A challenging ride!!

We left Mindo and headed north but took a more difficult route to avoid Quito. The owner of our hostel recommended what looked like a worse route on our map (grey instead of white). Whether it was, we shall never know...

The road started with lovely new twisty tarmac but then changed to a good track as we knew it would. Using our phone's GPS we could see where we were but had no idea of which 'roads' were the better ones to take. The scenery was lovely through the jungle cloud forest.

The track deteriorated with mud and then very rocky sections, some quite steep, inching the bike down using the front brake. As always, the question enters your head, do we carry on or turn back?

A quick chat with a local revealed that the road will improve - well sort of!

The road did improve but was still terrible!

We then reached a crossroads, dirt road to the right (our map says tarmac) and tarmac straight on (our map says dirt)! We took the narrow tarmac road into the clouds over a mountain pass. The weather deterioated to cold cloud/fog. However, the tarmac disappeared without warning every now and then - see below!

We eventually made it to Otavalo after a ride of about 7 hours, covering only about 175 km!