November 15th - Quito

The day began with a beautiful clear blue sky providing ideal conditions for viewing the old colonial city and its white walled buildings, and the banning of traffic from the streets on Sundays gave a welcome break from the hazards of competing with cars and taxis when crossing the streets. Religion clearly retains a significant hold on the Ecuadorian people, judging by the number of people we saw attending church services. There are 29 churches in the old City alone (all catholic, naturally) and those that we saw all had large congregations in attendance. William, although clearly catholic himself, was not as respectful of the services as we might have expected and although we were grateful to see the insides of several churches, we both felt rather uncomfortable about our intrusion into what is an important time in the weekly calendar of the church and its followers.

We then went up to El Panecillo, the hill at the south of the old city with a panoramic view of the city and its setting among the surrounding volcanoes and an enormous statue of the Virgin Mary keeping watch over her flock in the city below.

We then went out of the city to El Mitad del Mundo, on the equatorial line a few miles north of Quito. There we found an older monument, erected to mark the spot, but subsequently found with the aid of GPS to be about 200m away from the real line. We visited a museum which was at the real place and at which they were able to show a few interesting phenomena only capable of being demonstrated at the real line. For example, emptying a basin full of water at the equatorial line (straight down the plughole), 5m into the northern hemisphere (anti-clockwise) and 5m into the southern hemisphere (clockwise), balancing an egg on the head of a nail (impossible anywhere other than the equator due to unequal gravitational forces) and walking along the line with eyes shut and both arms stretched out into each hemisphere (very difficult without staggering off the line and appearing drunk). The other highlight (!) was being shown a shrunken head of a 12 year old boy who apparently died from natural causes, a custom no longer practised by the jungle tribes but it was nevertheless interesting to see the drawings of the process of how this was done – not something to be tried at home!

Once back to Quito we visited the Jesuits’ church, La Compania, baroque style taken to the extreme, with 7 ½ tons of gold leaf. Impressive but an indication of the scant regard had for the welfare of the local inhabitants who no doubt would have benefited enormously from even a small proportion of the expenditure on the church being spent on good causes in the locality.

Then back to the hotel to reorganise our luggage for the rest of the trip. Some to remain at the hotel in Quito until our return from the Galapagos and some to stay with William until our return from the Rainforest. The result was S & R sharing one bag for the first time in their lives and S unsure whether their marriage could stand the strain.