Quito (Round 2)

Coming back to Quito was a bit of a shock to the system after the peace and tranquility of the Galápagos Islands.  The cries of birds had once more been replaced with the sounds of horns beeping constantly through the day and night, and the clear sea air seemed to have turned into smog.  Having said that, we had plenty to do in and around the city to keep us busy, so cracked on with it all as soon as we got back.

This started with our trip to Cotopaxi the following morning.  This didn't look good from the outset to be honest - it was drizzling and the clouds were even lower than they had been before we left Quito the first time.  We drove up to the volcano, and quickly realised we had forgotten about the temperature change that comes with altitude, a few more alpaca items were bought at a market stall - because you can never have too many scarves and gloves... We realised we may have been a little ambitious in our attempt to go from sea level to 5000m in less than 24 hours when we stopped at a lagoon for an acclimatisation walk on the flat, and couldn't go more than about 20 steps without feeling dizzy and light headed.  This was at the relatively low altitude of around 3500m.

Regardless we carried on, to the car park at the bottom of the path to the Refugio.  The car park looked like a building site, and the volcano was still shrouded with cloud, but we gave it a go anyway.  The plan was to start out here at 4,500m, and spend an hour climbing to the Refugio, and possibly even the snow line beyond. It soon became apparent that this was not going to happen, we made it up to about 4,750m against the wind, and were not enjoying ourselves.  On learning hat the Refugio no longer served hot chocolate (or anything for that matter), as a new one was being constructed, and our guide having told us that if we couldn't see the volcano we were climbing by now we were not going to if we continued, we decided to cut our losses and headed back down.  One highlight of the walk we did do was seeing a pack of donkeys appear out of the clouds ahead of us coming down the track, they were making the trek up to the new Refugio site heavily laden several times a day.  Determined as ever for a good picture, I came quite close to being knocked off the path by the donkey in the lead, apparently I was in his way, but the picture was worth it :) 

We were on the move again, to a hotel in the Mariscal area of the city - which we immediately liked as they gave us vouchers for a welcome cocktail on arrival! The rest of the afternoon was spent exploring the lively area and watching the world go by, before heading to a trip advisor find for dinner - La Burguesa.  This was a burger with a view, Quito is beautiful by night.  The burgers were awesome, Andy (the connoisseur) rated them as amongst the best he has ever had!

The next day was clear when we woke up - so we went up to try the teleferico again.  The lady confirmed that today there was a vista, so we went up to the top of the hill and were treated to a panoramic view of the city, which really is huge - neither of us can fathom how it only has 2.3 million inhabitants.

The rest of the day consisted of laundry, some shopping and a nap, (travelling is tough you know!) before meeting up with Brandon and Leah, friends from the Galápagos! for dinner and drinks. With no shame we went back to the burger place from the night before - they were *that* good, and it was a big old menu to try!!

The next day was cloud forest day, and another change of hotels.  We left the city and went for miles through the hills to The Mindo cloud forest. First stop was zip lining. We'd heard stories of the bugs from people in the Galápagos, so I was fully prepared, tucking leggings into socks and wearing long sleeves despite the warmth.  Andy wore shorts and a t shirt, and forgot the insect repellent.  You can imagine how well that turned out, at one point his legs were running with blood from the bites. The zip lines were double cables, and the staff managed the brakes, despite this I screamed down every single one and had my eyes closed a fair bit as we swung over the canyons below. Andy loved it of course!

We then moved on to a Orchid garden and to visit the Butterflies and Hummingbirds, all fantastic.  We were in the wrong season for the orchids, but still saw a lot of flowers, including the Dracula and monkey faced orchids (I expect these are not the official names for them). The hummingbirds and toucans were incredible, we could have stayed watching them for hours. They are so tiny and beautifully coloured, and the noise their wings make is quite hypnotic. The butterflies were amazing, so many of them, typically despite trying to get one to come close enough to land on us, when one did we squealed! They're so delicate I wasn't expecting to feel them... It felt exactly like it was, that something was crawling up my neck!!

