I am home now, but thought all of you would still like to know about Quito!
After spending most of the day wandering around Cuenca, I caught a night
bus to Quito on the evening of 3/21. The bus was supposed to be about
10-12 hours, arriving in Quito around 6am, although we left late. There
was a nice Quiteño waiting for the same bus with me in the bus
company´s lobby and we had a really good long conversation in Spanish!
It is so funny how sometimes my Spanish seems so good and I can
understand everything someone is saying and can come up with full
sentences! It made me feel really good about the Spanish I have picked
up on this trip (and remembered from high school I suppose too). Anywho,
I was delighted to observe that the bus seats reclined really far and
that there were very few people on the bus so it would be a nice quiet
place to
sleep. HA. I don´t think the bus had shocks anymore, most of the
highway to Quito wasn´t paved, we made stops about every 20 minutes, and
there was a police checkpoint where the police office had a lot of
trouble finding my Ecuador entrance stamp in my passport. He found it
finally, luckily. In addition, the co-pilot kept turning up the marachi
music until it was blaring and he would turn the lights on every 20
minutes when the bus stopped for more people. Needless to say, I didn´t
sleep well. We made a stop around 5am and I fell asleep immediately
with the bus being stopped. It turns out it was Quito! After who knows
how long, the driver got back and tapped me on the shoulder. I thought
it was another police checkpoint and was reaching for my passport when I
realized that it was the driver, not a police officer! I jumped up,
and seeing that I was the only person on the bus, ran outside to
get my luggage. In the process, I lost my water bottle and had to get
back on the bus and crawl around on the floor looking for it. I found
it luckily! I caught a cab to the hostel and discovered that the guard
on duty (reception wasn´t open yet) had lost my reservation. He put me
in a double room to let me sleep. Once reception opened, they located
my room and everything was sorted out. I had a really nice 3 hours of
sleep though in the nice big queen-sized bed! After all this, I decided
to wander about the city. Well, I pretty much saw everything in an
afternoon except for a few museums and a church I want to go to! First, I
walked down to the Centro Histórico, a UNESCO World Heritage site. It
was nice, but given all the fabulous sounding talk I´ve heard, I think
maybe I was just a little bit disappointed. There are lots of pretty
little white-washed colonial churches and brightly painted
colonial buildings. The streets in the area are also
cobble-stone, but there was so much traffic. I went into La Compañia
de Jesus, considered one of Ecuador´s most beautiful churches and for a
good reason. I have never seen so much gold ever! It was a decent
sized church and EVERYTHING was painted in gold! The ceiling, the
walls, the humongous baroque-ish heavy altar, the pillars. So much
gold! It was really beautiful. The altar was so impressive- layers and
layers of spikes and spires with the inevitable saint´s bones
integrated in there somehow. And no colonial era, baroque style church
is complete without a collection of gory paintings depicting the martyrs
and the worst pits of hell so I got to admire those as well.
Unfortunately, I was not allowed to take photos so you just have to
believe me! After this I wandered a bit more til I got to a sketchy
looking neighborhood and then turned back to walk into new town. I
strolled through
several city parks and along busy, congested streets lined with Quito´s
major businesses and hotels. I had a really good lunch at a Vietnamese
place, found the best stocked grocery store I´ve seen in all of South
America and then wandered on back to the hostel. The restaurant at the
hostel served dinner, which I skipped except for the dessert of course
which was a delicious, bright red ginger and beetroot cake! It was so
yummy.
On 3/23 I set off in the morning for the northern
neighborhoods of new town to check out a few parks and the natural
sciences museum. The museum was fairly uneventful- lots of big ol
jungle bugs, creepily enormous spiders, and pretty butterflies bigger
than my hand. There were also a handful of cool rocks from the region.
The best part was a poster describing a recent macroinvert study in
Ecuador´s rivers. They concluded that 72.6% of rivers in the country
are considered
clean, high quality habitat for their fisheries and what not, while
only about 6% were considered critically compromised. That was cool to
see! After the museum I walked up a giant hill forever to a overlook of
a valley with a pretty church. I walked back to the hostel in the
afternoon and hung out in the bar chatting with the other travelers.
On
the morning of 3/24, I took a free walking tour of old town since I
walked through it before, but without any information on the history of
anything. First we went to the massive Basílica del Voto Nacional,
Ecuador´s biggest church. It is built in the classic style of all
massive European cathedrals, except instead of using gargoyles to guard
it´s 140m tall walls, the builders used animals from all parts of
Ecuador. So there are guinea pigs, pumas, tortoises, and iguanas
decorating the outside! Inside is so big. It´s one of those buildings
that is so big you
don´t even feel like you are inside of something. There were lots of
stained glass windows incorporating indigenous symbols such as maíz and
orchids instead of bloody martyrs which I thought was really unique and
nice for a change. The next hour we just strolled through old town,
much of which I have seen already, but with the guide providing history
and what not this time. In the Plaza Grande at the center of old town,
there were hundreds of people gathered on the lawn and cobblestone plaza
area waiting for the president to come out on the balcony of the
presidential palace and speak. There were also about 30 heavily armed
guards in army fatigues and berets standing solemnly at the entrace of
the palace. We also saw the VP´s car drive by, but only the driver was
still inside. After the tour, I got another tour of the interior of the
presidential palace, seeing the banquet room, many gifts from foreign
dignitaries and a room full of portraits of all the past presidents. On
returning to the hostel, I learned that another 5 people had been
robbed that day in Quito (basically, 1 in 5 people in my hostel were
robbed in Quito) and one girl had lost EVERYTHING- passport, credit and
debit cards, any and all forms of ID she had had and a DSLR camera!
Yuck. One poor Dutch kid had his passport stolen then a week later his
jacket and money stolen and then 13 hours later his camera stolen (and
this was the camera he bought to replace his original camera that was
stolen in Bolivia). The guy had more police reports than I had travel
documents! After hearing all these stories, I was basically just
counting down the hours til I was on the plane! I slept in the airport
and caught my flight with no problems! No mugging for Megan!
Stay tuned for one last entry about my trip favorites. It's great to be home!
