FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF QUITO
Quito, Ecuador, Wednesday, 07 June 2006
In the last few days before leaving Bahia de Caráquez for Quito, Kathleen has been picking up proofreading work. Thank goodness! That should help our financial plight. She goes off with the laptop, first to the internet café and then to Puerto Amistad where she can plug into 110 volt power and get on with her work. I putter about the boat getting Vilisar ready to be left at anchor while we head inland.
We are up at the crack of dawn on Tuesday (yesterday) to make Spam or PB&J sandwiches for the bus trip, and to get the dinghy up onto the deck, cleaned and stowed. Unbelievable how weedy and grungy the bottom of the dinghy is after only two weeks in the water! I shall definitely have to get something rigged soon to haul it out of the water using a sail halyard when the boat is not in use.
At 0815 Susan from S/V Wooden Shoe puts over in her rubber dinghy to take us ashore. She had been expecting her relatives and visitors the night before but they never show up. She is now antsy to get going to the Galapagos on Wednesday (today).
I bought the one-way tickets ($9 each) for Quito yesterday. As it turned out there are only about six of us aboard, all tourists (two American girls, sisters; a Belgian couple and us. Other passengers join later but there is always lots of room to spread out.)
The first third of the trip to Quito is through the coastal plain. At first we have great views across the River-Chone estuary and can clearly see the many artificially-constructed shrimp basins. Everything is very green, lots of banana plantations, cocoa trees, and fields full of cotton or rice, the hillsides covered in rows of corn stocks looking dry and clearly waiting for the heads to ripen. You can see why, after petroleum (30 percent of exports), bananas make up the second largest export product (26 percent). Twenty percent all farms grow them. (The third largest export item used to be shrimp. The farms were hit by a virus a few years ago and I am not sure how far they have recovered.)
Farmland in Ecuador is very inequitably divided despite land reforms in the 1960’s and 70’s. Three-quarters of all farms work less than 10 percent of the arable land. The big landlords are kings. Tiny farms (under two hectares, for example) – and there are lots of them - cannot support a family of four, providing at least one reason for the exodus to the big cities of Guayaquil and Quito. Desperate as life is in the barrios there, emigration is still a reasonable decision to avoid unemployment and perhaps starvation on the land. Small farms also cannot afford capital investment in equipment (irrigation, tractors, etc.) Certainly, at no time during the whole trip do we ever see mechanical agricultural equipment though I do see irrigation systems in operation at one point. We also see figures out in the fields doing stoop labour of some sort, setting out plants perhaps.
The housing along the highway is the typical coastal stilt-huts with plaited or woven walls and cut-out windows, some of them with shutters. I wonder if the people live on platforms to be above the water, if and when it rises, snakes and other roving things. There are definitely concrete-block houses along the road. But the poor people live in platform houses. It’s cheap to build an uses local products. Some have thatched rooves and some have corrugated sheet metal coverings. It isn’t till we reach the higher ranching country that we began to see the occasional very large ‘trophy’ houses of more modern construction. Somebody has money. We also see signs indicating large haciendas or estancias.
The bus sways around the curvy two-lane highway. It is worse than being on a boat at times, and Kathleen begins to feel a little nauseous. Fortunately she gets over it after an hour or so and a nap because, once we leave Santo Domingo de los Colorados behind us, we really get into mountain driving.
Prior to Santo Domingo ranching and feed-lots have already taken over from fruit plantations. There are rolling green hills of lush grass and herds of brahma cattle grazing. The roadside villages provide tradesmen services out of what are basically huts: welding, electrical repairs, car and truck repair. Every second shop seems to be selling plantains and/or bananas. Here and there in villages beans of some sort are set out to dry in the overcast daylight. Are they coffee beans? Or maybe cocoa? Green plantains are piled high in front of some tiendas.
