Quito by foot...not recommended...

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The title of this blog says it all. Unless you are a marathon walker, and daily climb hundreds of stairs and scale small peaks as part of your workout regimen, a walking tour of Quito is not ...repeat..NOT..recommended. My goal, as I have stated often, and perhaps earlier in this blog, but I´m too tired to go back and read and see if I did, is to experience Ecuador from an arm´s reach and eye level perspective. This ideally should involve lots of walking about, seeing the country as it appears to one on the street, not someone in a tour bus or rental car. By the time I got to the Ecuadorian Museum of Culture, I had no interest in taking another step, much less wander about the halls of a museum, studiously reading exhibit placards and such. Hell, I was ready to just buy the damn guide book and let that suffice. Unfortunately, that would have meant a climb of about 20 stairs and I wasn´t in the mood step over a threshold, much lest mount a virtual mountain to get to the museum gift shop. So that adventure was relegated to ¨the next time¨ My ¨next time¨ box is getting quite full, but being the PROcrastinator that I am, I have no problem dealing with that reality.

I did happen upon an interesting restaurant, not too far from the McDonald´s and KFC, that piqued my interest. Called El Arrecife, it featured Ceviche de Camarones, ceviche with shrimp, so I ordered that and proceeded to gorge myself. Interestingly, this ceviche was very much like a Mexican Coctel de Camarones, consisting of tomato juice, chopped tomatoes, cilantro, and a hearty portion of shrimp, totally different from the ceviche I was accustomed to. The meal was accompanied by a huge bowl of popcorn, roasted pine nuts, and plantain chips. Now I really needed a nap! I spent the next couple of hours in a nice park near the new Legislative Building which is under construction. Every hour or so I would move from one park bench to another, so that I would not arouse to much attention, since I truly looked like a vagrant by this time. It was a great time for people watching. I managed to sneak some video, using the GoPro, before both the camera´s batteries and mine had worn out! I then headed back uphill (how is it physically possible that all directions in Quito are uphill? Is Quito in some weird space time warp where all geometry is a spiral? Perhaps its the world´s only physical example of a Mobius strip...all surfaces at an incline. I should propose a National Science Foundation grant to support the research. In Ecuador, of course, all expenses paid! )

Anyway, I stopped in at the highly recommended (by someone at the hotel, of course) Fruitaria Montserrate, which was on my way back uphill. Their dinner menu was sparse, so I chose two Empanadas and some juice. They didnt have any of the juices that I was craving (naranga, maracuja, mango, melone, etc). The only choices available were Jugo de Mora and Jugo de Taxo. Now I knew that Mora was blackberry, which seemed interesting, but I had no idea what el Taxo was. I created quite a stir when I asked for glasses of both, as well as two empanadas. Turns out, Taxo is similar to the passionfruit, unique to the Andes mountains, and is quite tasty. Growing up in the South, we had our own version of Taxo growing wild all over the place...We called it Maypop. If you were lucky enough to find one that was ripe, it was quite a treat, but if you ate it green it would coat your mouth with a soapy slimey mess that required at least a half dozen crabapples to return your mouth to normal. The empanadas were also not quite what I expected. I am used to empanadas made by my buddy Edguardo, tasty little bites of chicken or beef inside a pastry shell and fried to perfection. Fruitaria Montserrate´s empanadas were the size of those small plastic footballs one buys for kids, and had about the same consistency. Consisting mostly of rice, with small bits of meat thrown in to earn the apellation ¨con carne¨, they were rather bland and were in serious need of the small cups of sauce that were provided with them. In fact, small pillows dunked in the same sauce would have been just as tasty. The juice however, was tasty, almost the consistency of a smoothie, though they both could have a bit cooler. I´m beginning to believe that finding ice cold fruit juice in Ecuador may be like finding a unicorn.

I finally staggered back to my hotel, but not before stopping at a shop to add minutes to my newly acquired Ecuadorian phone account. A very helpful security guard helped me find out my local phone number, and 10 minutes and 10 dollars later I was on my way to my hotel room for some much needed rest. Don´t ask me what I got for 10 dollars...I just figured that would do me for now. The lady selling me the time seemed a bit surprised, as if I had walked into a casino and slapped a couple of grand on the table.

I had hoped against all odds that my suitcase would have arrived in my absence, but alas it was not to be. After a disappointing call to the Quito airport, I am resolved that it fell into the black hole of lost luggage, only to reappear in some distant universe as a tangled mess of socks, underwear and toiletries. My only regret is the loss of some presents I had for the Cabrera family (some Georgia honey and some of Herschel´s soon to be world famous fig preserves and pepper jelly) and some pure Watkins vanilla extract for my couchsurfing host in Vilcabamba. Evidently real vanilla extract is worth its weight in gold in Ecuador, and I can finance future trips here by bootlegging the aforementioned flavoring. What will Customs think when I show up next time with a sample case of 300 bottles of pure vanilla extract?

Tonight the Ecuadorian night serenade went on as usual...but my aching legs and back created their own distractions, and I fell asleep quickly.

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