travel

Hobbits get home faster than we did. But before I get to our epic journey back to Minnesota, there was one last day of sight seeing in Quito.

Up until this point we’d been with tour groups of one variety or another, with someone bilingual in charge, but on the last day a group of us Minnesotans were on our own with a taxi driver who spoke no English. I had been listening to Spanish the entire time we were in Ecuador, and understood pretty much all of it (except a few times in the Galápagos when the crew members were chatting with each other, that was too fast and slangy for me to follow) but had not yet tried to put words together and force them out of my own mouth. So that was interesting. He was super nice with my garbling of his mother tongue (I even had to navigate him through the maze of a gated community to a house I’d been to just once before. Yay me!)

We were all pretty wiped out, cruising on three hours of sleep after the wedding the night before and just killing time until our flights home. There was some crankiness. Me, I was giddy, the kind of giddy that often reduces to uncontrollable, inappropriate laughing jags. It was a weird day.

We had missing seeing the Inca ruins of Pucará de Rumicucho two days before, and I had really wanted to see that before we went so we started there. The name means “stone fortress” but it was also a gathering place for sun and moon worshiping. It’s laid out in a long rectangle that runs east to west along the top of the ridge so it lines up with sunrise/sunset. It was a Sunday, but we were the only ones there, high up on a ridge overlooking the outskirts of Quito with the wind blowing by; it was eerie.

Quito suburbs below:

Mountains, then more mountains, then more mountains:  

This rock was at the center of things, now covered with graffiti:

Cross-section of the wall:

I got my dress sneakers all dirty up there. (Dress sneakers are too a thing). 

View from the parking lot up to the top of the ridge. Pretty much everything in Quito starts with a climb. I was on altitude meds so I felt fine but I understand without them exhaustion and headaches will plague you.

After the ruins we went to the Mitad del Mundo park, the one not actually on the equator. It was really too expensive for what was there (mostly shops and vaguely museum-y things, but the view from the top of the monument was pretty cool). My husband was irritated with the whole experience. I drew his attention to this particular purple flower and he had to admit it was worth a picture (I had drained my camera battery at the Inca ruins. Honestly, I have more pictures of rocks and mountains than anyone ever needs).

 

Finally it was time to head to the airport and start the journey home. Our flight to Miami was through Guayaquil so we still had a little bit of Ecuador left. If you’ve been with me from the beginning you’ll remember that on several occasions we had been told of the awesomeness that is the Barcelona Sporting Club football team. They hail from Guayaquil but are adored all over Ecuador. As my husband and I were fighting to stay awake waiting for our flight I noticed the arrival of a large number of hot young guys all wearing Barcelona yellow. My sleepy brain found this mildly amusing. It wasn’t until we boarded the bus that was going to take us out to the jet that I started to put it together.

My husband and I were oblivious, and the guys in yellow were trying to mostly keep to themselves, but everyone else on the bus were nearly wetting themselves, taking carefully framed selfies with the guys in yellow in the background. These guys weren’t fans of the Barcelona Sporting Club, they were the Barcelona Sporting Club. My husband struck up a conversation with the man next to him, a man in a polo short with a TV network logo on it, a reporter who spoke perfect English. and he confirmed it. They had just lost their game, which is probably why they seemed a bit withdrawn. Once we were on the plane other passengers went back two or three at a time to pester those poor boys. Can you imagine if the Chicago Bulls flew coach with the rest of us?

(So I got to fly over the Andes on a plane with a South American athletic team. Cool.)

We landed in Guayaquil, which in a weird way was starting to feel like home. We went from the domestic side of things to the international flights and it was immediately clear that something somewhere was not as it should be: long, long lines. Weather in Miami was delaying flights. Not only would we be two hours late leaving Quayaquil, our flight from Miami to Minneapolis had been flat-out canceled because Minnesota was also having weather. Now we had a 12-hour layover in Miami to look forward to. The poor man behind the counter had been there since 6 am with no end in sight. We told him about flying with the Barcelona Sporting Club; that perked him up.

