Ecuador 1 -La Mitad Del Mundo

Our trip from NZ is long and on our way to Ecuador, we stop in Santiago crossing the date line as we go. We leave Auckland at 4pm on the 19th Feb, arriving in Santiago at 11 am on the 19 th Feb, that’s 5 hrs before we left Auckland. We have been on the plane for 11 hrs. It’s 2 am NZ time but 11.30 am Chile time, so we are awoken from a deep sleep, and have to spend 6 hrs waiting for our next plane. We could spend the 6 hrs in the airport, but I imagine that might be pretty grisly, so we opt instead to grab a taxi and head to El Museo Interactivo. This is a science experimental Museum and very hands on, it is a lot of fun.  It turns out to be a good decision. The kids are enthralled and kept busy running around pushing buttons, oblivious of the fact that’s it’s still only 4 am NZ time. They participate in all sorts of activities. I don’t know where they get their energy from. Mark and I are positively shattered and slump on benches whenever we see one, trying not to fall asleep. Then it’s back to the plane and onwards to Quito for a 5 hr flight. We arrive at 9pm on the 19th Feb, that’s 5 hrs after we left Auckland, yet we have been travelling 22 hrs. Its tricky to get your head around this date line business, let alone try to explain it to the children. It takes us a week to recover from jet lag and general lack of sleep.

Can’t believe how quickly time is going . We are half way through our trip and quite appropriately arrive in Ecuador on the Equator. La Mitad Del Mundo.

Quito, Capital of Ecuador, place of my birth, where my mum and dad lived for two and a half years half a century ago (that seems like an eternity ago). Mum described watching the clouds coming down the road, from her room in the hospital whilst  having me,  I can well imagine it.  It’s a dramatic position for a city, surrounded by large mountains and volcanoes on all sides. Quito sits in a bowl and three adjoining  valleys seep into it. Mum and Dad described Quito as the perfect place to live, a small city. It has grown exponentially since they were living here and now houses 2 million people. The Historic old part is really very beautiful. We see it on a Sunday when the roads are shut off to traffic, so it’s just us pedestrians and bicycles. Pristine white painted colonial buildings, squares, cobbled streets, red terracotta tiled roofs and magnificent ornate churches. It was deservedly rewarded with a UNESCO world heritage site status, Though the magnificence of the churches erodes somewhat who you realise that all the gold was stolen from the Incas and at a huge human cost.The Spanish Conquistadors were brutal in their invasion. Atahualpo the Inca chief who reigned here when the Spanish Conquistadors arrived, razed the old Inca city to the ground, rather than hand it over to the Spanish, the ensuing result is one of the most beautiful  Spanish colonial architecture in South America, though sadly there is very little Inca heritage left, unlike neighbouring Peru.

We are staying in a very unsalubrious part of town, in a lovely little comfortable flat attached to a guest house, so we have our own patio and kitchen but join in for breakfasts in the guesthouse cafe. It’s convenient, the laundry opposite, an opticians (new glasses for me) around the corner from the dentists (see Jemima’s blog for her experience of having 2 teeth removed). A little supermarket opposite. But this part of town has a much more dodgy, edgy feeling here on the streets of South America, than anything we came across in Asia.  Mark gets  offered cocaine and weed every time he pops out for some milk, and the police cars are ever present round the corner and methinks the girl who stands outside the house 2 doors down must be a prostitute. The children are wonderfully oblivious to all of this. Curiously enough I still feel safe, though we are all tucked in when night falls.