After paying a toll, the bus starts up the two-lane paved road into the mountains bound for Quito some five or six hours away. We follow a river (Chone?) which is increasingly a cataract, dashing down over stones between steep walls of greenery. The road is not heavily travelled. But it consists mainly of freighters heading up and down from the coast. The bus is not much faster than they are, but the driver clearly thinks he is. He aggressively passes the trucks. We are occasionally passed ourselves by pickup trucks or the odd car or van. But the bus line, Reina del Camino (‘Queen of the Road’) clearly takes its title seriously. Puffing great clouds of black smoke out from under the window where I sit, the driver gives gas and skinnies past the eighteen wheelers. Some truck drivers accept the challenge: I see one freighter pass another on the outside of a blind curve. Had anyone been coming toward him downhill, the downhill guy would have been forced off into the gorge. I decide not to worry. Clearly this guy has been doing this job for a while.
We go snaking around the gorges until, at times we can look back and down for ten miles and see our highway behind us. We have to rise nearly two miles to reach Quito (2,800 – 3500 metres high). Horses and occasionally cattle graze along the verges of the road. At one point, as we enter the clouds at around ‘Kilometre 20’, I glimpse an Andes lady in a woollen cape and a fedora hat sitting in the grass watching the traffic go by in the mist. She is holding a leash with a llama at the end of it.
The scenery along the road is spectacular and the gorges hundreds of metres deep and steep. We top out through the clouds and into weak sunshine. The roads have been wet and glistening for hours and continue so. Raindrops streak the side windows of the bus. As we pay our exit toll, we have a horizontal perspective across rolling mountain valleys to distant peaks. No sign yet of volcanoes or snow-covered mountains but this could be because it is cloudy. Are we in the outskirts of Quito, the 1.5 million city strung out over many mountain valleys? Perhaps. We are still an hour short of our scheduled arrival. The density of buildings continues to increase. Must be Quito.
The traffic also thickens. Lots of busses and trucks, all spouting black diesel smoke. Most of the trucks are European makes: Scania, Volvo, Mercedes. But there are Norteamericano brands too. I see lots of Western Star trucks from Kelowna British Columbia.
When boarding we told the driver’s assistant that we wanted out in downtown Quito –actually, as it turns out, the New Town - rather than at the bus terminal. We do not have a hotel reservation. On the bus we got to know Peter and Elke from Antwerp. He is a mid-twenties film director and is interested in the cruising life. They have only a few weeks before they have to go back to work. We team up to find accommodation in the city. Good old Kathleen! She actually reads the guide books and when we get off the bus, we head into one of the many, many ‘Cabinas’ (telephone centres) you find all over Ecuador. She calls up Hostal Belmonte at the edge of the Old Town; we all jump in a cab and ride over there.
They have rooms for us all at $3 per person. Belmonte looks perhaps better from the outside on the little side street than it does from the inside. It is basically a backpacker inn. Very basic but cheap and clean. (According to Peter, it is much better, ie cleaner, than some they have seen at $5 a head). We get a room facing the quiet street with three small double beds, a single naked bulb in the centre of the ceiling, a small ‘arborite’ table and a single power outlet of indecipherable age. The toilet and shower is down the hall. The weather outside is not cold but it is damp, the clouds have closed in, and we none of have any desire to look any farther even though we wonder why there are not more guests there. The beds are not luxurious but they are at least more comfortable than Vilisar’s and the bedding is clean.
We meet Jose, the 19-year-old smiling clerk. He walks us around to show us the internet café, a bakery, and a few eating places that are cheap. Chifas (ie Chinese) are always cheap and there is a great little bakery at the corner for the morning, a frittateria (fries up various dishes at the counter tat you take to your table). There is also an Ecuadorian restaurant that is cheap. Jose seems determined to keep us company. We meet Peter and Elke at the internet café and agree to eat together at 1900 next door at the Chifa. (Jose sticks to us like honey, smiling and agreeable and helping us with our Spanish. That doesn’t actually mean he speaks slower or more clearly, but he does correct us in a nice way.) The lady at the farmacia where we make a brief stop warns us to be careful on the streets at night, and keep our valuables inside our coats. ‘The Columbians’, she says are all over the place and will steal or mug us. This confirms what we have read about the Old Town in all the guidebooks. Old Town has become rather dangerous and one should not be walking around alone at night. Maybe Jose if trying to protect us. Maybe we shall move up to the New Town when the kids arrive.
After two beers and a big meal I am ready for bed. We switch the bare bulb out by 2130.
