Carnaval in Santa Marta (Caribbean Coast, Colombia) is a much more down-home affair than in Barranquilla. photo ©Lorraine Caputo

It’s been several weeks without dry clothes in this high-altitude city during the rainy season. It hasn’t been because of the daily storms – oh, no.

It is Carnaval.

Every morning, we leave the hostel in Quito’s Centro Histórico and walk to a restaurant on Plaza Santo Domingo for breakfast. On García Moreno, near the Arco de la Reina, a woman sits aside a low, makeshift stand setup. Her wares are water-filled balloons, old IV bottles filled with water, buckets of water. A man hands her some sucres and launches a balloon at a friend awaiting a bus.

As obvious foreigners, we also get doused – both coming and going from breakfast.

We change into dry clothes before heading out to see the sites, like the equator at Mitad del Mundo…