One of the best things about our stay in Quito was that it coincided with the annual QuitoFest celebrations and the whole city was fiesta mode, with party buses prowling through town, blaring salsa music while scores of festive Ecuadorians boogied along on-board, on the sidewalks and in the street. Every park and square had a stage erected within, streets were closed off for street parties and bands and buskers were performing everywhere you looked.
Overall Quito turned out to be one of my less favourite capital cities this trip. On the surface, it doesn’t sound much different to any other; it has a historic old town full of tourist sites and markets and a modern new town where the bars and restaurants are clustered. It’s noisy, busy and polluted, but so is pretty much every other city in South America.
I can’t put my finger on what it was about Quito but I just did not like it much. I know part of it was frustration at finding good places to eat; the old town was bizarrely bereft of restaurants; other than the ubiquitous fried chicken shops, it was ridiculously difficult to find a place to have a meal (we even ended up having to eat fried chicken for our third anniversary dinner as it our first night in town, after spending all day on a bus and we couldn’t find a single other place open that night). It does have a decent sized central Mercado, but even that lets us down when all of the juice stands were closed. Fresh maracuya (passionfruit) juice from the market ladies is one of our favourite things about South America… served con leche, it’s cheap, refreshing and absolutely delicious so we were pretty sad that Quito didn’t have any on offer.
New Town by comparison, was crawling with places to eat but they were all firmly aimed at the tourist dollar and, to our minds, quite overpriced. We initially got excited to discover that there was a Vietnamese restaurant in town only to get there and see that menu was a mix of Thai, Chinese and South American dishes and of the very few Vietnamese options, they were charging about $10 for a bowl of Pho, which we found pretty outrageous.
We rather randomly ended up at a Quebecois bar, scoffing down poutine and Miller Lights, instead.
On two occasions, we ended up taking taxis around 25 minutes across town to hunt down some restaurant we’d read about on tripadvisor, because it just too difficult to simply go for a wander and take the chance you’d find something worthwhile. One of these out of the centre places we visited was a Tennessee style barbeque joint called Smoqe, and this is where we chose to celebrate our anniversary, a day late, because we could not bear to leave a substandard pollo broaster meal as the way we’d started our fourth year together. We decided that Memphis bbq ribs, brisket and craft beers was a much more fitting tribute.
With QuitoFest in full swing, we opted to stay a couple of extras days in order to attend a free concert being held in one of the parks near old town, which, as well as a lineup of half a dozen local bands we’d never heard of, was being headlined by Sick Of It All, a US based punk band that Brad really likes. We arrived at the concert ambitiously early; at 2pm just as the first band was kicking off, and were slightly dismayed to discover it was a dry event… we weren’t quite sure what to do with ourselves for 7 hours waiting for SOIA’s set to start if it wasn’t going to involve beers! Luckily – but actually unluckily – the decision was made for us when, between the second and third acts, the heavens opened and the rain started bucketing down. We had donned our waterproof jackets but they no match for the rain the likes of this so, with half a hundred locals, we bolted around the back of the stage and spent the next hour huddled under an awning attached to the park’s restaurant. Eventually the downpour eased off a bit and we ventured out to see what was happening on stage… the answer was not o lot; the rain had been so heavy they’d had to halt the gig for fear of electrical mishaps. As we stood wondering what to do next, the rain started back up so we were back under the awning for another 30 minutes. By this time I was getting quite and cold and as it didn’t look like the music would be starting again anytime soon, we decided to head back to our hostel, 20 minutes’ walk away, and get some warmer clothes while we waited to see if the weather would clear. By the time we’d made it home, dried off and rugged up, the organisers were tweeting that the concert would be restarting in the next 30 minutes so we headed back up the hill to the park, arriving just after things kicked off again. Luckily the rain held off for the rest of the evening and we had a pretty cool time watching a pretty eclectic lineup of local bands before the headliners, who were probably a bit heavier than I’d normally listen to but were still pretty damn good, even if the only Spanish the singer knew was muchos gracias, which he said several times after every song!
Other than concert going, we didn’t find a huge amount to do it Quito. We joined the free walking tour run by Community Hostel one morning, which was ok but not the most interesting one we’d been on. I set off by myself one afternoon to visit the centre for contemporary arts which had a series of small galleries showing paintings from a local artist, mostly of big old manor houses being reclaimed by the wilderness, which I quite liked… but other than that, none of the galleries or museums seemed that appealing.
Another day we spent two hours on buses to visit the Mitad del Mundo (middle of the world), aka the Equator. They’ve built a huge great complex around it, which is sort of like a theme park but really crap because there is nothing there; just a bunch of restaurants, a few souvenir stands and some little one room museums, some of which you need to pay extra to enter and half of which were closed. It was incredibly disappointing and we left feeling pretty annoyed we’d wasted so much time on a bus to see that and still had another 2 hour to ahead of us to get back into town. We’d read that the line that the park marked as the equator wasn’t even actually the equator; it was where the French calculated it to be back in 1700 and whatever, and they’d got it wrong by about 200 metres. There is another, smaller rival museum situated on the actual (GPS calculated) equator, tucked down a dirt driveway around the back of the theme park. We nearly didn’t bother with it but decided it was worth a visit if only to delay the bus ride a little longer. Entry included an English speaking guide but you had to wait for a big enough group to amass to start the tour. The museum was a curious mix of natural history; with displays about the indigenous tribes people, native wildlife and history of the area, and interactive science exhibit, with demonstrations of the flushing toilet/water direction principal (which our guide happily admitted to cheating on, in order to explain the concept), walking blindfolded along the equator to see if we could feel the gravitational pull, and attempting to balance an egg on the head of a nail; a feat that is supposedly possible anywhere but is easiest to do on the Equator. The whole group had quite a giggle attempting it and I, along with about 3 others, actually did manage to do it and we even got certificates to prove it! (Brad didn’t). All in all this museum was a little bit cheesy but really quite fun and it was definitely better than the bigger commercial one and we climbed back on the bus feeling quite a lot less dark about the outing than we head before our visit.
Having extended our stay in Quito in order to attend the concert, we ended up having to change accommodation on our last night, to a hostel in the new town with only passable reviews but was one of only view options available on the Saturday of Quitofest. Unfortunately this turned out to be one of the worst hostels we’d stayed in all trip; dirty, smelly and full of incredibly inconsiderate people who came in and out of our dorm all night, slamming doors and switching lights on at 4am. We took some small comfort in extracting revenge by dishing out the exact same treatments to them when we got up at 7am… but basically it just meant that Ecuador ended as it had begun; on a low note. Which was a shame as all up, while not as amazing as Argentina or Bolivia perhaps, it was actually a pretty cool little country.
Eat The World 