Welcome to our travel blog. We are Tabitha and Nic. In 2011 we 'retired' in our early 40s and set off to travel the world. We spent our first year in South America and have been lucky enough to make two trips to Antarctica.

Our blog is a record of our travels, thoughts and experiences. It is not a guide book, but we do include some tips and information, so we hope that you may find it useful if you are planning to visit somewhere we have been. Or you may just find it interesting as a bit of armchair travel.



Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Riobamba and bananagrams

We left Cuenca at the more civilised time of 9:30.  The drive to our stopover at Riobamba was long and not especially interesting.

We passed some of the time with a few games of Bananagrams.  The game has a tiles with letters on and you each take a set of tiles and play a sort of individual scrabble. You have to use all of your tiles up and then call 'peel' and then everyone has to take another tile.  This carries on until there are no more tiles, and the first person to finish using all their tiles and call 'bananas' is the winner.  I was playing this with Nic, who is always good at these games, and Leon, who whilst his English is excellent, is at a definite disadvantage being Dutch.

The game is good fun and once you get going there us always a point where one person is able to keep using their tiles quickly and so the 'peel' call goes out almost continually.  This is find for the person calling, but for those struggling to use their tiles - normally because they've picked up the Js, Qs, Xs and Zs, it us a nightmare because you don't have time to even think while this is going on.  But everyone gets stuck at some point, and often in the final moments Nic and I would be almost neck and neck to finish and call bananas.  Leon didn't really get a look in, but he was learning some new words, and did not get at all dispondent about it.  He said later that his aim isn't to win, but just to actually get to be the one to say 'peel' at least once!
We arrived in Riobamba around 4:30pm and I was sufficiently tired that I decided to have a short nap - and ended up asleep until 8pm.  We wandered around the closest part of town for a while, seeing a funeral going on, doors wide open with a group of mourners outside chatting.  It seemed no less sad an occasion, just a bit like a combination of a funeral and a wake together.  We continued past the hoards of partying fifteen year olds, and then found a deli that was serving food and ate there.
Riobamba is not really a town to visit, but it was a necessary stopover on the journey to Chugchilan.

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