What I adore about Ecuador

Quito air-port is considered one of the most difficult landings in the world, my aviophobic travel partner Gutsy decided to tell me this just as the plane began its descent. Outside the window, we were threading through cloud-covered Andean mountains that loomed 18,000 feet high. The airport in question was at a valley basin, surrounded by houses of the city proper that light up the hills at night. It’s a breathtaking view, literally, knowing how a slight miscalculation could end with the plane tearing through the tall buildings of a neighborhood at the end of the runway, and I found out it wasn’t just a Filipino thing to applaud when the pilot taxied us to safety.

“No mas problemas con la policia?” Gutsy busted out to our cab driver in a funny gringo-via-Florida accent. The things you discover about someone while traveling. This was our first out-of-country trip together, and we were already south of the border. “No mas, es tranquilo,” the cabbie assured us, referring to the state-of-emergency declared in the capital just a week earlier. I felt third-world kinship with the Ecuadorian people who just emerged from their own version of a hostage crisis tourism scare. Quito was our entry point to a longer boat trip around the Galápagos Islands, but we were going to give this city 9,300 feet above sea level two days on foot before saying adios to terra firma.  

We settled in the Old Town, known locally as Centro Historico and a UNESCO World Heritage Site with wide cobbled plazas, imposing churches and restored Hispanic charm. Quito, once the northern center of the Incan empire, was captured by the Spanish in 1534, but not before the Incan general Rumiñahui burned the city and its jeweled palaces to the ground. Here, indigenous folk can still be seen walking the streets, the women with their babies slung across shawls, the men in woven ponchos and panama hats souvenirs which can be purchased at the Otavalo craft market. Not used to the thin air, we got visibly winded climbing up the steep streets and were outpaced by the generally shorter locals. 

Old Quito’s got more churches, chapels, convents and cathedrals than one’s soul can handle, but a few are definite standouts. The baroque Iglesia de San Francisco, Quito’s first church, was built over an Incan temple, giving a distinct slope to the plaza. This palimpsest is an apt metaphor for how Catholic imagery miscegenated with Indian imagery, making Christianity more acceptable to the natives, and one can find religious paintings of biblical characters in native garb, as well as angelic sun hybrids with Indian faces decorating the entryways and altars of the churches.

The interiors of La Compañia contain a reputed seven tons of gold leaf.

Sitting atop a small hill, the concrete neo-Gothic La Basilica del Voto Nacional dominates the landscape as the tallest church in the country, Notre Dame-inspired with its riot of flying buttresses, spires, parapets, and unique gargoyles in the form of local fauna like dolphins, iguanas, tortoises and penguins. La Compañia de Jesus, on the other hand, is a gilt-ridden Jesuit masterpiece of a baroque church, with a meticulously carved volcanic stone facade and lavish Moorish interiors. The sun, a very important Incan symbol, is again brilliantly prominent on the main door and ceiling. Night had fallen, a wedding had just taken place at La Compañia, and fireworks announced the newlyweds to their white horse-drawn carriage. It was a magical touch to a quiet town now illuminated in the amber glow of spotlights.

Quiet, except for the diabolical purple tram that kept circling the old town blaring dancehall music. We dubbed it the Reggaetron, and we didn’t know whether to hop on it or get the hell out of its way. Nightlife was to be found in the new town where the modern buildings and hotels are located. While largely characterless in the way most urban commercial centers are, the establishments along Juan Leon Mera and Jose Calama streets had a whiff of trendiness, with concept restaurants, artisanal stores, hip tattoo parlors and steamy nightclubs, and where, in direct opposition to the Old Town, activity increased as the hour grew late.

Jet lag however demanded that we were up to catch the sunrise, or whatever semblance it took behind the mist of clouds. Bright and early we set off for the TelefériQo, a cable car system that was a relatively recent addition to Quito’s list of attractions, though now a bit run-down. It takes passengers from a base station at 10,000 feet on the lower slopes of Volcan Pichincha up to the Cruz Loma lookout point at around 13,300 feet. Sharing the short gondola ride with us were three Ecuadorian tour guide students who were planning to hike to the summit of Rucu Pichincha. They said it would only take three hours, and if we were lucky we’d get a view of the ice-rimmed Cotopaxi, one of the world’s highest active volcanoes. They were off like mountain goats while we gathered our wits and cursed the coffee shop for still being closed, because an invigorating cup of mate de coca would’ve made the ascent much easier. We started to trek up the trail at a leisurely pace, taking lots of pictures of the scenery. For 50 US cents Gutsy made me don a poncho and pose with Joselito the llama (“Como te llama?” I had asked it.) The view was exhilarating, until clouds rolled in from all over and covered us under a thick white dome.

Iglesia de la Merced’s fancy interiors

The weather wasn’t being terribly cooperative for sightseeing, but we couldn’t forgo a visit to the Virgen de Quito, a 30-meter statue on top of a hill called El Panecillo or “the little bread loaf.” The closing aerial shots from the movie Proof of Life that pan around the winged Virgin and beyond was set in the fictional city of Tecala but filmed right here. According to our guidebook, “violent muggings” were common on the way to the statue, so we took a taxi instead, which turned out to be equally violent with the way the driver careened up the hill. The rain started pouring down as we reached the statue, and we sought shelter inside the small base tower, which also houses a museum documenting the construction of the monument. From the viewing platform, we saw our friends down below, just arriving. They asked if it was worth the museum entrance fee. “Sure,” Gutsy replied, “if you want to pay two dollars to be inside a virgin.”

Quito, particularly the Old Town, used to be a significantly more dangerous and dirty place, but government efforts to spruce it up nearly a decade ago have turned it into the postcard-perfect colonial city we see today, whose safety is maintained by a visible police presence (that is, until salaries get cut). As historic cities built on bloodshed, slavery and religious subsumation go, it’s one of the prettiest, a well-preserved architectural gem found in a small nation already packed with peaks and valleys, rainforests and beaches, an extraordinary diversity of wildlife and not least, the origin of the Origin of the Species, the Galápagos Islands, where my new relationship and even more recently acquired diving skills would be put to the test.

(To be continued)