We had four hours to kill in the Guayaquil airport before our flight. I had brought four books with me for the entire trip certain I would never get through all of them since they were in French. Well, I had. Luckily I’m never so certain I don’t have a backup plan; I had downloaded a few novels to the Kindle app of my cellphone before leaving the States. It’s really too small of a screen for reading, I generally find it too annoying even to bother. Now I can say I’ve read one novel entirely on my phone: The Martian by Andy Weir. It helps that the story was super engrossing.

I think I’ve mentioned how security in Ecuadorian airports was casual in a leave your shoes on, enjoy your water kind of way. Still, the kid with the gun that shot plastic suction cup darts was startling. It looked just like a real pistol, no fluorescent-colored tip at the end of the barrel or anything. Not sure what was going to happen when they got to Miami with that toy…

I used to be able to sleep anywhere, but not so much anymore. I tried to sleep on the plane but mostly just kept reading The Martian. So I was running on three hours of sleep I’d enjoyed more than 24 hours ago when we landed in Miami and dealt with customs. In Ecuador every announcement in the airport was read twice, once in Spanish and once in English. It was a bit startling to realize that in Miami they were going to roll with just the Spanish, and that at a quick clip my sleep-deprived brain had to work to keep up with. That was some fun bureaucracy, let me tell you. At least in the end the airline gave us a voucher for a hotel and we got to get a few hours of sleep before going back to the airport.

While we were napping the city got deluged with more rain. The ride back to the airport involved driving through nearly a foot of water on some of the streets. The shuttle driver said this happened all the time and would be gone in another hour. But he would come and pick us up when our flight got bumped again, they would hold on to our room for us because they were sure we were going to need it. Which is nice, but not really what you want to hear when you just want to be back home.

The airport in Guayaquil is much nicer than the one in Miami. Just saying.

The delayed flight was further delayed because our plane was stranded on the tarmac while the plane at the gate waited for its flight crew, which was apparently stranded on some other plane waiting for a gate. Because: rain. Eventually we all jogged down to a different concourse to finally get on our plane to Minneapolis. By now I was done with The Martian but with six hours of sleep over three days about to become day four but still not able to sleep on a plane I just looked out the window and hallucinated. It was strange, the lights on the ground below were making Kaiju shapes that breathed and shifted their weight like characters waiting to be picked in a video game. I knew they were just lights on the ground, of course, but I couldn’t make my eyes focus on them that way. The Kaiju got more and more elaborate as we reached the edges of the Twin Cities area. It didn’t go away until the pilot turned on the lights as we approached for landing, and I was actually sorry to have it go because the way they were moving had been so hypnotic and cool. But I was very, very tired.

Then I got home to my boys and my dog. So good to be finally home. The Return of the King ended faster than that vacation.

I can’t wait to get back to Ecuador.

I’m combining two days in one post since these were the day before and of the wedding, and that’s family stuff. We did sneak in a few touristy things, though.

We were staying with the bride’s family in a condo in Quito, and had gotten in late the night before so it wasn’t until the morning of day 9 that we could appreciate the views out the windows.

The building next door was under construction, we could see workers moving through it.

Street level view:

Day 9 had a few false starts, first to see the actual site of the equator, which wasn’t accessible by bus because the road up the mountain was too narrow. Just before the driver came to that conclusion was the scariest moment of the trip, it was a sheer drop out the bus window and the road was bouncy/tippy. It turned out to be too far to walk from there (although we started to try) but at least we were all with our feet on solid ground while the driver got the bus turned around (the physics of how he did it baffle me; I didn’t see it happen but it must have involved a giant picking it up and setting it facing the other way).

Our next destination was Mitad del Mundo, the park located right on where they thought the equator was before GPS pinpointed it more exactly. Alas, the lines to get in were very long and we were all anxious to actually see something before it was time to get dressed up for the rehearsal dinner so we moved on to the next stop.

Pululahua is a dormant volcano whose caldera collapsed into a doughnut shape:

The sides were quite steep, and it was a long way down. Farmers live in the caldera and grow all sorts of crops in the rich soil but is pretty isolated from the rest of Quito because of how nearly inaccessible it is.

There were a lot of shops outside the visitor center with scarves, alpaca knitwear, indigenous musical instruments and handicrafts, and tons of silver jewelry. After shopping we went to a Peruvian restaurant and had some truly fantastic food. (After returning home I found this website Laylita’s recipes with tons of Ecuadorian as well as Peruvian recipes. I’ve tried a dozen or so already and they are all really, really good. We’re actually having the seco de cordero/lamb stew again this week).

