I don’t think I did anything my first day in Quito, being unable to sleep on buses when you travel long term is a pain in the arse. Oh well, whatcha gonna do about it. The next day I went for a wander around the area. I quite liked that part of Quito, except that it was pretty touristy so there wasn’t really any cheap places to eat that weren’t total shit. As always though, there was a bit of street art;
"The barricade closes the street, but opens the way."
Not sure if I'd wanna have pre-uni education from a dead uni drop-out. I guess he was a pretty good businessman though...
Then I went for a wander up to the Basilica of the National Vow, which, according to wikipedia (hey, it's been almost 2 months since I was there, and I don't generally get guides for places) took around 100 years between the first stone being laid and its consecration, and still isn't complete. In any case, it's a pretty pretty building, and looks complete enough:
Really starting to hate hilly cities. Though it looks reasonably flat in this photo...
The stained glass in this place was amazing.
Pretty sure you could go down there, but it cost another $3...
Can kinda see some of the wacky sculptures up the top. On the sides of the church there was all kinds of weird gothic animals, but they were tiny, and I had no zoom lens on me.
There was probably 20 of these guys down each side of the nave. Not sure where you'd be able to see their detail from, as the ground was looong way down.
Looking up at the main spire, which you could climb.
Walking along above the main part of the church. I inadvertently went on a public holiday, so there was a shitload of Ecuadorians there.
The stairs up the spire. Most of the many Ecuadorians went reaallyy slowly, so it took a while to get up and down.
The view from the top was worth it though.
I assume it was intentional that the church pointed directly at the angel statue on yonder hill. Didn't get a closer-up of him though...
I can't remember where this was, but that face right in the middle of the photo is priceless.
The next day (which also happened to be a public holiday, which I didn't realise until I was there and committed) I went up the cable car which overlooks the city. Despite the crowds, this was well worth the trip. From the top of the hill, which is at around 4100m, you can see almost all of the city (though it turns out the population's only about 3 million, I'm pretty sure the locals told me it was closer to 5). It does serve as a reminder of how much being at altitude sucks though. There's a walk which can be done to get even higher up, but it takes around 3-5 hours return, depending on who you talk to, and I wasn't about to walk for 2-3 hours starting at that kind of height.
Looking up the hill after approx. 1.5 hours in queues.
Living with a view of snow-capped volcanoes (if you're fortunate enough to have such a view, even in Quito) wouldn't be too bad.
Can't remember what that one was called though...
Almost as soon as I arrived in Quito I decided I'd go on a 4-day tour to the Amazon. You can do such a thing independently, but in this case I decided it'd probably be too much hassle, and the tour wasn't terribly expensive. A couple of days before I left for the jungle I decided I'd also go to the Galápagos, so I spent a fair amount of time running around trying to organise that (mostly the money, turns out there's stupid rules about the amount of money you can get from ATMs in Ecuador, which surprisingly don't seem to exist in the rest of Latin America). I did remember to take a photo of the excellent view from the rooftop bar at the hostel, though I ended up staying there 3 more times before I finally managed to extricate myself from Quito:
We had a nice night bus to some random nothing town, breakfast, then another bus for a couple of hours to where the boat left from. We spent quite large chunks of the next 4 days just cruising round in the boat either going from A to B, or bird/sunset-watching. Accordingly, the view was often something like this:
I didn't take too many photos of not-animals, but I quite like these guys. Who knows how the hell they make those nests...
The first monkeys we saw! Mostly we saw them as whole troops running/jumping from one side of the river to the other. Agile motherfuckers...Though one of the guides said something about how we had to see when they missed their jump and fell in the river.
More, other monkeys! I can't remember the names of any of the species. These guys kinda look like the howler monkeys we saw in Mexico, but I'm 90% sure they aren't.
This guy was hanging out about 5m from the hammock area at the lodge.
I believe we were around towards the end of the rainy season, so the lagoon near the lodge was really high. The trees below live like this for something like 9 months out of the year, with a few metres below the water. Obviously, most trees would die in such conditions, but these guys are survivors.
