Winter holidays... part 1: Quito

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...a trip to the centre of the earth...

Due to Argentina being in the southern hemisphere, July is the middle of winter. Whilst my Facebook feeds are full of people talking about their summer holidays, here in Buenos Aires it's freezing. To rectify this matter, I decided to use my two week long winter holiday to head further north in search of the sun. I had decided to visit Michelle, who I had last seen in 2008, when I spent July 4th with her family at their cabin on Lake Michigan. (Fireworks and Cherries... July 4th in Michigan)

When I moved to Argentina in July 2008, Michelle moved to Ecuador a couple of months later. Fast forward 3 years she is now married to José and they're processing his paperwork to get him his green card into the States. This meant that if I wanted to visit Ecuador with Michelle there I was running out of time. Luckily work let me leave a couple of days early, which meant that I was able to have a full two weeks holiday and still be back in time to attend this year's Share Conference . I wasn't participating this year due to lack of time and work commitments, but I had been invited back as a special guest, and I didn't really want to miss it. Therefore, leaving my colleagues with a pile of exams to give to my students, I set off to Ezeiza far too early on a Wednesday morning to catch my flight to Quito.

The drama started early, I got a taxi to the airport with Robin, a colleague. He was also heading to Ecuador, but had been booked onto a different flight. Mine was a direct one to Quito, via Guayaquil, whereas he had an extremely long layover in Santiago de Chile. Arriving at the airport (at 4.30am) there seemed to be an extraordinary amount of people doing not a lot. Worried that the Chilean volcano had started sending more ashes our way, we made our way to the Lan desks. It turned out that the volcano had decided to keep quiet for a bit, and the people milling about were being affected by something happening in Brazil. So we queued. And queued some more. Given that we were in the fast bag drop the line seemed to be moving very slowly. Eventually we reached the desk... and Robin was told he was at the wrong airport. His flight to Santiago was leaving from Aeroparque, not Ezeiza. He had just enough time to make it there if he got in a tax straight away... (he made it, but only just!). I, meanwhile, checked in and headed to immigration. This was the first time I had left the country since getting my work visa and Argentine DNI, and it made negotiating immigration a piece of cake: no awkward questions, no snarly looks, just a simple buendía and an exit stamp in my passport.

The flight was unremarkable, except for me kicking myself for not having batteries in my camera as we flew over the Andes as the sun was rising... but I doubt any foto taken would have been able to do any justice to the scenes I saw out of the window. With a brief stopover in Guayaquil (we stayed on the plane whilst most of the passengers got off) it was another half hours flight before we arrived in Quito. I felt the altitude the moment we got off the plane... except that I forgot that Quito was at 2,800m and just thought that I was having some kind of asthma attack... Immigration negotiated I made my way to the baggage reclaim... to find an empty carrousel. There was a big crowd around the complaints desk, and recognising people from my flight I made my way over. It turned out that the long wait at Ezeiza had been due to problems with the system, which led to our bags not being loaded onto the plane. Instead my bags were en route to Lima, Peru. They would be put on a connecting flight to Quito, and were due to get it later that afternoon. After filling in a missing bag form, I headed out to meet Michelle. Luckily Michelle lived a short taxi ride away from the airport (due partly to the airport being in the centre of the city) so it was easy enough to go back to the airport to collect my bags when they finally turned up.

The first day we spent exploring the old town. Quito is fairly difficult to navigate, but luckily the old town is fairly compact. There are 63 churches in Quito (if not more), and we saw a fair few that day. We also discovered the roof terrace at the Centro Cultural which had brilliant views of the city.
The second day we had planned to go to an artisan fair in the Mariscal, which is the backpacker area, but the altitude hit me bad, and I had no choice but to head back to the flat and sleep it off. I wasn't too worried as we were heading to the coast the next day...

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Photos

View from the roof of the Centro Cultural
Of the Virgin overlooking the city

Presidential palace
Correa doesn't live here... he says it's haunted...

View from the roof of the Centro Cultural
Banco Central