Quito, Ecuador, Wednesday, 07 June 2006
In the last few days before leaving Bahia de Caráquez for Quito, Kathleen has been picking up proofreading work. Thank goodness! That should help our financial plight. She goes off with the laptop, first to the internet café and then to Puerto Amistad where she can plug into 110 volt power and get on with her work. I putter about the boat getting Vilisar ready to be left at anchor while we head inland.
We are up at the crack of dawn on Tuesday (yesterday) to make Spam or PB&J sandwiches for the bus trip, and to get the dinghy up onto the deck, cleaned and stowed. Unbelievable how weedy and grungy the bottom of the dinghy is after only two weeks in the water! I shall definitely have to get something rigged soon to haul it out of the water using a sail halyard when the boat is not in use.
At 0815 Susan from S/V Wooden Shoe puts over in her rubber dinghy to take us ashore. She had been expecting her relatives and visitors the night before but they never show up. She is now antsy to get going to the Galapagos on Wednesday (today).
I bought the one-way tickets ($9 each) for Quito yesterday. As it turned out there are only about six of us aboard, all tourists (two American girls, sisters; a Belgian couple and us. Other passengers join later but there is always lots of room to spread out.)
The first third of the trip to Quito is through the coastal plain. At first we have great views across the River-Chone estuary and can clearly see the many artificially-constructed shrimp basins. Everything is very green, lots of banana plantations, cocoa trees, and fields full of cotton or rice, the hillsides covered in rows of corn stocks looking dry and clearly waiting for the heads to ripen. You can see why, after petroleum (30 percent of exports), bananas make up the second largest export product (26 percent). Twenty percent all farms grow them. (The third largest export item used to be shrimp. The farms were hit by a virus a few years ago and I am not sure how far they have recovered.)
Farmland in Ecuador is very inequitably divided despite land reforms in the 1960’s and 70’s. Three-quarters of all farms work less than 10 percent of the arable land. The big landlords are kings. Tiny farms (under two hectares, for example) – and there are lots of them - cannot support a family of four, providing at least one reason for the exodus to the big cities of Guayaquil and Quito. Desperate as life is in the barrios there, emigration is still a reasonable decision to avoid unemployment and perhaps starvation on the land. Small farms also cannot afford capital investment in equipment (irrigation, tractors, etc.) Certainly, at no time during the whole trip do we ever see mechanical agricultural equipment though I do see irrigation systems in operation at one point. We also see figures out in the fields doing stoop labour of some sort, setting out plants perhaps.
The housing along the highway is the typical coastal stilt-huts with plaited or woven walls and cut-out windows, some of them with shutters. I wonder if the people live on platforms to be above the water, if and when it rises, snakes and other roving things. There are definitely concrete-block houses along the road. But the poor people live in platform houses. It’s cheap to build an uses local products. Some have thatched rooves and some have corrugated sheet metal coverings. It isn’t till we reach the higher ranching country that we began to see the occasional very large ‘trophy’ houses of more modern construction. Somebody has money. We also see signs indicating large haciendas or estancias.
The bus sways around the curvy two-lane highway. It is worse than being on a boat at times, and Kathleen begins to feel a little nauseous. Fortunately she gets over it after an hour or so and a nap because, once we leave Santo Domingo de los Colorados behind us, we really get into mountain driving.
Prior to Santo Domingo ranching and feed-lots have already taken over from fruit plantations. There are rolling green hills of lush grass and herds of brahma cattle grazing. The roadside villages provide tradesmen services out of what are basically huts: welding, electrical repairs, car and truck repair. Every second shop seems to be selling plantains and/or bananas. Here and there in villages beans of some sort are set out to dry in the overcast daylight. Are they coffee beans? Or maybe cocoa? Green plantains are piled high in front of some tiendas.
