Quito

Well, after Brazil, here we are in Ecuador and its capital, San Francisco de Quito. We arrived on Monday and very much saw Quito as a pit stop where to arrange our trip to the Galapagos from - a few days affair. We should have known better!

Not that there is nothing to see in Quito, don't get me wrong. In fact, it is very much a tale of two cities: on the one hand, Quito old town which is absolutely packed with pretty squares, gorgeous churches and impressive buildings, on the other hand, Quito new town which is the active "live" city for business, leisure and shops.

Quito old town is where the history happened. Another Unesco world heritage site (we seem to be collecting them!), it is overlooked by El Panecillo, mountain that sits at 9,895 feet (3,016 m) above sea level and where stands the statue La Madonna del Panecillo.

We spent half a day on tuesday walking the streets of the old town and taking the place in - we visited the main cathedral which was absolutely breath-taking in a full-on Catholic style. It included a painting of each bishop having ran the cathedral for the last few centuries, as well as the tomb of a few famous people. including Antonio José Sucre. Antonio is a real hero in Ecuador as he kicked the evil spanish in 1822 out of South america - there isn't a single city or village in Ecuador where there isn't Calle Sucre as the main street... Nonetheless, the guy got assassinated..

Is seems impossible to visit all the historic places in Quito old town, so we felt that after half a day, we had seen enough and moved on to Quito new town to find a Galapagos trip deal! There isn't a lot to say about the new town really. It has many bars and restaurants mainly catering for a raft of american tourists, some really loud. A few places are also frequented by local Ecuadorians and we found a nice bar/restaurant, El Cafecito where we ended up sleeping.

Finding a deal for the Galapagos ended up a bit of a nightmare. We got offered 2 late deals, one from a boat operator directly and one from a travel agent. We ended up selecting the one from the travel agent as the more questions we asked to the tour operator, the less trust we had in him. Sounded quite dodgy. One agreeing to go on The Galapagos Vision boat for 8 days with the travel agent, on Wednesday, we were told that payment had to be done in cash! We are talking a few thousands dollars here! It worked out to be hellish to find the right place to get the money and took us 3 days and a lot of taxi trips from the bank to the travel agents with lots of cash to sort it out - painful! Eventually we got there and on Friday got a bus for a day trip to Otavalo - post to follow about this!

A word on the people in Quito. Well, they seemed much more reserved, colder, actually. People keeps themselves to themselves and very few smiles or eye contact. Also, on the one hand there are people, mainly women, still very much traditionally dressed: the traditional shoes, fedora hats and a long shawl on their back which can be used to carry everything from children to gaz bottles (and we even saw a pig being carried!). On the other hand, people wearing full on western clothes.

Oh yes, we also need to mention red lights and the fact that they tend to be completely ignored and replaced by beeping - great fun!

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