Tourist extravaganza!
Gina. Banos, Ecuador.
Wow! The last week has been a crazy flurry of tourist activity. I´m exhausted! But we have two more weeks of Ecuador stuff planned, so I´m going to have to suck it up and keep on going.
Here´s what we´ve been up to…
We left Bahia de Caraquez Monday night on a night bus to Quito. We originally panned to leave Tuesday night but we were both itching to see more of Ecuador since our first impressions were so good (we actually tried to get a bus out Saturday or Sunday night, but they were booked). One thing I´ve found very convenient about Ecuador buses is that they´re basically all $1 an hour for long distance buses. It was an 8 hour bus ride to Quito, so it was $8 each for the bus! It´s so much nicer than the crazy system in Peru where you pay based on the quality of the bus and (in our case) can be easily ripped off. No matter what bus we hop on, we know what we should be paying based on how long the ride is going to be. It´s awesome!
One of the things we had read about Quito (the capital of Ecuador and set in the mountains–the Northern Incan capital with Cusco being the Southern in Peru) was that the taxi drivers are supposed to all use meters, something completely new for us in our travels so far. We´d gotten pretty good and pretty used to bargaining over taxi fares before getting in, but it is a bit of a pain especially since you never really know if you´re being charged a fair price (we´ve learned that if we´re getting off a bus we´re going to be overcharged, period). So when we got off the bus around 7 a.m. and there were taxis we just jumped in and told them the address of the hostel we had picked. We asked about how much it would cost mostly out of habit, and when he said $4 we didn´t think much of it since we didn´t know where we were or how far the hostel was. But as soon as we started driving along I realized that we were near the big museum that I wanted to go to which I also knew was only a couple of blocks from our hostel. I thought it was a bit odd that it would cost $4 to go 5 blocks, and I quickly realized that he was taking us for a ride… literally. After going straight a ways we made three right turns to get to our hostel. The guy had scammed us for our $4–using the meter but clearly going a long way out of the way. The rest of our stay in Quito we bargained for a price before getting in and had better luck with our fares ($2 to go all the way across town during a hail storm which I´ll get to in a minute).
Our first order of business in Quito was to take a little nap. I had very carefully planned out our time since we´d only have 2 1/2 days to see all the tourist sites I´d highlighted in our guide book. But I´d made sure to pencil in a nap since sleeping on a bus is never very restful. After our lovely nap (in the cold room with lots of blankets! It was fantastic after sweaty nights with a sheet under a mosquito net!) we took showers and headed out for one of two ultra touristy things on our list… the TeleferiQo, a French-made ski lift type contraption that goes up a volcano for views of Quito! When we got there we had to go through a silly little amusement park before walking up steps (oh the altitude! I forgot how hard it is to go up steps in such thin air) to the very long line for the lifts. According to our guide book they opened at nine, the sign said they opened at ten, but they really didn´t open the doors until eleven. Luckily we didn´t arrive until around 10:45 so we had less of a wait outside in the hot sun, but still quite a long wait in the queue inside. We waited about 2 hours total to get on one of the lifts, and by the time we got to the top we were both starving and feeling a little headachy from the altitude. We ate very yummy and very over-priced corn/cheese things wrapped in corn husks. They were very good and helped us bare the next half hour of quickly walking around the viewing areas taking photos and trying to catch our breaths. It was definitely worth the views, but we should have either splurged a little for the express line or brought snacks! The ride down was much better than the ride up since we sat on the side of the lift facing the city. It was breathtaking!
After our lift ride we took a shuttle bus to the town center where we grabbed a cheap lunch and started our mini walking tour of the city. We hit all the main squares but only went into this one church that was garrishly decorated from top to bottom on the inside with gold leaf. It was so spectacular and so over the top. It was really neat. You weren´t allowed to take photos, which is a shame, but I got some of the elaborate outside covered in cherubs and hearts and curly carved stone. I even got a shot of some of the gold through the open doorway.
Our last adventure of the day was to go to the main basicilica which is covered in flying buttresses and gargoyles that are interestingly native animals instead of the classic demons. The idea was to climb up into the different towers and possibly go through the clockwork of one of the towers which I was really excited about. But as soon as we walked into the courtyard it started sprinkling and by the time we reached the ticket office across the way from the church it was a full on thunder storm with giant bolts of lightening and cracks of thunder. It was awesome! One of the things I´ve really missed living in California is the awesome thunderstorms we´d get back East. We huddled in the doorway of the ticket office watching the rain and taking photos and getting pretty soaked in the process! There were a handful of poor souls up in one of the towers when it started to rain. At one point we were trying to decide if we should just go for it since we were already pretty wet, but right about then a bolt of lightening struck the lightening rod on the top of the tower and we decided that was a sign that it wasn´t meant to be. When the rain let up a bit we made a run for it to try and find a taxi, and just when we got into our taxi it started hailing pea-sized hail! Quito´s weather is amazing–going from winter-like cold in the morning to summer heat then a crazy thunderstorm and then cool again. We had a great day running around being tourists. We grabbed some mediocre pizza and a glass of red wine for me and then went to bed early since we were setting the alarms for 6 the next morning.
I can´t believe I actually willingly got up at 6 the next morning! If it wasn´t for Steve, I would´ve rolled over and gone back to sleep. But we were getting up early to catch a 2 hour bus ride to Otovalo for their Wednesday artesian market. Their main market day is Sunday, but after going to the main market day in the town outside of Cusco I think we were both happy with a scaled-down version.
