Semana Santa - 1

MOFFAT INVASION

Tuesday, March 18, 17.30 h: Will and I take the bus to Quito Airport to pick up our long-expected guests: Mr and Mrs Scott and Caroline Moffat and Mr and Mizz Ross and Rachel Anderson-Moffat!

A taxi ride through a quickly darkening city takes us to Amazonas 639, where our newly arrived party has to climb 5 floors before they will be treated to a selection of exotic fruits, soup and bread. Luckily they haven’t been in Quito long enough to be affected by sorocho or altitude sickness and they make it up the stairs without a problem.


DISCOVERY OF QUITO

The next morning, every one got up rather early and after breakfast we started our tour through Quito.

From Parque Ejido we went on to Parque Alameda, where Ross, Rachel, Will and me held a race to the top of a little tower. Ross and Rachel did remarkably well considering Quito’s 2800 m above sea level. Still no signs of sorocho ...

We bought some fruit from a she-vendor in the park, Will showed the clan the two ugly space ships in the middle of town and then we paid a visit to the Basilica del Voto Nacional where we admired the paintings inside and the gargoyles in the shape of turtles, armadillos, buffalos, etc. on the outside.

Hereafter, we walked on to the old town, where we were treated to a fanfare on the Plaza de la Independencia, saw some more beautiful churches and the Palacio del Gobierno, went to the Plaza San Francisco, eyed the Virgen de Quito from far and tried a variety of jugos (mora, guanabana, naranjilla, zanahoria, naranja and guava).

Then we took the Trolley back to La Mariscal, had a typical almuerzo (no chicken feet though!) and went fruit and towel shopping in the Mercado Santa Clara. We even got the yapa from one of the fruit vendors; she gave us a chirimoya for free!

After a refreshing nap, we decided to walk to Guapulo where you have a great view over the valley bordering Quito. Coming back, we had a flowery tea in a nicely decorated bar in La Mariscal, dinner at home and an early night.

More Semana Santa pics

Sins! ... and our first visit to the White City

On the weekend of the 15^th and 16^th of March, Will, Veerle (our new recently-moved-in interested-in-caving Belgian house-mate) and I went to Ibarra, a city just three hours by bus away from Quito.

After a first reconnaissance trip through town (and what a town ... with a very pleasant atmosphere, beautiful squares and churches and of course a volcano nearby!), we had almuerzo in a small place in the company of an elderly woman who - just like my grandmother - kept on telling us we had to eat well! In the afternoon, we planned to visit a museum, but all of Ibarra’s museums as well as its tourist office appear to be closed in the weekends ... (so much for being a tourist destination for your compatriots! :-s) So, we couldn’t do much else to do than go for an ice cream in Ecuador’s oldest and most renowned ice salon ;-), take a nap, explore Ibarra’s outskirts on foot, witness a wedding at night and then go for pizza!

On Sunday, we saw everyone in town running around with small bouquets made out of strips of stem of a type of palm tree. We correctly supposed that people took these “palms” to church to be blessed, because - after all - it was Palm Sunday. Their bouquets did look a bit funny, but hey, in Belgium we even use buxus buxus to replace palm leaves ...

It was only after we had read some posters in church that we found out that with the usual type of palm (wanted for its wax and the manufacture of jewelry, but especially to be used on Palm Sunday, when their leaves decorate churches and bless people’s houses) going extinct, the parrots that live and nest only in this type of tree go extinct as well (read more and more, in Spanish though!).

Read here for a cool article on the new 7 deadly sins. These were frequently mentioned (and interpreted to the advantage of both palm and parrot) on El noticiero (the news) that week preceding Palm Sunday. Probably just in case people needed extra arguments to replace their palm leaves by an alternative ...

That Sunday, Will and I actually wanted to visit Cayambe (famous for it’s cheese and biscuits), but stranded in Otavalo, where I (oops, deadly sin??) went shopping and where we had a delicious fruit salad (greed!)!

Some pictures

Of butterflies, orchids and Hummingbirds ...

Will and I finally made it to Mindo on the weekend of March 8-9th. Mindo is a small, cute village in a subtropical cloudforested area (just on the other side of the Pichincha volcano, but yet a two hour drive ...).

At several occasions proven-to-be-unreliable-or-out-of-date Footprints and Lonely Planets made us go on a quest for the bus station ... Finally arrived there, we bumped into Marion, the Austrian girl we met at the language school during our first weeks in Quito. She had been working as a volunteer with children in Mindo and that weekend, she took her mum, sister and aunt - who came over for a holiday - to visit her scheme.

After settling into a pretty wooden and yet inexpensive cabin / guesthouse with shared bathroom, we visited one of the mariposarios, a butterfly garden where they breed different types of butterflies to - later - release again in nature; went to the orquideario, a private garden full of orchids of a guy who collected at least 200 different species and saw a lot of hummingbirds (quinde in Quichua).

On the Sunday, we went for a long walk in a nearby protected forest. A so-called tarabita - a metal carriage moving over a steel tyrolienne - took us to the other side of the valley where several routes led us to a multitude of waterfalls (santuario de las cascades it was called!). We saw at least six of them and eventually cooled our feet in one of the streams (brrr). Will went for a run in the jungle and before returning back to Quito, we concluded a nice, relaxed weekend with mango and a piza at the local bakery!

Check out our Mindo Picasa webalbum