Cycling in the Andes on an average altitude of 3000 metres.
The preparation for this trip was quite a short one and started on the other side of the world. We were preparing for a bicycle trip on Sri Lanka when a new offensive against the government was started and both sides started throwing more and more bombs. In our preparations Sri Lanka had won by a few arguments (warmth and Buddhism) from Ecuador so when the security on Sri Lanka became an issue the decision to go to Ecuador was quickly made. We changed our schedule to cycle through Ecuador and immediately came to the conclusion we were not quite trained for this trip. Because of our former experience in cycling, we assumed we would be able to manage. We would see as we went along. Since the moment we had booked the flights, it had kept on raining. It had rained without interruption for the some weeks, and it had rained 5x average volume of rain in a month.
We had
never cycled in Southern America and had never cycled on an average level
of 3000 metres. After a stupid mistake in our tickets about the allowed
kilograms, and paying for overweight, we were aloud to take our bicycles
into the plane. After a smoothly (:-)) and quite boring flight we arrived
in Quito. Since we are used to living an altitude of about 6 metres above
sea level, we were a bit anxious of the altitude of Quito. The altitude
was not as big a problem as I had expected. After arriving, we went to
our hotel and afterwards we went to the magic Bean café to drink coffee
and try to stay awake. There seemed to be only a few tourists in Ecuador,
it was clearly off-season. 
On
the second day we cycled to the old part of the city. Cycling at this
altitude was no big problem. It started raining again, as it had done
yesterday. We imagined this could become quite a wet cycle trip.
We e-mailed home to tell we had arrived safe.
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