Monday 5th May 2025 El Carmen to El Paraiso
Another pizza last night, at this rate will be turning into an Italian, not so big, so felt better, still enough rooms for some snickers ice cream, in my day it would have been marathon ice cream, love my puddings.

Thankfully the storm had passed over from last night, torrential rain last night, started just as we arrived in El Carmen and did not let off until after we had eaten, great how life just goes on with water cascading down the roads like a full flowing river, all the street stalls carrying on selling, what ever they sell, if it happened in the UK, the place would come to a standstill.

Still really humid in the morning, looks pretty stormy, but you never know as we set off, just after 6 in the morning, slight adjustment needed on my brakes, realised that I could not stop very well yesterday, not good, but soon sorted, with a little bit of tweaking. Not far today, few things in mind, first thing is to get past the large City Santo Domingo, so that’s the plan get to outskirts of the city, have a coffee then decide what we are going to do, seems a bit to sensible for us though. Nice little coffee stop, just on the edge of Santo Domingo, even that sounds like a pizza name, old gentleman was interested in the bikes, he spoke that fast, i could not understand him, but he got the jist of what we was up to, big shake of the hands, as we left.

We decided to take the E25 ring road around the city, good call, still busy but following traffic, would have been a nightmare going through the centre, soon back on the other side of the city, now we need to decide how far we are going to go, bearing in mind we are only 70 odd miles from Quito now, meeting Charlie, Max & Lyle there on Saturday, then Sandra is joining us on Monday, before we all fly out to the Galápagos Islands, all very exciting, so Bingo and I, have no reason to rush, just take it all in. With that in mind, we stopped for another coffee in a small hotel along the side of the, bit posh for us, but thought we could stretch to a coffee.

There are a few places dotted about the place, further up the road, around the small village El Paraiso, headed for that, soon found a little place willing to take us in, nice and clean, with a bar and restaurant next door, happy days. All booked in, showered and washed the kit, what we going to do now then, have a beer and dinner sounds like a plan.

Lazy afternoon, bit of maintenance on the bikes and a well earned clean, ready for a couple of days of serious climbing again.