Smiling through gritted teeth...

Last stop was the chocolate factory, where we learned all about how chocolate is made from cocoa bean to bar. We tried the product at various stages through the process, it really doesn't taste very much like chocolate until very near the end.  The Ecuadorean chocolate is very dark - they don't mix with milk but with the cocoa butter, but even then the cocoa percentage didn't go beneath 65. We were treated to a chocolate brownie at the end and told the recipe... Which consisted of 8 eggs amongst other things. Very gooey!

On leaving Mindo we headed back to our new hotel - up on the side of a volcano crater. This was very desolate, and again shrouded by cloud, so felt quite eerie.  They had pet alpacas wandering around which we were please by, as they were the last of the 4 types of South American camelid we hadn't seen, always nice to have the full set (Alpaca, Llama, Guanaco, Vicuña)!

When the clouds cleared the next morning the view was incredible - you wouldn't even have known what was out there, and then the view just appeared.

Our last stop in Quito, which was pretty action packed looking back on it, was the famed Middle of the World monument. I had been wondering why Ecuador seemed to have he monopoly on the middle of the world, as surely other countries around the world also have the equator, but on looking at the map and seeing some of those countries (The Congo, Gabon, Somalia...) you start to understand why Quito, as the closest city to the equator - gets to make the fuss.

We visited the official monument, and took the obligatory pictures, finding it all a little odd.  The site is set out almost like a theme park, - in fact Andy's description of it was a Cold War theme park, but still takes itself quite seriously with statues of Ecuadorean presidents heads along the walkways, and official looking signs. This is made slightly ridiculous by the fact that the monument isn't even actually on the equator - which makes a mockery of the people posing on 'the line'. When building this they got it wrong, and when military GPS was used it was discovered that the actual equator was a few hundred metres down the road. 

Being enterprising individuals, there is now another site to visit, this one actually on the equator. This is a more lighthearted visit, with scientific experiments (ish) proving that the equator is a funny old place.  Water falls straight through a plug hole on the line, move the sink 1m either side, and it swirls down the plug hole in opposite directions. We lost our balance horribly (me even worse than usual) while walking along the line, and Andy managed to balance an egg on a nail. No mean feat! At the last second I remembered that we needed to get our passports stamped, (quirky stamp no. 5 for the trip), and then we went back to enjoy our crater view and hug the alpacas for the afternoon - our last one in Ecuador.

We've really enjoyed Ecuador, for a start it was nice to spend so long in one country at a stretch, we were there for 11 days. Definitely somewhere we wouldn't mind coming back to explore more in the future... After all, Andy managed to get out of the Andes without having tried Guinea Pig this time... So we'll have to come back one day!

Quito (round 1)

Ecuador has always been a special place for me. When I was in Junior school our  headmistress Mrs Knowles used to tell us about it, particularly because as a school we sponsored a little girl from there, Olga. We all tried to raise money by selling dubious looking cakes, or from holding '2p a go' competitions. These were held come rain or shine at break times, where we would huddle on the steps of the hut in the playground waiting for people to guess how many sweets were in the jar or to guess the name of the teddy, for an end of week total of approximately £1.37 (always an odd number, even at 2p a go). The money raised from all of this, and from the proceeds of every mufty day, went to Olga in Ecuador; we were sent a picture and a letter at least once a year of a smiling girl who never seemed to age, always wrapped in a red blanket. We even had a song that we sang about Olga in assembly - 

There's a little girl in Ecuador, I'd like to be my friend

There are lots of ways to help her with the money that we send

I may never see her, it's a very long way to go

But the photograph shows that little girl is a great person to know.

(Credit to Jayne for remembering the words ;))

Having found out last week that Mrs Knowles had sadly died late last year, and as reminiscing is one of the things I do best, I found it hard to get the image of the little girl in the photo out of my mind, not to mention the song. Ecuador has been ingrained into me since I was 6 as a special and far away place to go, and because of that has always been somewhere I've wanted to visit. On top of that, visiting a brand new country was so exciting - we were both looking forward to exploring.