Otovalo was a nice little town with delicious pie and great crafts for sale. There was the typical jewelry and woolen hats we´d seen all over Peru, but there were also other hand-made goodies like the Panama hat. Apparently the Panama hat is a complete misnomer as it´s made exclusively in Ecuador. They´re handmade with some native plant and then taken to a factory where they´re finished. They make the classic gangster-looking shape as well as some more feminine versions of sun hats. I bought a cute white sun hat for $14 which I´m really happy with. But I realized that I´m a terrible bargainer as her asking price was $15! I´ll have to get much better at this before China since I read that their asking price is usually more than double the actual value. We had a good time walking around and looking at all the stuff. The market was calmer than the one in Peru. We could take our time looking at stuff without being too harassed by the people. I really like Ecuador so much better than Peru. It seems better in every way, really–the people are friendlier, the food is better (although not by much), it´s cheaper and easier to get around, and the scenery is stunning. It´s also so much smaller that you can get from the coast to the jungle in 12 hours! It took 20 hours just to get from the coast to the mountains in Peru!
Anyway, after the market we were going to get off the bus a little North of Quito at our second big tourist destination–La Mitad del Mundo, the ecuator monument! We had a good time taking silly photos walking on the ecuator line and being separated on different hemispheres! But if I would´ve known beforehand that the monument was sort of boring I wouldn´t have gone. Instead I would have just gone to the wonderful Inti Nan museum just down the road which is actually on the ecuator (checked by GPS) where the monument is a little ways off (it was found by some French guys a really long time ago so has more historical significance than anything else). But Inti Nan was touristy gold! Unfortunately Steve was a bit over being a tourist so he sat this one out, but I had a fantastic time with my guide Javier who performed all kinds of science experiments that can only be done on the ecuator. We watched water pour down a drain–counter-clockwise in the Northern hemisphere, clockwise in the Southern hemisphere, and straight down on the ecuator. We walked on the ecuator, two-to-heel with our eyes closed and our hands out to our sides, thumbs up. It was crazy! You couldn´t keep your balance at all. You were literally being pulled by the two poles off of the line! We also tried to balance an egg on a nail, which no one in my little tour group succeeded at, but Javier did it in like a second, so it was possible. It was a lot of fun and they even had some other attractions like a reproduction of a tradiational burial hut where the structure was shaped like a mother´s stomach and the dead person was put in a clay pot in the fetal position since they believed that they´d be reincarnated as a fetus. We also saw some dead jungle animals including a giant, grown-up version of the pee fish that when it´s a baby sometimes swims up pee streams and goes into the urethra where it attaches itself with spines! Terrifying! The moral is to never pee in water in the rainforest. Lesson well learned. We also saw (what they told us) was a real shrunken head made by an indigenous tribe who would shrink the heads of their enemies as a war trophy. It was weird. I took pictures. And I had my hand at a blow gun which was very heavy and I missed my target. But it was fun anyway.
After the ecuator excitement we were both completely pooped and had a little bit of an adventure with the bus system before finally giving up and getting a taxi to a little Italian restaurant in the hip area of town where we had raviolis and then grabbed the right bus back to our hostel where we both passed out.
Day three of our tourist adventure in Quito had us checking out of our hostel and visiting the local SAE clubhouse to store our bags and make sure our farther travel plans for Ecuator all sounded okay and we didn´t have any questions. We met a nice guy from Standford named Wei who we hung out with for the morning, going to the awesome museum and then a yummy lunch. The museum was so well done (it was called something like the Museo Banco Central since the collection was owned by the bank). They had such a wonderful collection of pottery, sculptures, and gold work from the different cultures from across Ecuador. After hearing so much about the Incan goldwork in Peru but never getting to see any (partly because we never went to a museum but mostly because the Spanish melted most of it down) it was awesome to see the gold jewelry and masks. They were also really well displayed against black backgrounds with light shining on them to make them sparkle. I wish we would´ve spent a little more time on the first floor with all the ancient stuff, but we weren´t sure how big the museum was since there were three floors and the first was gigantic. It turns out that the top two were much smaller with the second floor having colonial art and the third floor having more modern and contemporary artwork. It was an awesome museum and even though we couldn´t take photos I was told by the guard that you could download them for free from the museum website. I´ll have to try that out when I get some time.
The last couple days have consisted of going to Latacunga where the plan was to spend the night before going to Laguna Quilatoa–an emerald green lake in the crater of an extinct volanco. But I got sick again so spent the day in bed where we thankfully had a tv to keep me company. After taking a couple of cipro, I felt much better, and we headed to the lake the next day (Saturday). It was a long day of buses (five hours round trip) but the scenery was gorgeous and I took a bunch of photos through the bus window that don´t nearly do it justice. The lake was also really awesome and we sat and had a snack and watched the clouds skim over the rim and into the bowl of the crater onto the lake. It was beautiful.
And now we´re in Banos–an Ecuadorian spa town that is a big hit with both vacationing locals and foreigners alike. It´s located in a little valley surrounded by mountains and an active volcano that erupted six months ago! A little creepy since you can take a nighttime tour up to another mountain where you get views of the volcano spitting lava, but I think we´ll be okay. The attractions of Banos include hot water mineral baths, hiking to dozens of waterfalls, a zoo, and homemade taffy like candy that´s stretched in the doorways. We haven´t tried the candy yet or the baths, but we´ll be here all day tomorrow and we plan to try and do it all! I have tons of photos to post, but there´s no time for rest when you have a whole country to see in just a couple of weeks!
Tags: Banos, Ecuador, Latacunga, Quito
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