The water in the lagoon was black from tannins released by the trees, This made the water too acidic for mosquitoes to breed, which can only be a good thing. It also made the water a pretty effective mirror when there were no ripples about.
Most days we went out and saw the sunset and had a swim. Despite the caimans and anacondas and so on in the area, it was supposedly safe in the middle of the lagoon, where the water was deep and the animals didn't go. We all survived, so it must be at least partly true!
One of the days we went for a walk for a couple of hours through the jungle to see what we could see. I didn't take any photos of it, but one of the coolest things we were shown was an ant nest. It was basically a blackish blob stuck to the side of a tree, and when we arrived there were a bunch of ants walking around the outside. Our guide said "hey guys, look at this, the ants react to sounds," and proceeded to scream at the nest a few times. After one or two yells, the whole nest was swarming with ants. Apparently a punishment for more serious crimes is the perp is stripped naked and tied to the tree. Then other villagers yell at the nest. Fuck that. The guide also called for a volunteer, who was told to put his hand on the nest. After more yelling, and when his lower arm was reasonably well-covered in ants, he was instructed to swipe along and kill them all. His arm then smelt like shit, and supposedly it's one of the more effective insect repellents you can use (though it isn't waterproof at all, and gets sweated off). But for the most part on our walk we saw spiders:
This gal (on the left) is a walking palm. If other trees grow over it and cut off its light, it can grow more roots in the direction where there's still light, and ditch the roots on the opposite side, thereby "walking."
Somehow the guide saw a couple of these guys when we were walking along, and caught them for our photographing pleasure.
Kinda hard to see, but there's a couple of cutter ants there. Apparently cutter ants don't just cut any odd leaves, they only get them from one specific tree. So the line might be miles long, from the nest to wherever they find a tree. Then they chop up its leaves and carry them back to the nest, where they're turned into some sort of goo, which is what they actually eat.
This kills the tree.
This guy's nicknamed the "telephone of the jungle," because if you get lost you can try and find one, then smash it with a stick or something and it makes a fucking loud noise which someone will hopefully hear and seek.
Spider in there somewhere :/
At least this one's obvious.
Not sure what these were. Seeds probably.
Pretty sure this was basically the only bird we saw on the walk...
Sunset/bird-watching ride.
Spiny palm trees.
We saw a couple of anaconda, but for the most part they were pretty well-obscured by the leaves of their trees. Supposedly sometimes they go to the top of the trees to sunbathe, but we didn't see that...
One day we spent a few hours at a small village on one of the rivers. There was maybe 20 houses, a soccer field (of course! and it even had a little stand), and a small shop.
One of the main purposes of the trip to the village was to learn how to make yuca (or cassava) bread. I've just learnt from wikipedia that tapioca is dried yuca. Who knew... In any case, the first step to making yuca bread is pull the yuca out of the ground. We got 2 or 3 pieces like those we're holding, and then bits of it were replanted to keep the stock up.
Using a machete to skin the roots. Our teacher was ridiculously skilled with that thing.
Puppy wanted bread too.
Using huge grater things to powder the roots.
Post-grating. At this stage it was a reasonably wet paste.
Making sure the heat on the handmade ceramic pan was even.
This flax thing was used to dry out the yuca paste.
The flax was wrapped around the paste, and then hung up...
... and then twisted vigorously...
... leaving mostly dry clumps of tapioca (I now suppose it'd be called)...
... which was then sieved crudely.
The rest of the tools needed to actually cook the bread.
The smaller bowl from the photo above was the exact volume needed to make a bread, then the blade thing in her hand was used to smooth it.
Rolling the bowl back and forth compressed it a little to make it cohesive.
Finished bread. Surprisingly tasty.
After lunch I inadvertently volunteered to be rubbed down with some plant related to poison ivy. When the local kids see it they run, as it's used as punishment for whatever small transgressions kids commit. Looks pretty fuckin' terrible, but it wasn't so bad. Stung a little bit while he was doing it, then was nice and warm for a few minutes. By the evening it was basically gone, and the following morning you wouldn't be able to say anything happened.
