After haggling for our taxi, we zipped off to our hostel, L'Auberge Inn, where we were led down about five hallways interspersed by about seven flights of stairs to our little room in the top corner of the sprawling (and moldering) building. Once settled, we cinched up our proverbial (and literal) belts and ventured out into the last couple hours of daylight to check out the town. We first tried go to the South American Explorer's Club... but they were closed. So we kept walking til we hit the Mariscal tourist area where we popped in a snazzy bar/restaurant for an overpriced drink and an overpriced gourmet snack (fried cheese with black raspberries - ¡que rico!) then continued on to find internet to upload a long overdue blog. We rounded out the night with some delicious shwarma in what is apparently Quito's Arab quarter. And then it was time for bed as we had big plans for the morrow. Big plans indeed.No, we weren't adopting helper-monkeys (Kate vetoed that sweet, sweet idea) - we were going to the market town of Otovalo. That meant we needed to take a two+ hour bus ride which, naturally, meant that it was (finally) time to watch Rambo 4.
Which, incidentally, is an incredible work of the purest cinematic genius... dripping with blood. Anyway, once we reached our destination, we endlessly wandered the endless stalls of tourist trinkets and passed people, like this guy, packing their entire stock on their backs. We got some subpar local food, fiercely haggled over hammock prices, and picked up food for dinner that night. Overall, we both found the market a little too sprawling and, in general, with lower quality goods than the market of Pisaq we went to outside of Cusco.The next day started off with breakfast at the Magic Bean, a hostel/restaurant in the Mariscal where we feasted on a fat stack of succulent black raspberry pancakes, an omelette the size of a large omelette, and juice that was no doubt rather awkwardly squeezed whilst the fruit was still on the tree.
Fed and watered as we were, we decided it was time for some culture in the form of a museum whose name escapes us. But it had an extensive collection of pre-Columbian art on the bottom floor (where we lingered) and some of the standard religious art upstairs (where we zipped through) and a cool sculpture park outside (where we posed). To cap off the day, we taxi-ed it out to the cinema to watch Sweeney Todd. Several people walked out. We didn't, but I can't say that we loved it either.Monday, we finally made it to the South American Explorer's clubhouse during business hours. We checked our email, got some advice, and then set out for the Mitad del Mundo to see the world-famous EQUATOR! Now, most people don't realize it, but the
equator is a physical line consisting of various types of rocks pulled over the millennia by earth's gravitational force into a narrow band around its middle. Primitive people called it the E'ko-o'dor, or "Snake of the Heavens," because it was assumed that I should probably stop lying now. In actuality, the true equator was only recently discovered through a GPS survey... about 20 years after they built the monument to it in an incorrect location. We took some pictures and admired the false equator from afar, then went to the true equator...Which lies in an old native village. We got a great tour with some equator games (like watching the water spin different ways down the drain), then got to see some of the native stuff too, like pickled snakes and shrunken heads. We also shot a blow gun and picked up a beautiful woven tapestry with llamas on it.
Hooray for llamas! Once we returned to the city, we wandered a bit, BBQ'd some Mongolians for dinner, and went back to the cinema to watch the recent Oscar winner, No Country for Old Men, or Sin Lugar Para Los Debiles. While kilometers better than Sweeney Todd, we were both a little disappointed by it. Not the Coen Bros. finest effort... but then, they are held to a higher standard.Tuesday was our last day in South America! Our last day... in SOUTH AMERICA! Egads! Gumdiddly! La cucaracha! We kept things mellow, spending most of the day looking for some elusive chocolate that we picked up in Baños. This was gold-wrapped fondue chocolate of the gods and extraterrestrials that we were only able to find in Quito for about $7/bar (whereas Baños was about $2/bar). So while unsuccessful in that quest, we did a) pick up some other pretty good chocolate and b) checked out Quito's old city, which was way nicer than the part in which we'd been loitering for the past few days.
Oh, and we also changed money on the black market. Aren't you proud of us? We haggled a bit, got a better rate, and double checked all the bills were legit. Now we can add international black market currency dealers to our growing resume. Anyway, to celebrate the end of our trip, we decided to get some French food as we'd never see it again at these prices. We had a scrumdidly-iscious meal of: oven-roasted veggies, cream soup with mussels, chicken with a peanut and mushroom sauce, mashed potatoes, salad with a mustard vinaigrette, with fresh lemonade to drink and sugar roasted figs with fresh cheese as a desert... all for $3.50. ¡Estos Ecuatorianos son locos! The next day, we got up way earlier than humans are meant to (about 6:30 AM) to cab it over to the airport, where we stood in line for a couple hours to get our tickets. Then, after paying our cash-only $41/person departure tax, there was no line through security and we made our flight to Miami with plenty of time to spare. But there, things got sticky as our plane was delayed an hour, causing us to miss our connecting flight from LA to SD. We couldn't get on the next flight as they had to leave 7 seats open for weight restrictions but we just barely caught the last flight out that night and made it to the San Diego airport around midnight after five months in South America.
Now would be the time to write our reflections on South America, but we're lazy and behind schedule with the blog...
so we thought it'd be a good idea to invite our readers to write THEIR reflections on our trip for us... also, as this is an end of an era, so to speak, if you have any suggestions for improvements to the blog, writing, what we write about, what we wear, or whatever, do not hesitate to let us know.
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