Quito, Ecuador

2-10-20009
Quito, Ecuador

We flew from Manta to Quito. Manta is a beach town that's popular with Ecuadorians. Large hotels and shops of all sorts line the beachfront. Our driver dropped us off at the Manta airport at about 4:30 PM. We had no reservations, but there are three airlines operating in Ecuador and all had flights scheduled to Quito departing around 7:30 PM. We read books while we waited for a TAME airlines employee to show. The airport was pretty much shut down when we arrived but as we approached 5:30 and then 6:00 PM employees and passengers began to arrive. I ate a greasy chicken empanada from the airport deli and waited.

We had no problem at all getting a ticket. Tame Airlines is slightly more expensive than Icaro Airlines. Its planes are much newer. The Icaro flight was nearly full, I think, but ours was more than half empty. Total fare was $68 and the flight took about 45 minutes. A bus would have cost only about $12, but would have taken 10-12 hours to slowly climb the winding roads over the Andes. This would have been scenic, but painful. Instead I read an article in the Tame flight magazine condemning the lack of ethics by large U.S. corporations and urging Ecuadorian business people to do better. It quoted Hugo Chavez. You get the idea. Can't say I completely disagreed with it. The next thing you know we were descending through thick cumulus clouds into a nighttime landscape of sharp ridges and tiny beacons of light. Highways were carefully lit by streetlights and small towns looked like bright clusters of stars but I saw very few cars on the roads until we were over Quito itself.

Quito is a visually stunning city. It lies in a deep valley surrounded by high mountains, many of them volcanoes. The historic center of the city is in the south of the region just above one of many drainages that carve deep canyons out of the mountains. Leaving the city in any direction entails either a dramatically steep climb on foot or a long, winding descent by road.

The city has lots of character. The most interesting area is the historic center with its seemingly endless churches and cathedrals, its three large plazas, its narrow mountainous streets, its colonial era buildings, the Presidential Palace, and its crowds of rushing pedestrians and lines of jammed traffic. Oddly enough there were very few tourists in this area at any time of day. Often we were the only obvious tourists in a street scene. Part of the problem is that nearly everything shuts down at night and the area becomes unsafe, though this is true in much of the city. Still, Quito is Quito is richly endowed with historic, cultural, and natural attractions.

For example, not one but two museums are dedicated to Ecuador's most famous painter, Guayasamin. We visited the Chapel of Man, a secular shrine dedicated to humanity, not the afterlife or almighty. It's built alongside Guayasamin's house and is filled with Guayasamin's unique paintings and sculptures representing the suffering, struggles, and hope of Latin America's peoples.

The majority of the tourist hotels and restaurants are jammed into an area well north of the historic center called the Mariscal Sucre (named for their famous liberator, a compatriot of Simon Bolivar). Not much history up there. More like drug dealers, pizza restaurants, fancy bars, artsy t-shirt shops, and really tall and skinny prostitutes dancing in the streets (were they men, I wonder?) We spent very little time is this area, but got the impression that many young tourists rarely leave it.

North of the Mariscal is a large grassy public park. Adjacent to the park is a shopping mall that rivals anything we have in the United States in terms of architecture and consumer goods. There's no doubt that some very wealthy people live in Quito. We visited both the park and the mall on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Quito sits very nearly at the equator but is almost 10,000 feet above sea level. As a result the weather is eternal spring. Many of the days during our visit exceeded 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Taxi drivers repeatedly mentioned the heat so this must be unusual. Still, I suspect its always pleasantly warm, rarely hot, and never truly cold. Most afternoons clouds built up against the mountains. Now and then it sprinkled some rain, but there were no downpours during our visit.

A real highlight of our visit to Quito was riding the Teleferico up to Cruz Loma lookout on the side of Pichincha Volcano. This newly opened aerial tram whisks riders from below 9000 feet of elevation to more than 13,400 feet in less than ten minutes. While you're still not at the top on Pichincha at this point, it's a different world at this elevation. The air is cool and thin and the vegetation is dominated by bunch grasses. Views of massive snow-capped volcanoes and deep valleys are stunning. There are a number of restaurants and shops here, but you can hike on for miles or even to the summit if you choose. We strolled along the trail for a half mile or so and soaked up the views of Quito and its suburbs stretched out below us.

