Rich's Journal from Quito
April 2, 2009
Well, we are way the hell up in the Andes as of a few hours ago. We flew out
of BWI at 6 AM and arrived in Miami around 8:30; since our flight to Quito was
not until 3:30 PM we took a taxi in to town and spent several hours in South
Beach. The taxi driver was Haitian or some kind of French Caribbean type, and
spent every moment of the ride on the phone, speaking some weird Creole French
that we always felt like we ought to be able to understand but never quite
could.
South Beach was hot and sunny and we mostly walked around and
people-watched... it´s a great place for it as you know (you need to wear shorts
and sandals with socks and walk at least two poodles). Had lunch at the
obligatory Jewish deli: corned beef sandwich and matzoh ball soup of course...
it was great but cost a fortune. (You know those Jews.)
Our taxi driver back to the airport was a voluble Nicaraguan from Managua, so
of course we spent the ride trading stories. (It's been an interesting day for
transport service personnel; our shuttle driver to BWI early this morning
collected foreign currency and asked us to bring back some Ecuadoran and
Peruvian money for him. He was disappointed to learn that Ecuador uses the US
dollar, but we'll help him out on Peru.)
We left Miami on time and the flight to Quito was just about 4 hours,
arriving at around 6:30 local time (Ecuador is on EST, so 1 hour behind EDT).
Since it is smack dab on the equator, that hour of the day is around sunset, so
our descent and approach were through twilight. "Descent", however, is barely
the right word: Quito is at 9200' so it's like you're not even going down very
far: you kind of fly along parallel to the mountains and then...land. And so the
last 20 minutes of the flight was spectacular, straight through the Andes. They
are redder than the Rockies and very, very dramatic, snowcapped and craggy and
jutting up angrily through patchy cumulus clouds. I kept waiting for the terrain
to flatten as we approached the city, and it never did -- you're just suddenly
there, on the runway in the middle of the mountains. (It is not at all like
Denver, which sits on a plain at the base of the Rockies.)
As a result of this, as you approach Quito it appears not to have been so
much planned or built but rather sprayed into the mountains. It is ringed by
steep slopes and peaks which do not stop at the edge of the city because there
seems to be no edge; the city is all hillocks and ridges and small plateaus and
crazy slopes, with barely enough level space to build an airport. (We will get a
much better look tomorrow when we can see it in the daytime and will have a city
tour.)
The airport is very modern and efficient, and we breezed through immigration,
customs, etc., and were immediately met by a driver from the hotel, holding a
sign with our names spelled remarkably correctly. He spoke little English but we
have retained enough rudimentary Spanish to at least hold a Neanderthal-level
conversation. That is to say that, translated, the conversation was as follows:
Driver: Are you going to the Galapagos tomorrow?
Us: No. Galapagos Sunday. Tomorrow city.
Also equator. Saturday market. Wampum.
Driver: Are you using a travel guide for the city tour?
Us: Yes, yes. Guide.
Driver: What time are you being picked up at the hotel?
Us: We don't know. Hotel know. Deliver
pancreas.
Functional and error-prone, in other words, and we're better at listening
than speaking.
In fact, the hotel folks did know, or more accurately, had a message waiting
for us with contact and logistics information. The hotel is very modern and
fairly upscale (including a casino). Best of all, our room turned out not to be
available, and so we were apologetically upgraded to a suite, which is very nice
indeed. (This is already the second time that this has happened on this trip; we
were upgraded to the top deck on the Galapagos boat as well.)
So. Tomorrow we will actually see the city and will be shown the equator, which is somewhere around here. I expect that there is some street person there who for a fee will lead you to the nearest toilet and flush it to make the water go straight down without swirling in either direction. The excitement builds!
