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Published: November 20th 2014
El Panecillo
The Virgin of QuitoQuito is a quixotic mixture of Spanish colonial grandeur and third world pollution and poverty. The climate also, swings between sunny intervals and torrential downpours, varied and never dull! It has taken us two days to adjust to the thin air, longer than we hoped. Quito is 2,800 metres (9,350 feet) above sea level. We might have skied from this height before (not sure, maybe not) but certainly we have never lived and slept at such altitude. It has also taken us a while to adjust to the strong smell of cheap petrol fumes, which are so strong, one can taste them. John Sawyer, if you read this, remember the fumes in Moscow? It isn’t quite so bad here, but close! A great pity, because it is a beautiful city in a stunning location, high in the Andes mountain range. Getting here was a tad stressful…
We left the hotel in Miami on Monday morning, arriving early at the airport at 11.30 a.m. The deadline for hotel check-out was 11.00 a.m. and we didn´t want to carry our rucksacks around downtown Miami for an hour or so, hence our early arrival for a 4 p.m. flight. We were surprised to
Outside view of the hostel
Didn´t look very inviting! find that we were not the only early arrivals and there was quite a queue of people lined up to check in for the LAN airways flight to Quito. Unfortunately, due to an unexplained delay on the arrival of our plane from Lima, we didn´t take off until 9 p.m. and got to our hostel here in Quito at 3 a.m. on Tuesday morning. As soon as we landed we started to feel the effects of the altitude, so carrying our rucksacks in the early hours around Quito airport was a gruesome experience. We both had headaches, felt sick and dizzy, and Viv, being asthmatic, found breathing seriously difficult. But, “Hey!” we thought. Things will soon get better. We have crossed the Equator, we are in the Southern Hemisphere and we are all in one piece, just about. The altitude sickness probably affected us badly because we came straight from sea level, where we had been for three weeks, two weeks on the sea itself and one in the very low-lying Florida Keys. Also, we live by the sea in Spain, on a flat coastal plain.
The taxi journey from the airport was quite an experience too; the car
Inside, however, a different story!
Lovely little patio; view from our bedroom door. was small and battered, seemed to lack any suspension, and our driver thought that she was racing in Monte Carlo. The route wasn´t dissimilar to the Monte Carlo track, except maybe with more hairpin bends and not on the flat; Quito is hilly, with pot-holed roads. Disneyworld does not have any rides as adrenalin-charged as this ride from the airport to Quito in the early hours of the morning!
“Travel and change of place impart new vigour to the mind” Seneca
Our minds were not at all vigorous when we got here! We spent most of Tuesday sleeping, taking Paracetamol, feeling miserable, and only venturing out for a short walk to the Basilica and back to get our bearings; we forced ourselves to do this; it didn´t make us feel any better, but at least we knew where we were!
The hostel is lovely, and busy with backpackers arriving and leaving at all times of the day and night (so a bit noisy). From the outside it looks like a seedy tenement building; it isn´t in the smartest part of town. Inside, however, there is a delightful patio garden and dorms and rooms surrounding it
on three floors. We are on the ground floor (well actually the first floor, as is the garden, because like most of the buildings in Quito, this one hangs on the hillside). We have our own little room and bathroom, free Wi-Fi, for $30 dollars (US dollars) a night. That is about 24 euros. The currency of Ecuador is US dollars, but they mint their own coinage, with 100 Ecuadorian “centavos” to the US dollar. Quixotic coinage too!
Our hostel is in walking distance to the historical old town and now that we have explored it for a couple of days, we feel quite comfortable. At first, on Tuesday, we found it all a bit threatening (being ill didn´t help). There are very few tourists, most backpackers are indigenous, it is culturally distinct from anywhere we have travelled before, and crossing roads is seriously dangerous. Most of the buses and trams accelerate when approaching pedestrian crossings and red lights! Car drivers don´t even see them! So, whilst not feeling exactly “at home”, we have nevertheless warmed to this city; we like it. As George Bernard Shaw once said “I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad”.
Another bonus for us is that we don´t have any problem understanding the Spanish spoken here, as we thought we might. It is easy to understand, once adjusting to the sibilant “ss” instead of the “ths” so, for example $12 (doce dolares) sounds like “dossi dolares”).
The food is good here. We have had a few good “Menu del dia” meals in busy little restaurants frequented by the locals, and enjoyed the food. It isn´t as spicy as we are used to, but heavy on the herbs, especially oregano and cheap: $4.50 for three courses plus a drink (about 3.60 euros). Also, they serve the best coffee we have had since leaving Spain. We haven´t eaten any of the street food, however. It is certainly true that if one spends one´s time travelling being afraid of the food, the customs, the strangeness and the culture, then one might as well stay at home. We have enjoyed trying different street food in many different countries (it is superb in Thailand, for example) but in Quito? No, no, no! The ladies sit on the dirty pavements, where dogs pee up the
walls, with the food all over the place, buckets of dirty water to wash utensils in, and they handle all the raw food with hands that have been resting on the pavement! Not for us!
The colonial architecture is stunning. There is so much of it, packed into a small space, all around the Plaza Grande. It is like having the best of Madrid and Seville architecture all squashed together within a few square miles. Wonderful! Hard work on the legs, however; Quito is hilly! Today we took a taxi from the Plaza Grande up to El Panecillo, which is a huge statue of the Virgin overlooking the city. Erected in 1892, the “Virgin of Quito” is the Protector of the Republic, “La Protectora de la Republica”. The base of the statue stands at an elevation of 3,035 metres (9,957 ft) and the sixteen peaks which surround her and her city range from 3,200 metres (10,498 ft) to a towering 5,897 metres (19,347 ft); this is the Cotopaxi volcano. After this, we came back down to visit the Cathedral. Whereas the Basilica is the nation´s church, the Cathedral belongs to the city. The official name
Raining again!
Typical hilly Quito street in the rain. is the Church of the Society of Jesus of Quito, “Iglesia de la Companía de Jesús de Quito” and it was constructed between 1605 and 1765. It took 160 years to build and decorate and it is the most ornate interior of any church or cathedral we have ever seen; laden with gold leaf, 17
th Century oil paintings, stunning stonework and ornate carpentry to pews, pulpit and confessionals. We were not allowed to take any photos! They do not sell postcards! In short, our memories of the hour spent in this beautiful building are our only record. They are probably vivid enough to suffice. We are now sitting in a bar writing this blog, enjoying recounting the day together with a few beers. Tomorrow we are going to stand on the Equator!
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