It´s raining AGAIN!!

Hi all, not got a great deal to tell you since the weekend as we´ve spent most of the week travelling and mooching about in the rain :-(
On Sunday we left Quito to travel down to Banos, it took about 4 hours on the bus and it was a pretty decent drive.
We arrived and it was grey, cloudy and raining, Banos is not one of the nicest places either (despite what our Rough Guide told us) so in the rain it didn´t look very appealing.
We were hoping to go to the thermal baths too but it was just too cold and miserable so we gave it a miss.
We did find a really nice Italian Restaurant that is popular with travellers and we soon got chatting to an American couple, who we have had trouble shaking as they seem to be everywhere that we are.
I think it´s safe to say we wont be seeing them again now after we left them at Cuenca Bus Terminal last night.
We stayed 2 nights in Banos, the hostel we stayed at was right on the main road and extremely noisey in the evenings/mornings, that coupled with lousey weather was a good excuse not to hang around!
We got the bus for Cuenca yesterday morning, we were up early and at the bus station for 7.50, we bought tickets for the 8.10 bus (even though it said 8am departure on the wall)
It got to 8.30 and there was still no sign of our bus, although the Americans had turned up for the same bus!!
After much aggravation with our bus company and a rival bus company (who had a bus in waiting to leave for Cuenca) and some intervention from a policeman, we were no further on and were advised to wait and the bus would be with us soon.
Anyway it never turned up, we got our money back and got on the bus that had been there since we arrived, which had we have known we would have jumped on originally.
The 1st leg of the bus trip was 2 hours and dropped us off at a dump called Riobamba, it was awful, we were there approx an hour before our 2nd bus turned up to drive us approx 6 hours to Cuenca.
We passed so much poverty on the way here it really does start to drag you down after a while, after our stay in Banos and then the drop off in Riobamba I really was starting to get a bit sick of the place, especially as it never stops raining!!
BUT... all is not lost we arrived in Cuenca at about 6pm last night (still raining) found a FANTASTIC hostel, and it really is a lovely little Colonial Town with lots of nice shops, restaurants and buildings.
It is by far the nicest place we have found in Ecuador.
We also found a decent book shop owned by an American guy so we have been in there this morning swapping a few books and having a chat.
We are here for one more night then we are heading for Loja, which is where we catch the bus that will take us across the border and into Peru, to some decent weather!!
We are hoping to be there by the weekend, we still have a lot of miles to cover.
On the bus yesterday we saw another celeberity lookalike.. It was Ricky Tomlinson!!
It was really funny, he just looked like Jim out of the Royal Family, and to make it more funny he was wearing a chav Adidas tracksuit stuffing crisps into his mouth, he was covered in bits!!
Anyway when he fell asleep I got some pics of him (I know it´s rude) so we will upload them soon.
We are thinking of spending Christmas in Aisia now rather than Oz as we wanted to visit more places and time would have been against us, so we are hoping to visit Vietnam which I´m really looking forward to.
We are both losing weight from all the walking and the lack of chocolate and MASSIVE portions, so were really pleased about that, I dare say we might put it all back on though when we get to Thailand!!
Anyway that´s about it for now, bit of a boring one but will hopefully get a bit more interesting once were not on as many buses and settled in Peru.
Congratulations to Marco and Zoe on the birth of their Son Luca, we got the pics and he is lovely.