We were supposed to also visit an Incan ruin but by the time we were done stuffing ourselves with Peruvian food there was no time. The rehearsal dinner was a series of native Ecuadorian dishes that were so tasty. I could happily eat plantains with every meal (they cook them in so many different ways), and the pineapple they have in Ecuador is nearly white, so you expect it to taste bland, but it is so much more flavorful than the yellow pineapple we have here my husband keep talking about how we wish we could have that again. There was also live music at the dinner, two fellows who could play guitar, flutes and pipes, trading instruments between songs and even playing the guitar and the pan pipe at the same time. They were amazing.

Lastly are some pictures I took at the venue where the wedding was held, flowers upon flowers upon flowers, it was really a gorgeous place for a wedding. And it had the nicest bathrooms in Ecuador, and I’m not just saying that because the men’s and the women’s were separate rooms and were equipped with tissue (some of the places we saw on our road trip were quite an experience. They were all clean, but you brought your own tissue and the division between the men’s room and the women’s was theoretical to nonexistent, including one restaurant where the paper towels for both “sides” was over the urinal, so if you’re going to dry your hands you’re going to have to be friendly).

We still had one day left in Quito before our air travel adventure started, and a few of us Minnesotans had planned to spend the day seeing the things we’d missed seeing on day 9. Plus there was the epic RETURN OF THE KING just get to the end already journey home. And I have a bit I want to say about music, so we’re not done yet. In the mean time, enjoy the gorgeous gardens:

This was the day we started in Tonsupa on the coast so literally at sea level, then drove out of the rain forest of the coastal lowlands to Quito, the capital city, in the Sierra (Andean highlands). Quito is at 9350 feet but we were a little higher than that since the pass we traversed overlooked the city.

We were in the rain forest for most of the day. The highway we followed passed through a lot of little towns, each with at least one set of speed bumps where people waited with fruit and other stuff on sale, running up to cars which are never making a complete stop. Seems like a tough way to make living.

The houses were mostly right up on the road, on the narrow strip of land between road and edge of the mountain. It reminded me of roads I’ve driven through the Appalachians where the houses are also right up on the road with a sheer drop behind, although the architecture is of course quite different.

Nearly every house had four or five chickens in the yard, a dog or two, and a pig.

I took a lot of pictures that didn’t turn out because I insist on using a crappy camera through the dirty window of a moving bus. Somehow my husband’s pics from his cell phone look like he was standing on the street with a tripod. (Most of these are his. *sigh*. I saw cool stuff too).

Town on the river. I tried to take a pic of the houses that didn’t come out. Closer to the bridge they were built right up to the water like they do on the Ganges.

I think this is the same town…

We stopped for lunch in a town called Mindo, a touristy place with lots of Europeans roaming the streets. Parts were quite lush…

…and it was Disneyland-clean and maintained…

 

…but with more of those ubiquitous stray dogs. This one followed us about because one of us had food in his hand. He was a cool dog though, check out those Batman ears.

After lunch we kept climbing higher and higher. We got into the clouds before we even left the rain forest.

 

Then we reached the edge of the green and everything was suddenly brown. And we’re looking down at Quito:

We went all the way down into downtown, specifically la Calle de Las Siete Cruces (because it has seven churches).

I might be misremembering which one is which, it was late when we got there so we didn’t go inside any of them, but I think this is the one that is all gold on the inside:

The streetlights really messed with my camera so most of what I saw I didn’t get a good pic of. We did see the Plaza Grande and the Carondelet Palace. Our guide/host pointed out that “you can still see the bullet holes in the walls from the last coup”, which I’m filing under things I didn’t hear last year when I was touring DC (of course the British once set the White House on fire, but we didn’t go on that tour).

In this picture if you look down the street you can just make out an illuminated statue on a peak overlooking the city. It’s called the Virgin of Panecillo and despite the late hour we really wanted a closer look at that.

The Panecillo is a hill that tops out at 9895 feet, and the view from up there is amazing.

We were told that this was an Incan sundial, but Wikipedia disputes this. Either way, cool.

