Quito, city in the clouds. During our month in Ecuador, we’d flown in and out of its precarious, mountain-framed airport no less than six times. So we figured it just wouldn’t be right to carry on without some small ode to this, the world’s highest official capital and our Ecuadorian basecamp.
It wasn’t love at first sight. In fact, it wasn’t until our last morning, as we strolled through the World Heritage-listed Centro Historico with our Quiteñan guide Marcelo, that we admitted to each other that perhaps this place, with its colourful terraces, multitude of churches and impressive squares, had grown on us just a little, or ‘un poquito’ as the locals say.
For some reason, we’d envisaged a quaint little village in the clouds. What we found was a sprawling city, rising and falling over peaks and hills as far as the eye could see up a narrow valley rimmed by volcanoes; where pollution gathered in a misty haze under a hot morning sun before clouds rolled in around noon each day and blasted the streets with torrential rain.
The daily downpour was a lesson quickly learned after we were caught out on our first day, providing the locals – crowded into every doorway and storefront – with a bit of entertainment as we attempted to outrun total saturation only to fade into a slow, heaving walk when the city’s 2,850 metre altitude caught up with us.
The alternative, however – cabs – introduced us to Quito’s traffic, a city-stopping heartache that would have to make it running contender for world’s worst. Happily, the taxis weren’t metered but we felt for the poor guys as they muttered their ‘ay dios mios’ in the inching traffic, constantly wiping down their fogged-up windscreens in the bucketing rain.
On our final visit to the city, we hired a mountain guide for a trip down the Panamericana Highway – what the Quiteñans fondly call Volcano Avenue. We were off to climb one of the world’s highest active volcanoes, Cotopaxi – a spectacular cone-shaped, glacier-capped mountain that rises sheer out of the landscape to nearly 5,900 metres.
Mountain climbing novices that we are, we weren’t quite prepared to take on the peak (or much of a climb at all, really) so we opted for a morning hike to the mountain’s refuge, or basecamp, itself a mere 200 metre climb from the carpark to 4,800 metres. Easy peasy.
More like queasy.
John, harking back to his gut-wrenching encounter with altitude sickness on the Inca Trail, conducted a pre-emptive strike with anti-altitude sickness pills. I scoffed. Several hours later, he took happy snaps as I – bent over double and climbing at glacial pace – focused every atom of my being on getting to the Cotopaxi refuge without throwing up on the trail. Which I eventually managed…before bolting to the refuge baño. I will never scoff again.
Smiles and grimaces: The difference of a couple hundred metres on Cotopaxi.
Back in Quito the next day, having wrapped up our tour of the old town and sipping coffee while we people-watched in the Plaza del Teatro, we actually felt sad to leave. It had taken several visits, but by the time we finally farewelled this epic city for the last time, it really had gotten under our skin…un poquito, anyway.
