Alausí, Ecuador

So, back to normal posts....and thank you for surviving my last edition =)  And well, sooner or later you may have to go through another one, who knows :)

But for the time being, will focus on places I haven't been to but would LOVE to go to...and for which I have my dear buddies to send me postcards from...and of course make me feel all jealous about it :P

And for starters we have a card from Ecuador, which maybe wouldn't have seen the light of the day for a while more if like a week ago or so I didn't come across this post at the PC forum about the offer of cards from Ecuador...well I do have a few from there, so I was wondering if I should take part in it...but when I read they were to be sent from the US, I wasn't really interested...HOWEVER it just got me curious to check how many Ecuador cards I have posted....and I come here, check the Ecuador label, and to my utter bewilderment, I see only ONE...posted in July 2010...and that one is not even a written and stamped one....I thought it must be some mistake since I KNOW Agi has sent me cards from there from her trips...I check again and again, but no, no Ecuador cards posted...and then of course, I go through those piles of unpublished cards, and guess what? There they are!! Yep!!! A HUGE face-palm for me here! I can't believe it I could have been such an idiot and totally overlook those....and that makes me wonder that if I go carefully through those piles, what all sorts of 'surprises' I'm gonna find.....

So dear ladies and gentlemen, my first written and stamped card from Ecuador on the blog...sent in November 2010....yeah, you read it right...2010...neglected for like almost 6 years....I wonder if Agi has ever noticed I never posted these Ecuador cards....yeah, there is another one from few years later...as if the embarrassment wasn't enough already =/

Well dear Agi, I don't wanna make excuses with cliches like 'better late than never'...but I don't really have another one :)))))

The card shows a super-cool tourist train in Alausí, a town in the Chimborazo province of Ecuador.
Yes, it is a train - a small one, but so cool and funny :) I don't know if Agi in the end did take a ride on it, but she said that one is not allowed to sit on the roof any longer - heh, that is a bit of a bummer, if I was the one to take a ride, I would have loved to sit on the roof - it is just more adventurous....but I guess probably due to safety reasons, some measures had to be enforced....don't know if it is me though, but the people on the roof here seem to be freezing...yeah, on my second thought, not so convenient for rainy/windy days :)

two very nice stamps and a clear cancellation - the left one is from a set of four Tourism stamps issued in 2010, representing the diversity of Ecuador (this one shows Playa Los Frailes). The other stamp is another Tourism stamp, this time issued in 2009 in a set of eight stamps.

Agi, jedno najveće hvala opet, eto nakon toliko godina :)

Galapagos Islands, Ecuador

Well, I seem to be really out of shape lately when it comes to updating...either im busy with something or just in such a crappy mood that I dont feel like doing anything...and that unfortunately includes postcard-related stuff..
But you know, usually when Im just silent like that, I bring you a nice treat for starters...and this time I decided to share with you this fantastic map card from the Galapagos Islands which came to me as a surprise :)

It may not be originally coming from Ecuador, but it is more than a fantastic card to own and have it in my map-card collection :)
The back of the card says: "They are wild animals and treat them with respect AND BE CAREFUL".
It refers to all those animals you can find presented on the card...I will skip the listing in order to avoid making mistakes in the naming.
When I was little, I was collecting this animals' album, Životinsko carstvo (by the Croatian Kraš), or in English it would be called The Animal's Kingdom, where I was introduced to many of the world's animals, and I recall that one of the animals I was extremely fascinated with was the Galapagos tortoise...coz compared to the tortoises I knew, these ones were just huuuuugeee....and looked scary to a little child...I often wondered if they could eat me :)
Here is how one looks like...not something I would like to meet face to face :)
The tortoise is also portrayed on the card...if you take a look you will spot it on the right side, among Santa Fe, Santa Cruz and Seymor Norte Baltra. If Im not mistaken, it has an iguana on its back, or some sort of another creature from the lizard family.

Thanks a million to Sissel for this fantastic card!