Quito is very different from Quayaquil, like Chicago compared to DC (probably I’m thinking that because I visited both those cities on the same trip last year, but still, I think it’s valid). I wish we could have gotten more time downtown, it looked like there were tons of things to see, all those churches just to start with. I guess we’re going to have to go back someday…

 

After our Galápagos adventure we caught up with the wedding party’s tour, already in progress (we missed some cool places they visited without us, my husband and I totally have to go back some day). We had arranged for the hotel shuttle to take us to the airport, but the shuttle was stuck in traffic so the hotel staff got us a taxi instead. It was a town car not a yellow cab, but driving through Guayaquil morning rush hour down at ground level was the second scariest moment in Ecuador (the scariest bit is yet to come). No one pays attention to the traffic lights or signage, but there is a complex system of horn honkings that everyone seems to understand. All the drivers use their horns to communicate where they are, where they want to be, and when they think it’s their turn to be there. They all seem to understand each other perfectly, but it’s nerve-wracking, particularly if your car has no seat belts. Luckily it’s a short ride to the airport.

The airport in Guayaquil is nicer than Minneapolis/St. Paul and much nicer than Miami. And passing through security is downright relaxing. You don’t have to take off your shoes, they don’t care about your liquids, you just have to pass through the metal detector and move on. Like back in the good old days.

We were flying from Guayaquil to Esmeraldas, so it was a small jet and we boarded from the tarmac. You follow a painted path that takes you safely around all the engines to board the jet from the back, picking up your plantain chips from a table as you leave the building.

It was pretty narrow on the inside, with the front row a pair of seats that folded down and faced backwards. The jet was not quite small enough to make you want to make sure there were no musicians flying with you (musicians on small aircraft being of course terribly unlucky).

It was a short flight, cloudy so I couldn’t really see anything but the top of the tallest volcano. We came in for a landing over the ocean, which was cool because there were so many ships and fishing boats out on the water. Esmeraldas means emeralds, which apparently there are a lot of, but it’s also appropriate because everything is so intensely green. We were now in the rain forest part of Ecuador.

From Esmeraldas we went a little way south along the coast to Tonsupa, a beachfront town. We ate some amazing seafood (with more plantains, natch) and spent the afternoon on the beach.

From the pictures it looks like a normal beach, but it was really more like a marketplace. People came by every minute or two selling everything under the sun. Some things made sense like ice cream, sunglasses, towels, fresh fruit and that. Other things were more surprising, like massages and someone with pages of designs that I hope were for henna and not actual on-the-beach tattoos. These vendors had sections of beach that were their territory, and we saw one woman who was clearly keeping other people off the section of the beach her people worked.

There was lots to do there, but I was so exhausted from all the Galápagos activity I just people-watched.

The weather brightened up later in the day, and of course the sun goes down promptly at 6:30. You can watch it happen, it only takes five seconds for the sun to disappear. Being on the equator is pretty cool.

 

But the thing I remember most about my time in Tonsupa was that I slept for nearly 12 hours there. I woke up feeling almost human again. The ocean air will do that to you.

 

Our last day in the Galápagos. We went ashore after breakfast and were left to wander around the town of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno until our flight back to the mainland. There wasn’t too much to see there, lots of tourists shops and stray dogs (some seemed to have owners or at least places they chiefly liked to linger but few had collars and startingly none had been neutered. I saw a little chihuahua who was insanely well-endowed for his size, I guess to compensate for the pink collar his owner had put on him). The sea lions were still everywhere, napping.

We walked up and down the street then played cards in a café until time to catch our flight. A nice low-key day after four days of intense activity.

 

The airport was colorful, but opened to the tarmac so it was very loud, and the PA system desperately tried to broadcast louder than the jets: chaos.

 

 

 

They had us board the flight from the front and the back at the same time, so insanely efficient I wonder why they don’t make jetways at airports long enough to reach both doors so they can do this everywhere. I guess it would be awkward getting around the wing.

This was the one flight without cloud cover so I could see the part of Ecuador around Guayaquil as we came in for our landing. There were mangrove swamps and rice paddies and shrimp farms and the city itself was huge, we never saw more than a sliver of it on the ground.