After the village, we went down the river a little bit to talk to one of the village's shamans. He's one of 4 brothers, all shamans, and all sons of the ex-shaman. He started off by briefly introducing himself, and describing how he and his brothers use ayahuasca to help cure the village's ailments. Essentially if you're a villager and you're sick, you go to the shaman, and depending on whose turn it is, one of them will be with you in this house, and the both of you take ayahuasca one night. As part of the shaman's trip he then sees aurae and so on that indicate to him what's wrong with you and what needs to be done to cure it. Then he gathers medicinal plants, either from the jungle, or from those that've been relocated around the medicine house, and prepares your remedy. Payment is in food or whatever you can give. I believe for outsiders payment is preferred in cash. For some illnesses you'd just be sent to the hospital, at least he knows his limits. While not fulfilling their shamanly duties, the 4 brothers live normal lives in the village, farming and driving boats for those that hire them and so on.
After a wee Q&A and a demonstration of a cleansing ceremony, he got out his dart gun.
After he showed us his skillz, we got to try it out too. That thing's probably just over 2m long, and it's pretty heavy holding it out to aim. Apparently the ones they use to actually hunt things are up to 6m long, and they can hit things up to 60m away (with poisoned darts, of course!).
On the way back to the lodge the guide heard this guy, and we managed to find him way away at the edge of our vision. His clicking was surprisingly loud.
Luckily the guide had his telescope on the boat, and I was sitting next to him. I wouldn't recommend trying to take a photo through a telescope from the front of a boat, however.
Big caiman that lived near the lodge.
He only had one eye.
Later that evening, we went for a night walk. The ride to the night walk was pretty fun - we weren't allowed to have our lights on for whatever reason, so we were gunning it along the river and across the lagoon in basically complete darkness. As with the day walk, we mostly saw spiders. At one point we asked if the spiders'd kill us if we were bitten. The reply was no, probably not. You'd just have a really shitty week or so.
Didn't stop the guide from grabbing this gal by the thread.
Photo at the middle of the world! After this I decided I wouldn't bother going up to the monument near Quito, though in hindsight I'm pretty sure the official monument isn't exactly on the equator, so god knows what latitude this one was actually on.
Weta-thing?
Again, there was a few frogs around the place.
Sunrise on the last day; we went out birdwatching early as sin.
These guys are called "caciques," which roughly means chief, or boss. In that case, there's a shitload of chiefs in this jungle, as they were probably the most common bird we saw. This one was pretty boss though, no other could get as high as him without flying...
Probably the second most common bird we saw, the stinky turkey. So named because it produces some sort of protein that makes its meat smell really nice. Doesn't really help it when it's already dead though...
I can't remember what this guy was called, but he's just a baby. Basically he just sits on this tree looking like a tree all day until he's big enough to take care of himself better.
Coupla vultures.
These two had the grace to sit and pose for a while...
... before deciding to fly off.
One of the last troop of monkeys I saw, on the boat ride back to the bus stop.
After our final boat ride, we had lunch and then got a bus back to Quito. I was pretty happy this ride was during the day, as we obviously couldn't see anything on the ride to get out there, and most of it was pretty amazing. The road was shitty, and the only place we stopped with enough time to get a bite didn't really have anything decent and fast, but it wasn't too bad:
A decent amount of the ride was up a valley with waterfalls on the sides.
There wasn't much river though, I'm not sure what happened to it, but suspect it had something to do with the Chinese-sponsored hydro dam being built. In Colombia I was told about how the rights to much of the country's water had been optioned to the Japanese and to a lesser extent the Chinese, so it almost wasn't surprising to see a Chinese-funded public works project in Ecuador, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if much of their incentive to help was to get water.
The dam from a distance. It looks mostly done, but I've never been on a dam construction site, so who knows?
When I got back to Quito, I had a quick nap and liaised with a friend who was also going to the Galapagos to make sure our cab to the airport was sussed out, then went to bed, ready for another early start...
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