April 3, 2009
Other than the remarkable mountainous topography, Quito in the daytime looks a great deal like many other Third World cities: crowded and seedy, with a lot of “in your face” infrastructure, i.e. lots of poles and wires. The streets, particularly in the older areas, are very, very narrow and cannot even come close to supporting the volume of traffic, much of which consists of taxis. It looks more than anything else like a cross between Bangkok and Managua, with the vertiginous streets of the most vertically exciting parts of San Francisco. It is yeasty and bubbling, but I would not actually characterize it as charming. The air is an odd mixture of brisk freshness (from the 9200’ altitude) and smoggy haze from the crowding.
The weather started out cloudy with a bit of drizzle but eventually cleared. (I looked up the forecast on weather.com and learned it would be partly cloudy with a UV index of something like 12 billion. At this altitude when the sun is out you can practically hear your dermal cells dancing around in a precancerous fiesta.) We were picked up at 9:00 by our private tour guide for the day, a 27-year-old cutie named Gabriela (thereby giving us an instant topic of conversation because of her name) and the minivan driver, a pleasant woman a few years older named Marcie. Gabriela’s English was pretty good, Marcie’s nonexistent, so by the end of the day we had managed to resurrect at least a fraction of our Spanish.
Our first stop was the old historical center, a short trip in distant but maybe 45 minutes in the perpetual gridlock. Making matters worse was the presence, in and along the roads, of periodic groups of highly excited people hyping one candidate or another in the run-up to elections on April 26. Ecuadoran politics is a madhouse: Gabriela estimated that there were 120 (that is not a typo) political parties. The barriers to entry are low: you only need something like a thousand signatures to create a party and get on the ballot. There are so many that they no longer have names but use numbers instead. I am not kidding. There are posters and banners everywhere, and they all have a picture of a smiling candidate or two, a slogan, and an exhortation to VOTA 75! Sometimes you will see feeble attempts at coalitions and the posters will show a few candidates at a time, inviting you to VOTA 43 108! The largest number I actually saw was 151, leading me to believe that our guide was underestimating the size of the field. If we ever return to Ecuador for an extended period, I am going to attempt to forge a coalition of prime numbers.
The historical center is a plaza very typical of any that you would see in Latin countries, or Santa Fe NM for that matter. It is ringed by some churches and the presidential palace. Some of the latter are most impressive on the inside, with stained glass worthy of Notre Dame and, in one case, an entire interior limned in gold leaf, absolutely eye-popping. Which really made me think….
-------- Public Service Announcement for 16th Century Indigenous Peoples ------
Congratulations! You are about to be subjugated and colonized! Before doing so, however, make sure that you carefully choose the colonial power that will hold suzerainty over you and everything you have ever known! There are several choices, so make sure that you choose one that’s best for you! Or rather, least worst! Here are some examples to guide you:
Britain. CON: Lousy food, worse dentistry. PRO: Less genocidal than average.
Spain. CON: Abject slavery, annihilation of cultural identity. PRO: Spectacular churches, short work week.
Anyway, they’re great churches, and I’m sure the locals would not have had any good ideas about what to do with all that gold. (“I know! How about something anti-Semitic?” “Nah. We don’t have enough Jews, and anyway the Spanish already did it.”) But I got some beautiful pictures once we fought our way past the swarm of children and extremely short, leathery, ageless women trying to sell us stuff.
Quito is watched over by the Virgin of Quito, a 130 foot statue of You Know Who sits on one of the higher hills in the middle of the city. (It is a bit strange to speak of “one of the higher hills” of a city that is ringed by the Andes, including THREE active 19,000 foot volcanoes.) She is much a part of city lore, visible from much of the city. Indeed the largest basilica in the historical center has a heart-shaped opening high on one side, positioned such that you can see her when standing in the apse. (I took a picture, of course.) So we drove up the hill to the base of the statue, a vantage point from which you can take in the sprawl of the 2-million-person city through the mountains, plus appreciate the fact that --there’s just no getting around it here -- the Virgin herself is one godawful hideous statue. Especially at 130’ in height, with huge awkward wings and holding a graceless chain (why?) she is positively Stalinesque in style. If North Korea ever converts to Catholicism, this is the statue they will build.
