Sunday, January 29, 2006
Quito
Our final day involved a 6am wakeup call, and a dinghy ride around some mangrove swamps. We think this was so that the cruise could be called an 8 day cruise, rather than a 7 day cruise!! Still it was a nice finish to the Galapagos. After getting off the boat at 8am on Tuesday, for a flight planned for 1015, we found out.....what a surprise....that our flight was delayed.
Baltra airport is not the most happening of places! It does have a few souvenir shops outside, which you can check out in about 5 minutes, then.....waiting, waiting......
Our flight finally left about 1130am, and we flew to Quito via Guayaquil. Once again it was about 4pm before we got to our hotel, so there was not too much left of the day. Enough time to copy our photos to DVD though (this was not as easy as it sounds, as the shop´s technology was too old to take big memory cards, but eventually we got it sorted.
We found a good pizza shop for dinner - after the excesses of 7 days acting like marine iguanas (basking in the sun and eating and not much else) we didn´t feel like a big meal.
Quito is an interesting place to spend a day. We had heard that pickpockets were rife (Mike and Suzanne had a camera picked on their day before flying to Galapagos) so were on the alert.
We headed off to the Old Town, which is very picturesque - cobbled streets and narrow bustling alleyways, with churches nearly as prevalent as marine iguanas in the Galapagos! Those Spanish conquistadors were really into big churches.
The Iglesia de la Compana de Jesus is lined with gold - very glittery! At the Iglesia and Convent de San Francisco there is a museum of art and sculpture and so on, so we visited that too. Then we walked to the Iglesia de la Basilica del Voto Nacional. We found out that you can climb to the Belfry for only 2 Dollars each so we climbed......and climbed.....and climbed..... First steps, then a spiral stairway, then a few ladders! I started to get vertigo, but we had got that far we had to keep going! The view was quite grand of the Quito town, and we were as high as the hill with the Virgin Mary on it. This is an excursion to be recommended. We also visited one of the Spanish gentleman´s houses, but I can´t remember the name.
We had read in a book that there is a nice mirador (lookout) of Guapulo (another valley we think, although we never did really work it out) a few kilometres away, so we decided to go. It was about a 2 hour walk or thereabouts, and we got to see some of the less touristy parts of Quito along the way. Another 2 hour walk got us back to our washing place (we had dropped off our washing first thing in the morning) then back to the hotel to pick up our luggage and back to......Quito airport.
Our flight was overnight, from Quito to Lima, and then a 3 hour wait before flying in to Buenos Aires and arriving about 7:30am the next morning. We were able to catch up on our email at Quito, and were happy to get emails from the kids that all was well at home! The highlight of this trip was probably watching Justine Henin-Hardenne beat Maria Sharapova in the semi-final of the Aussie Open - live from Lima VIP lounge!