Francisco who had dropped us off was there to pick us up and take us back to the hotel. If you’ll recall my husband had lost his Twins cap somewhere on the way to the ship on the Galápagos and he wanted to get another cap of some sort before we continued our Ecuadorian adventure, so he asked Francisco who the local football teams are and which one he should support cap-wise. Francisco explained that there are two football teams in Guayaquil, the Barcelona Sporting Club and the Club Sport Emelec. He tried to be impartial but it was increasingly apparent that he was a Barcelona fan, especially when he described them as the Bruce Springsteen of football teams (Emelec is owned by some rich fellow while Barcelona is the people’s team). When we got back to the hotel my husband went out to get his cap but they were all sold out of both teams, so he picked up a cap for a Quito team called Sociedad Deportivo Quito, which apparently is the Bruce Springsteen of Quito area football teams.

We were on the eleventh floor this night but the traffic sounds still carried all the way up to us, including the sound of a drum, chanting, and lots of vuvuzelas. I looked out the window and saw a group of protesters marching. They had a cardboard coffin they took turns carrying and I could hear them saying “Fuera correa” but I couldn’t read their banner from the angle I was at so I’m not sure what they were protesting. They had a police escort and they marched up and down the main street a few times quiet peacefully.

After five days on the Galápagos where the water was safe I completely forgot about not brushing my teeth in sink water, that was a tough habit to get back into. We stayed in that evening, watching cooking shows in Spanish, including a Japanese chef making sushi. Guayaquil is truly a melting pot.

You’d think being back on land I would sleep really well but alas I kept waking up all night long feeling like I was still on the boat, which was nice, and certain I could hear the navigation starting, which was less so. But the hotel bed was more than twice the size of my bunk in the cabin; it was nice to be able to stretch all the way out again.

 

 

Our last full day in the Galápagos was spent on Isla San Cristóbal. We spent the morning at one location than navigated over lunch time to see something a little further on. The morning was a hike up a steep path through a canyon…

… that twisted and hairpin-turned, nearly always at too close of quarters for good pictures but the mountains around us were amazing.

We saw four or five different kinds of lizard between all the islands we visited.

We finally got to the top with awesome views of the ocean all around us. I love this pic in particular (it’s my Twitter banner currently). I never thought I’d have a picture of me with a bunch of yachts, and one of them’s my ride!

But the point of this hike was the boobies. Where we were hiking to had the ground nests of the blue-footed boobies as well as the tree nests of the red-footed and nazca boobies. A lot of the blue-footed boobies nested right on the path (the rocks were put their by the naturalists to give the nests a little zone of privacy, for those who might not respect the white spray of, well, you can guess what a boobie can do to mark its territory).

This boobie has its mouth open and is making a trilling motion with its throat to cool off; the sun was intense that day, and this one chose to nest in no shade whatsoever.

Then we saw an adorably fuzzy newborn boobie, also way too hot in the full sun so its parent is trying to make it some shade.

The next nest over was expecting twins.

The red-footed boobies on nest duty were hard to distinguish from the others; if you can’t see their feet they all look alike. But this one was out of nest, just chillin’.

We saw nazca boobies too, but their feet are quite ordinary and they were all in the nests like the red-footed boobies. This is probably one of those, a bit of a drop below me.

 

And of course the Galápagos also have finches, and finch nests.

But everywhere you go you see my two favorites: napping sea lion pups and hoary-looking iguanas.

The hike ended at a beach which was our last snorkel. We swam along the rock face to the right:

After lunch we went on a panga ride to explore more rock formations, some high-sided alcoves:

And some we could have sailed straight through:

The ceiling inside of the second one was quite cool, lots of different colors all melted together. Sadly it was dark up there and none of my pics turned out, but here is a picture of me taking a picture of the ceiling:

The pangas then took us to a postcard-perfect white sandy beach bordered by volcanic rock. There was nobody there but us boat passengers, the best sort of evening on the beach:

These two sea lions were very chummy, and completely ignored the dozens of humans taking pictures of them cuddling.

If there was anything we saw more of than sea lions and iguanas, it was frigate birds. They hover and watch for opportunities to snatch other bird’s fish. They look nearly Batman-esque with their impressive outline.

The day ended with the ship circling this rock formation. We mistimed our opportunity to get a pic with the sun setting between the two rock formations, but there’s always next time, right?