1/26/2024 0 Comments Scotland purple doritos![]() ![]() The drama intensifies: will I reach the right bus station in time? ![]() The first driver I hailed quoted a $15 fare and said it would take an hour to make the journey to Terminal Carcelen,: ‘ Es muy lejos, señorita‘, he said. I didn’t think I had enough time for catching the public bus – a quick glance at my phone told me it was already 9.05am, and my bus left at 10am – so I headed back to the taxi rank I’d just left. ‘Twenty five minutes away,’ he said, his finger pointing to a public bus sign which read, ‘Terminal Terrestre Carcelen’. I asked a security guard where the other bus station in Quito was. The realisation quickly hit that I was in the wrong place. I was at Terminal Quitumbe in the south of Quito. And this wasn’t the station where I’d bought my onward ticket the night before. Except when my taxi driver pulled up at a bus station and demanded his $8 payment, we’d only been driving for twenty minutes. I jumped in a cab at 8.45am and settled back in my seat, taking in my last glimpses of Ecuador’s capital. She assured me yes, and that I’d better leave pretty soon because it took almost an hour to get there. “That’s the one that’s at least a half hour drive from here, right?” I hastened to add. I’d bought the ticket for my journey to the border the night before – when I’d arrived at one of Quito’s bus stations fresh off a bus from Guayaquil – so I was adequately prepared for the day ahead.Įxcept somehow, in the midst of that tired arrival, I’d forgotten to check the name of the bus station I’d bought my ticket in.Īs I was checking out, I asked the helpful girl at my hostel which station sent its buses to the Ecuador Colombia border. ![]() I awoke in the top bunk of a hostel bed in Quito, packed the few things I’d withdrawn from my backpack, and headed downstairs for a quick breakfast before getting a taxi to the bus station. The drama begins: which Quito bus station goes to the border? And I was probably too smug about how familiar it felt – familiar enough to stop paying attention to my surroundings. Terminal Terrestre Quitumbe takes passengers to destinations south of Quito like Cuenca, Guayaquil, Baños, Riobamba and Tena, which happen to be most of the places where travellers want to visit.ĭuring the five months I’d been living in Ecuador, I’d passed through the Quitumbe bus station a lot. Terminal Terrestre Carcelen is where you catch a bus to destinations in the north of Ecuador: places like Otavalo, Mindo and Tulcan. As you might imagine, there’s several miles and hundreds of congested streets between them. Although there used to be just one central bus station called Cumanda, nowadays there are two major inter-provincial stations: Terminal Carcelen in the north of the city and Terminal Quitumbe in the south. Quito is a huge city which can be split into three sections: the Centro Historico in the middle, the north (Norte) district above and the south (Sur) district below. Because of both its size and location, Quito acts as a central hub for journeys all across the country. Cheese Doritos: the principal figure in this dramaĪ little backstory to Quito’s two bus terminalsīefore my story starts, you should know something about the bus system in Quito, Ecuador. ![]()
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