Quito Ecuador

5.30 pm local time.
Culture shock. It doesnt seem right to have such a comfortable tranfer from the San Jose hotel to airport, easy check in, nice Boeing flight and effortless disembarking and customs process, to walk ou into this place. The city is at 9,200 ft, and is the second highest we will be visiting. I definitely feel a bit tired several hours on, but shanti claims she does not. Quito is a connection point to the Galapagos, being Ecuador territory, but we are staying longer (2 nights) to acclimitise for our later visit to the Inca ruins at Machu Pichu, which will be through 12,000 ft.
The city occupies a valley between two volcanic mountain chains. From the air the city is a bleached colour with tiled roofs in orange. On the ground its cooler, dusty dirty versus wet dirty, and sprawling up and down the valley.
The area has hosted 4 cultures to date, the native south americans, the incas who moved in from the south and built a city here, the spanish conquistidores who obliterated the inca buildings and built a colonial city on the ruins (some of which are still here, dating from 16th century),and now the modern section of the city with some high rise buildings. We will see it tomorrow as we are hiring a guide to take us around.
The sight of the city running up the valley with high hills and mountains both sides is striking. The land is very dry and barren looking, covered in intermittant scrub but mostly rocks and rubble from the hills, it seems. The city has a daunting reputation for violent and armed muggings, so when we went out we carried almost nothing, including taking off my watch. We needed a new lock for shantis suitcase, which was smashed open somewhere in the baggage handling but nothing taken, as we had all valuables in hand luggage. Thank god not my bag as it has the cigars.
We found it immediatly a strange experience to walk in such unknown and different territory. The people are very unusual to us, we saw native indians in their heavy woven woollens and hats, but also every manner of other local of native, spanish and negro decent from suit wearing, to black american ghetto culture. Loads of people everywhere, considerably less english speaking and not many visitors. Trafic pouring through the often narrow and one way streets, street stalls and vendors of trinkets, fruit, and in one case toilet paper. A colourful, strange smelling place, mostly single storey. We found our lock, had an excellent cup of coffe in a not very savory smelling cafe which looked ok from the outside. The grimy half toothed proprietor offloaded all his useless Costa Rica coins on us for change, as we soon found out. Twice in quick sucession this happened with small purchases so now we know to examine the change.
We are in a small hotel which is a refurnished house, in the thick of it. The safe would hardly hold a mouse so I took our monstrous binocs to the desk for them to hopefully store. The place is quite cute or at least we think so at this stage before dinner, afterwards might change! They have even put on some tinkering piano music as we sit in a small lounge shanti reading in the dim light and myself typing. Tomorrow will be fascinating and all the time our excitment is building at the prospect of the Galapagos on the near horizon.
More pics on flickr but very rough labeling as yet.
sx