The first odd thing on arriving in Ecuador was that their currency is the dollar. We've been using dollars throughout South America, but they are usually interspersed with colourful, threadbare and mostly ruined notes from the local currency, Chile being the exception where they have adopted the plastic currency like Australia and New Zealand to name two countries - which is almost indestructible! 

We drove off to Quito, a city which I knew little about other than it was again at high altitude, and surrounded by mountains. The new airport is quite a way out of town, but the new road hasn't been completed yet, so it is a trek to the airport. The old airport was in the centre of the city, it closed one day last February, and the new airport opened the next day, with most of the same staff - very efficient. The safety record at the old airport was not good, look on Wikipedia for the highlights... They have transformed the site of the old airport into a city park, where concerts are held, and a terminal for the new metro system is going to be built. This has happened really quickly, it was only last February. Not much of Quito was visible as we drove in, as the clouds had descended over the mountains. 

Little change the next morning, buildings appeared through the clouds in waves and then disappeared again, and not a mountain in sight. We drove up to the teleferico, up a very steep hill above the city, hoping that the clouds would clear. When we got to the ticket counter the lady behind it looked at us as if we were loco - 'no vista'. Perhaps not the best day to try and get a panoramic view of the city then! The site of the teleferico station was very odd, Andy decided one particular building looked like a Cold War ice cream shop... Not sure where he got that from, but it was strange up there, particularly in the clouds. 

Not phased by being sent away, we went back down the hill and found the joining point for the city tour bus. The smog and pollution on the streets of Quito can be quite debilitating, combined with the altitude there really is very little air to breathe when on street level walking along, so the bus was a welcome relief. We drove around the town seeing various sites, city parks, giant hospitals, and a mall being 3 of the scripted highlights. Unimpressed thus far we moved into the old town, a UNESCO site with steep cobbled streets and geraniums hanging from window boxes at every turn. We passed a beautiful church with twin spires, and the main square, which was much more in line with what I had been expecting from Quito.

I should explain that coming from colonial Cusco, with it's cobbled streets and unmistakeable South American style, in my head Quito was going to be similar but on a larger scale. I couldn't have been more wrong, Quito is a bustling, sprawling city of over 2 million people - spread out along the valley that seemingly stretches out forever. The buildings are certainly different, a multitude of colours and styles, with the unfinished aspect that we are now used to having seen it across the continent. In Quito it seems that the bottom floor of a house is built, with the beginnings of higher floors put in place, families move in, and when they have the money they build upwards. 

The old town was really pretty, with its steep streets. We particularly liked the street of the seven crosses, a street with (as you would expect), seven stone crosses along it's length, of varying intricacy.  We headed up the top of the El Panecillo area, where a giant statue of the virgin overlooks the city. The view was better than expected given the weather, although the signs explaining what we would see suggested that there were mountains and volcanoes out there - these were still invisible! Seeing condors swooping over the city was pretty cool, but I was really hoping for a view of Cotopaxi, the volcano dad trekked around for his charity trip 10 years ago, so the lack of visibility was quite disappointing.

Cotopaxi is in there somewhere...

One unusual addition to the view was a minivan with blacked out windows shaking. I hadn't noticed being oblivious as ever, but when I ventured too close to it to look at the view behind I was quickly extracted by Andy - who pointed out that there were clearly a couple of people inside the van enjoying their afternoon...! Temptation to knock on the windows was strong, if only so Andy could out the phrase - if the van is a rocking, don't come a knocking... I was quite shocked, Andy thought this was hilarious.

Thoroughly exhausted from a days sightseeing, and safe in the knowledge that we were coming back to Quito later, we went back to our hotel. Because we were joining a GAP (G Adventures) tour the next day, they had put us in a Hilton, on the executive floor - this gave us access to free drinks and snacks, so we were quite happy to settle into watching a couple of episodes of Homeland (the start of season 3), and an early sleep as we had an insanely early wake up call of 3.45am scheduled for the next day to go to the Galápagos Islands.