Kathleen
Ecuador – Quito
June 13, 2014
We flew out of Armenia, Columbia (which was amazing after the long bus ride there) to Quito, the capital of Ecuador. It is a surprise to realize that we have now entered the last country we will be visiting on this stage of our world trip! Quito has just built themselves a shiny new international airport which has all of the bells and whistles, but they failed to complete necessary roadwork to route folks from the major city. Since there is a very large gorge between the airport and the city, this means that all of the traffic needs to go over one bridge which has only two lanes (one in each direction) and the bottleneck is huge. Quito is a city of XXXX people, so between the bridge work and our luck in arriving at rush hour it took over an hour to get to our vacation rental/guest house in the old town area of the city.
Quito is naturally a beautiful city. Another city built in and among many hills, with colorful buildings and houses cascading up and down each and every one of them. There are many opportunities for climbing up to fabulous views. The hill we stayed on had a famous Mary Angel (??) statue at the top, and seemingly thousands of stairs to take you there. The climb was worth it though because the view was fantastic. We found a restaurant near the top and treated ourselves to lunch with a view. Another highlight was climbing up in the towers of the cathedral. You could climb up in both clock towers and a beautiful filagree tower in the middle. We played around up there for over an hour and took lots of great pictures.
On Saturday, we were able to hire a driver to take us to nearby Otovalo, which has a world-famous Saturday market (so they told us). It seems as if the whole town is made up stalls selling everything from underwear to local fruits to art and even Steve and I (who are notiorious for being able to resist buying things when we travel) managed to come away with several trinkets, two pieces of art, a blanket, a t-shirt and some jewelry. We got to stop at an Incan site on the way out of town where we saw a beautiful waterfall amidst a Eucalyptis forest and some pools that were supposedly made by the Incans for bathing.
Back in Quito, we enjoyed its many lovely squares and parks, a couple of fantastically gaudy churches, some local food (yummy soups here – I had a potato soup with avacado and a chicken, potato, corn and caper soup also with avacado), some cajun food (served up by an ex-pat from New Orleans) and actually a pretty decent Equadorian microw brew (EPA – Also served up by said ex-pat).
You really need to spend a few days in Quito without trying to drive anywhere to be able to appreciate it. The traffic and pollution is really bad. Luckily, we had three full days to spend and travelled only by foot on the second and third. We aren’t sure what kind of fuel the busses use in Quito, but the exhaust is black and deadly looking. There are a couple of electric bus lines, but small relative to the number of folks using the busses as their primary source of transportation. By the time we headed for the airport at 6:30 AM the day we flew out, we had almost forgotted how horrible the drive was. It took us even longer to get back to the airport than it had taken to get into town at rush hour on Friday. The government is in process of finishing a new road and bridge that should make this process less painless as well as starting to implement restrictions on vehicle traffic in the city. We hope they keep up the good work because Quito is lovely with very nice weather and a delightful destination to visit.