Finally on our last day in Quito we headed for El Mitad del Mundo (The Middle of the World). Ecuador has come up in lecture or discussion in every physical geography class I ever taught. Remarkably very few North Americans when shown an outline map of the world's countries can correctly identify where the Equator lies. This despite the fact that there is an American country named for this line that divides our spherical earth into northern and southern hemispheres. The equator was established to lie just north of Quito by a French astronomical expedition between 1735 and 1739. This involved triangulation measurements of three degrees of arc along the equator after three years of astronomical observations from tropical mountaintops over 200 miles of equator. A three dimensional map in the museum depicts the locations they measured and I can hardly imagine what it would have been like to trek up and down these ridiculous peaks during the 18th century with heavy astronomical and surveying equipment. Amazing.

While El Mitad del Mundo is today mostly a hokey tourist destination of shops and restaurants built around the monument established by the French, the exhibits describing the expedition itself are professional and informative. Plus, there's no doubt that it's great fun to have your photograph taken straddling the clearly delineated equator line, one foot firmly planted in each hemisphere. Ironically, we now know, thanks to global position satellites (GPS) that the actual equator lies about 200 meters north of the of the monument. Never mind, it's still fun.

In fact, two competing "museums" have opened up to the north and claim to be on the actual location of the Equator. We visited one of these because I was eager to see the famed demonstration of the Coriolis effect causing the water in a draining basin to rotate in opposite directions. This, of course, is impossible because at the equator there is no Coriolis effect and moving a few feet off of the equator will do essentially nothing to change this. Nevertheless we saw the demonstration and I have no doubt that virtually everyone in attendance will go home convinced that they have witnessed the Coriolis effect on a drain. Leaves were dropped on the water's surface and the water did drain in opposite directions only three feet to either side of the supposed equatorial divide. I worked hard and managed to hold my tongue, instead watching very closely for the technique involved in the trick. She opened the drain cock long before the water she had just dumped into the basin had stopped moving. Thus, all she needed to do was learn where to pour the water into each drain in order to predetermine the direction of rotation. In short, a complete hoax. Thousands of people go back to their countries and propagate this myth passionately, I'm sure, "I tell you I seen it with my very own eyes..." What makes this even more ridiculous is that after careful investigation using Google Earth, Matt informs me that even this second "museum" was not far enough north to be on the actual equator. Thus, she was just moving basins back and forth south of the equator. Why then would it drain in opposite directions. I sure wish I'd thought to bring my handheld GPS with me. Oh well.

In the afternoon we visited large volcanic crater near El Mitad del Mundo. After having lunch at a very fine restaurant on the rim, we hiked a very steep mile to the agricultural community on the crater floor. It was the only place in Ecuador that we spent time in a forest of any sort. A a group of three locals passed us on their way up. Two elderly folks were on a foot and a middle-aged woman rode a donkey.

Ecuador is a beautiful country. The people seem genuinely likable and open. The landscapes are incredible. The architecture in Quito is truly historic. The surf was excellent and if we'd had more time we'd have found even more isolated waves. The food was very good and very inexpensive. I had Filet Mignon for $5.20 in a hotel restaurant and it was excellent. The museums in Quito were very fine and rivalled those in North America. There are bookstores in many neighborhoods. Children seemed happy and playful and well looked after. Throughout the trip my only concern was for personal safety. The prevalence of armed guards and bullet proof vests never makes me feel more safe, only less so. I always remind myself when I see these things that the locals will not fly home, that they live their daily lives amidst the threat of violent crime. Los Angeles is infamous for bank robberies and freeway shootings but we have not yet had to resort to armed guards in every shop and a policeman on every corner. I hope we never do.