Loved ginger Hated Ginger

Arrived back from the Galapagos and met a woman by the name of Nez. She was eastern european but had no facial hair.

She ¨took¨ me to the cultural centre /old city in quito for the first time one night. Nez was an interesting character who seemed to have a slightly inflated sense of direction (this is toned down cause she is now my friend on face book and might read this).

We attempted to reach one of the main squares for a concert that she saw them setting up in the afternoon. We caught (what I later realised) was really the wrong trolley line for getting to the old city. We end up somewhere she didn´t know but luckily her spanish was good enough to get us headed in the right direction.

Rather than catching a taxi we did something no guide book would recommend, walk through the old city at night (930 or so). After walking about a km up the hill (all the time she was sure we were going in the right direction...) passing 40 year olds sniffing glue from plastic bags and some other shifty looking locals we decided we wanted a taxi but to no avail there were none.

Eventually locals who told us we ¨shouldn´t be walking in this area at night¨ pointed us in the right direction and after about 30 minutes we reached an amazing colonial plaza with great lighting and a funky ska concert.

She could be forgiven if the next morning with another person on the way to a museum she hadn´t tried to point us again in totally the wrong direction luckily the other woman (michelle loved her) was firm and took up my amazing race challenge of a beer for getting us there without looking at the map.

All in am tempted to give her HATED due to the lack of facial hair but she was a really nice person and also the concert was great so she gets LOVED HER.

The first (and hopefully not most notorious) person on my list is Yong im a thirty something american woman who with justification hated having her name pronounced incorrectly.

The only problem was that Yong im intentionally did things which she knew fine well would piss people off and pretended she didn´t notice.

I saw amazing things on the galapagos islands. And despite the cost (Yong´s favourite subject as she was determined to let everyone know that she had paid the least for the boat tour) it was totally worth it .....LOVED it.

Blue footed boobies....Yong im´s back while she took 10 photos of the bird, tortoises....Yong im´s back. Frigate birds performing their mating ritual of puffing out a massive red neck flap.. yong im looking sneakily over her shoulder to see if she was going to walk in front of someone´s view, realising she was going to and then creeping apologetically pretending not to notice.

The problem with this tactic was that when you creep apologetically you admit guilt Yong im (oh and yes I meant that hard G you inconsiderate twat).

Needless to say

HATED HER.

Karen and Alex lebovic/eifler

Galapagos honeymoooners who didn´t need too much time to themselves (except for one blatantly obvious after lunchtime effort). NB the foreplay was a sort of dinner table spooning which involved a headlock....must try this sometime.

Bickered like they had been married for years not days but looked like they genuinely had a chance of lasting forever.

On the last night shared a priceless moment on the back deck with this couple (and a few others) where a sea lion had swam from the shore and decided that jumping into our dinghy was a good spot to spend the night. With his/her head rested on the front of the boat looking sorry for himself he just screamed

¨I is sea sick¨...which karen aptly captured.

LOVED THEM.

When weighing up all the factors of visiting locations at this stage I think it comes down to it was
a)worth it
b) not worth it

You can try and grade things by how much they cost or just how beautiful they were but for brevity (and sometimes entertainment) I like the approach of loved it hated it.

Keep things nice and simple, black and white...just like life?

Seeing as I´m so pessimistic I think I´d prefer to have a whole heap of HATED it in my memories. However seeing as some many of the places I think I´ll visit will be worth it/fall into the loved it category I think its easier to incorporate the people I´ve met into the places I´ve been.

So far we have a few mentionables.