After paying a toll, the bus starts up the two-lane paved road into the mountains bound for Quito some five or six hours away. We follow a river (Chone?) which is increasingly a cataract, dashing down over stones between steep walls of greenery. The road is not heavily travelled. But it consists mainly of freighters heading up and down from the coast. The bus is not much faster than they are, but the driver clearly thinks he is. He aggressively passes the trucks. We are occasionally passed ourselves by pickup trucks or the odd car or van. But the bus line, Reina del Camino (‘Queen of the Road’) clearly takes its title seriously. Puffing great clouds of black smoke out from under the window where I sit, the driver gives gas and skinnies past the eighteen wheelers. Some truck drivers accept the challenge: I see one freighter pass another on the outside of a blind curve. Had anyone been coming toward him downhill, the downhill guy would have been forced off into the gorge. I decide not to worry. Clearly this guy has been doing this job for a while.
We go snaking around the gorges until, at times we can look back and down for ten miles and see our highway behind us. We have to rise nearly two miles to reach Quito (2,800 – 3500 metres high). Horses and occasionally cattle graze along the verges of the road. At one point, as we enter the clouds at around ‘Kilometre 20’, I glimpse an Andes lady in a woollen cape and a fedora hat sitting in the grass watching the traffic go by in the mist. She is holding a leash with a llama at the end of it.
The scenery along the road is spectacular and the gorges hundreds of metres deep and steep. We top out through the clouds and into weak sunshine. The roads have been wet and glistening for hours and continue so. Raindrops streak the side windows of the bus. As we pay our exit toll, we have a horizontal perspective across rolling mountain valleys to distant peaks. No sign yet of volcanoes or snow-covered mountains but this could be because it is cloudy. Are we in the outskirts of Quito, the 1.5 million city strung out over many mountain valleys? Perhaps. We are still an hour short of our scheduled arrival. The density of buildings continues to increase. Must be Quito.
The traffic also thickens. Lots of busses and trucks, all spouting black diesel smoke. Most of the trucks are European makes: Scania, Volvo, Mercedes. But there are Norteamericano brands too. I see lots of Western Star trucks from Kelowna British Columbia.
When boarding we told the driver’s assistant that we wanted out in downtown Quito –actually, as it turns out, the New Town - rather than at the bus terminal. We do not have a hotel reservation. On the bus we got to know Peter and Elke from Antwerp. He is a mid-twenties film director and is interested in the cruising life. They have only a few weeks before they have to go back to work. We team up to find accommodation in the city. Good old Kathleen! She actually reads the guide books and when we get off the bus, we head into one of the many, many ‘Cabinas’ (telephone centres) you find all over Ecuador. She calls up Hostal Belmonte at the edge of the Old Town; we all jump in a cab and ride over there.
They have rooms for us all at $3 per person. Belmonte looks perhaps better from the outside on the little side street than it does from the inside. It is basically a backpacker inn. Very basic but cheap and clean. (According to Peter, it is much better, ie cleaner, than some they have seen at $5 a head). We get a room facing the quiet street with three small double beds, a single naked bulb in the centre of the ceiling, a small ‘arborite’ table and a single power outlet of indecipherable age. The toilet and shower is down the hall. The weather outside is not cold but it is damp, the clouds have closed in, and we none of have any desire to look any farther even though we wonder why there are not more guests there. The beds are not luxurious but they are at least more comfortable than Vilisar’s and the bedding is clean.
We meet Jose, the 19-year-old smiling clerk. He walks us around to show us the internet café, a bakery, and a few eating places that are cheap. Chifas (ie Chinese) are always cheap and there is a great little bakery at the corner for the morning, a frittateria (fries up various dishes at the counter tat you take to your table). There is also an Ecuadorian restaurant that is cheap. Jose seems determined to keep us company. We meet Peter and Elke at the internet café and agree to eat together at 1900 next door at the Chifa. (Jose sticks to us like honey, smiling and agreeable and helping us with our Spanish. That doesn’t actually mean he speaks slower or more clearly, but he does correct us in a nice way.) The lady at the farmacia where we make a brief stop warns us to be careful on the streets at night, and keep our valuables inside our coats. ‘The Columbians’, she says are all over the place and will steal or mug us. This confirms what we have read about the Old Town in all the guidebooks. Old Town has become rather dangerous and one should not be walking around alone at night. Maybe Jose if trying to protect us. Maybe we shall move up to the New Town when the kids arrive.
After two beers and a big meal I am ready for bed. We switch the bare bulb out by 2130.
posted by rjb @ Wednesday, June 07, 2006
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