). Most people, I think, just want to
chill out and renew energy for the remaining 22½ weeks!
If you’d like to contact Iris, whether to wish her luck
with her trip or to ask questions about her itinerary and places visited,
I am sure she would like to hear from you. She can be contacted on: irisej2002@yahoo.co.uk
