We arrived in Quito at 9am on the morning of January 7th. We were both sick (persistent tummy bug), exhausted (a 12 hour layover in the Bogota airport meant that our total travel time was 30 hours) and starving (last meal was 12 hours before and Avianca didn't provide anything.) Not a great start. To add insult to injury, we couldn't check in to our boutique hotel until 1, so we dropped off our bags and headed to the nearest park (Parque Alameda), which was right across the street. there we explored, admired the flowering trees and the hummingbirds they attracted (in the middle of Quito!), climbed the spiral ramp around the park mirador, and generally decompressed. An hour later I started to actually look around, and I was amazed by what I saw.
Quito is like a 66 kilometer-long serpent, which, having swallowed its valleys, has now expanded up the surrounding mountains. And mountains they are, too-- Quito's elevation is listed as 2850 meters, and Pichincha, around which Quito wraps, rises to 4784 meters-- over 15,000 feet. (It's also an active volcano which spewed ash on the city as recently as 1999. Building on or near volcanoes is common in Ecuador because that's where the most fertile land is.)
There's a stately medieval city center with stone churches and administrative buildings and boutique shopping; it was one of the first UNESCO World Heritage sites. Outside of centro lies the commercial district, which also sits on the flat floor of the valley. Once you start climbing the city rim, things get (IMO) most interesting. Due to the terrain, houses and business are literally piled on top of one another like Legos. Where the slope allows, there are streets like San Francisco. Where it gets even steeper, stairs take their place; if you need to firm up those glutes, this is the town.
We got to our lovely boutique hotel (Casona 1914 https://hotelcasona1914.com/, ) a couple blocks outside of centro, and for the next week we explored. We're not really foodies, but we do like a good meal, and Quito had plenty to offer. We ate at the city market (best piece of fish *ever* was the corvina steak at Jimmy's Seafood), we had almuerzo at a hole in the wall next door to the hotel (the fried pork meal was amazing) and we did fancy food one day right off the Plaza Grande. Lunches were so big that we generally just snacked for dinner.
When we weren't stuffing our faces, we were taking amazing excursions in and out of town-- to the cloud forest in Mindo; to the touristy 'Center of the World' museum at the Equator, to the Pululahua crater, to the Iglesia Católica San Francisco (pics below). It was a blast. After a week, we moved to the Quito Airport Holiday Inn (which was a very nice Holiday Inn, but so not our Casona) and spent a frantic evening re-arranging all of our stuff. The next morning at five we got up to head to the airport for the next stage of our Ecuador trip-- the Galapagos.
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