Date: 02/02 – 03/02
City: Pasto, Columbia
Kilometres ridden: 0
Cumulative kilometre: 32794

Not much happened the next two days. I updated our blog and we discussed our future plans. The temperature here was cold and the weather rainy and not much to see apart from the volcano nearby, and riding in rain to a cloudy volcano didn’t appeal much.

So we went to the nearest shopping centre, replenished our food reserves and had a lazy evening. On the way to the shopping centre we found some horses roaming on the road.

Date: 04/02
City: San Gabriel, Ecuador
Kilometres ridden: 140
Cumulative kilometre: 32934

We didn’t start too early today. We took a couple of pictures of our accommodation in the hope that in the rain would stop in the meantime, but it didn’t.

So we stared with our complete raingear on and rode out of the town. After a while the rain turned into drizzle and then stopped all together. We went to the view point to see the church built into a mountain wall and took a couple of pictures

Then we continued to the border. The border crossing took a while; first the Colombian customs officer would like to see our bikes, which meant we had to ride back to the DIAN office which was at the beginning of the border. After we did this, he was busy… So it took a while before we got the paperwork through. After the Colombian customs office was happy we went to migration to get our exit stamp into the passport, no problem at all.

And off we went to the Ecuador migration to get our passport stamped, which didn’t take very long. Now we had to get our bikes imported, so off we went to Customs. Here it took a while; we were waiting for ages before the customs officer started to process our bikes. First we needed a copy of our passports with the just acquired immigration stamp. So I went to get a copy. Sigrid was occupying our place in the customs office, so nobody else could squeeze in. When I came back with the copies, the migration officer noticed that the computer was not working so he had to go to another office. So we went with him and he started to process our bikes. We had all the copies but it took a while to enter the data into the computer, in the meantime it started to rain. So we continued our trip in heavy rain. After a while it got easier, luckily the roads in Ecuador are good!

When we filled up our bikes (1 gallon – 1.45US$, so for both our bikes we paid 10$, that is cheap!), we asked the staff there for a hotel. They described it, and after some driving around town we found the first one, but.. it didn’t have secure bike parking and no internet. They had, however suggested another hostel. So we continued to the next hostel, and this one was great. We tried to dry our cloth but no heater was available and it was cold. It was still raining heavily so we got our rain jackets on and went/ran for dinner. We had a nice meal in the local restaurant and it cost for both of us 7U$. I think with these petrol, hotel and restaurant prices we can easily stick to our budget :D.

Date: 05/02

City: Quito, Ecuador
Kilometres ridden: 196
Cumulative kilometre: 33130

When we started in the morning it was cloudy and fresh, but it didn’t rain.

We put our wet gear on anyway; it keeps the draft out and makes it more comfortable to ride in cold weather. It didn’t rain during the morning so we had a short break around lunch time. When we got ready to continue my motorcycle jacket zipper broke!
Great, so much to BMW quality…. For the rest of the day I left the BW jacket open and put the rain jacket on top of it, which works well as long it doesn’t get hot.

As we continued towards the equator we almost missed it! I assumed there would be a marker on the Pan American highway, but there was really nothing except the mountain road. When the GPS showed that we passed the equator we stopped at the next possible place and turned around.

There we did our equator dance http://www.facebook.com/RidingAroundTheWorld?ref=hl#!/photo.php?v=347150135399344

Once this ceremony was completed, we continued to Quito where we had booked a room in a hostel that was highly recommended by Franz and Marika, the motorcycle couple that we meet in Cartagena. When we arrived at the hostel, we notice that we had the wrong date, we booked the room for tomorrow and they didn’t have any room free and only one place in the dormitory. Rodney, the receptionist, made some calls, but nothing was free. We jumped on the bike and found a hostel not far from here, so we booked it for one night. The rooms were colourful and the bike could easily be securely parked.

We noticed that it got really cold here at night night, which was a bit different compared to the weather in the last few months.

Date: 06/02
City: Quito, Ecuador
Kilometres ridden: 0
Cumulative kilometre: 33130

We had breakfast and moved out around noon to the Hostel Casa Helbling where we meet Klaus, the owner. He made us feel welcome and he was happy for us to leave the bikes during our trip to the Galapagos Islands. We tried to organise stuff around all the broken equipment- helmet visor and jacket. In the meantime the travel agent came back and gave us a list of available trips. We picked one for tomorrow- the same that I’d seen earlier on the internet. There was only one problem -the payment. Credit card did not quite work, so Willi (our travel agent from Switzer land) suggested to meet at a bank to get is all sorted. To cut a long story short it did not work – we are going to have to pay via Commonwealth bank. Willi will continue to book the flight and the boat trip, worst case scenario is that we pay after. In that case Klaus would put a chain around the bikesJ.

Willi sent us all the details and everything was sorted with Simons help (he jumped on Skype and got us the bank key immediately so I could start an international bank transfer).

All was sorted, only packing for tomorrow, storing all the gear we won’t need and making Anna’s birthday video were left….So we started with the packing, went to dinner to the Chinese shop next door, finished everything and went to bed shortly after midnight.

Galapagos tomorrow!