You may have the impression that I am being rather harsh on Quito. That is a little unfair of me. It is true that in appearance it does not have a whole lot of grace, but the setting is spectacular (when visibility is good) the food is quite good, and the people are very friendly. While we were in the main plaza, two sharply dressed and somewhat aristocratic-appearing old ladies came up to our guide and asked her (in Spanish of course, though we could understand them) where we were from. Our guide told them that we were American, from Washington DC. They both grinned and nodded and repeated the information, then turned to us and happily said, “Bienvenidos a Ecuador!” before toddling away.
Our next stop was our own personal geekstravaganza, i.e. the Equator. But first we had to make a choice. Our guide explained that the exact position of the equator, at the outskirts of the city, was determined by a French survey team about a century ago, and so it was there that most people headed. There is a big monument, and a large and beautiful ethno-archaeological museum telling all about the local history and the indigenous peoples. All very impressive, beautiful and worthwhile, we were told.
Problem is, it’s wrong. Those French engineers were perfectly competent at what they were doing, but times have changed and there is now this thing called the Global Positioning System, and guess what? The impressive monument and beautiful museum are nearly a half mile away from the actual equator.
At this point, our guide hesitated. We wouldn’t have time to visit both sites, you see, so we would have to choose. Most people went to the original monument and museum, she explained. The other site was….”different”. She seemed slightly abashed.
We thought long and hard for a good two-thirds of a second. “Screw the monument and the museum,” I announced. “I am an astronomer, and goddammit we are going to the REAL equator!” Alice (and this is why I am married to her) was 100% on board with this, and could barely understand why anyone would even consider visiting a fake equator. So off we went, soon to learn what “different” meant.
DIGRESSION. When I was about ten years old, we had a family vacation in Florida. (Stick with me, there is a point to this story.) My father and I drove down from Philadelphia, and my mother and sisters flew. We met them in Miami, stayed for a week or so, and then drove home together. This was before I-95 was built, I believe, so it was local roads all the way home, and I will forever remember with warmth and delight the first couple of hundred miles of the trip, where we visited many of Florida’s iconic cheesy roadside attractions. The Parrot Jungle! The alligator wrestling places!
And now…. The Equator!
Yes, the actual, GPS measured equator is a cheesy Ecuadoran roadside attraction that would be perfectly at home next to the Parrot Jungle. It even has a shrunken head exhibit. (The heads are shrunken, not the exhibit.) The line in the ground was there, of course, and we took the obligatory pictures of us straddling it. And the guide did all the obligatory bullshit Stupid Equator Tricks, like balancing an egg on end, or pulling the plug on a tub of water and letting it swirl down the drain counterclockwise on one side of the line and clockwise on the other.
The only downside was that Alice suffered a case of TMJ from continually warning me out the side of her mouth, “Don’t you dare say a word. Don’t you DARE start correcting him.” And so I never did speak up and say, “Hey, if you can nail down the position of the line to an accuracy of about 2 feet using a tub of water, how did those French guys screw up by half a mile? Didn’t they have a tub, or what?” We had a great time. Bonus: I got a great picture of a hummingbird there. (Pardon the nonsequiter, but it’s a great shot.)
We worked our way back into town and treated our guide and driver to lunch. Earlier in the day, Gabriela had spoken of a particular favorite restaurant in old historical part of town, so we took them there and made her order a bunch of traditional dishes for all of us, notably including ceviche, which is an Ecuadoran favorite and rather different from what we had had in the past. Quite good.
And that was our day. Tomorrow is an all day excursion to Otavalo, which is the very large and famous native crafts market a few hours from here. I expect that a lot of our gifts to the folks back home will come from there. So if I am feeling ambitious tomorrow night, I will send out another dispatch about it. That will be our last night in Quito. We fly to the Galapagos Sunday morning, and at that point will be completely incommunicado until we return to the mainland (in Lima, Peru) on Sunday the 12th.