journey to the centre of the earth - with orchids!

Well, as some of you may know, we are far from Ecuador, both in time and location, but the stories roll ever onward.

As for impressions of a country, with Ecuador I find myself at a bit of a loss. We spent a scant two weeks in the country, most of that in or around the capital of Quito. Quito was a great city, but it's hard to form an opinion on an entire country from one city, especially when the country differs so much - tall mountains, remote jungle, gorgeous coastline.

Even though we only experienced the area around the capital, we tried to take in as much of the people and food as possible, as we had in previous countries. The people were, unsurprisingly, warm and helpful. The hostel that we stayed at was run by a family whom we got to know by name in our time there. They told us the best restaurants to try and kept us entertained when the regular afternoon rains kept us indoors.

The food, unfortunately, was a bit of a disappointment in the mountains - a very small variation on beans, rice, meat, and fried plantain. I love all of the ingredients, but even for me, the same thing twice a day, every day can get a bit much. Luckily there was a huge selection of foreign food at great prices to break the monotony and a few restaurants from the coast, where the main ingredients are seafood, coconut, and peanuts. There were also plantain chips and coconut snacks to be had everywhere, not to mention delicious, cheap, freshly-made fruit juice on every street.

On to a little bit of history of the region. Ecuador saw little of the Incan empire and wasn't nearly as influenced by it as Peru was. The last mighty Incan used it as a refuge from the hubbub of Cuzco and the Spanish appeared before the Incans could import and export people from the area. The Spanish came right in and started taking the plethora of natural resources. There was a lot of gold here, some brought down from Colombia, but a lot of it dug from the mountains and worked into amazing pieces of art. The goldsmiths in this area (and Colombia) were working gold while life in Europe was still moving at a rather glacial pace - that was 1500 years ago. We saw some terrific pieces from this golden age.

I feel torn about Ecuador. It's a split-personality of a country, even more than Paraguay, Argentina, and any other country we visited. They've given up their own money - they use US dollars - and received a stable economy in return. There are so many North American brands around, yet the country is still very firmly rooted in South America. Miners petition the government to open more mines and dig up the country and oil companies take black gold out of tangled jungle in the middle of nowhere, yet Ecuadorians love talking about the beauty of every region of their country and how much they love it. I couldn't get a bead on how people feel about their life in general, and this may have contributed to my muddled feelings about the place. However, we did have a good time in a beautiful country that straddled the equator, balancing day and night every single turn of the Earth.

Our story starts with the crossing of the border into Ecuador. Up to this point, our crossings had been fairly easy. Not so much here. We hit the border around one in the morning (it was an overnight journey, designed to 'save us time') only to discover that the Ecuador entry point was closed. We sat around chatting with the other tourist on the bus for a couple of hours until the border guard woke up, got out of his car across from us, opened the office, and turned on his computer. Oy vey. Our trip was made even more exciting by the fact that not two kilometres from the border (still at three AM), the transmission dropped out of the bus with a deafening grinding sound. The bus driver tried to fix it while everyone slept, but was unsuccessful. Despite the terribleness of it, my favourite part was when his assistant tried starting it in the morning and as the transmission ground like a terrible two-year-old's teeth, he shouted, "No se apaga, no se apaga! [It won't turn off, it won't turn off!]" Even the bus that came to get us didn't end our day - we had to transfer again in some small town to travel the last couple of hours. Needless to say, when we arrived in Loja, our destination, we were thankful and deliriously tired. Loja was simply a stopover day, though the cleanliness of the city, and even the market, were outstanding. It was a nice, quiet little provincial city and some of the nicest people we met in our time in Ecuador came from Loja.

After another day-long trip on a bus, we arrived in Quito, the capital on the centre of the world. We spent a short time here before we headed off to Mindo, a small town in the cloud forest only a couple of hours away. So you know (as I didn't before then), a cloud forest is a tropical rainforest that is at an altitude of 2500 metres or more (it's a rough definition) and it is often filled with insects, flowers, animals, birds, and, above all, rain.

Mindo was a small town with very little happening, but that was fine with us as we stayed in a tropical garden positively stuffed with orchids. Ecuador boasts 3500 types of orchids and this little garden had 200 itself along with bromeliads and other flowers. There were also birdfeeders where various kinds of birds (including tiny little hummingbirds) would come and feed while we fed ourselves or sat and sipped a beer or two in the afternoon. Paradise? Pretty close. We visited a butterfly reserve that was bursting with colour, seeing butterflies being born while we were there. It's neat, but not as romantic as one might like to imagine. We also went birdwatching, seeing some pretty amazing colours, combinations you wouldn't think existed in nature. It was a welcome respite from all the city touring we had been doing recently. One needs a bit of green now and then to relax.

Our time in Quito was also rather enjoyable. We stayed in the Old Town area of the city, the place that the Incas (and those before them) had built sacred buildings and where the Spanish continued the trend. We spent a lot of time just walking around all of the old buildings and churches, seeing people out and about during the day, children chasing pigeons through the plazas, small store owners lounging outside chatting with each other. Another city with buena onda (good vibes). We even got to meet up and spend some time with a couple that we had already met in three other countries - this kind of chance meetup (well, this one was planned) tends to happen when you're backpacking like this.

We visited the enormous National Museum with works of pottery and gold from pre-Columbian eras and also lots of Spanish and modern artwork. It was interesting to see how the culture had developed in the area over the past 2500 years or so. The goldwork was particularly impressive, such detail and intricacy by what the Spanish had called 'primitive people'. Coming back to present times, we stumbled across a march to commemorate the anniversary of the Virgin Mary appearing in the Government building some 500 years ago; thousands of people carrying umbrellas and singing hymns marched down the streets of Old Town one sunny Sunday morning, much to our surprise and thrill. Kids playing futból using church doors as a goal, protests to encourage the government to open more mines (currently a hot topic), bananas being plied in many different shapes and forms (baked, fried, chips) - these were why we chose to stay in this area.

Two mini-trips were made out of town. The first was made to one of the biggest markets in South America, the Otavalo market about an hour north of Quito. This market has street upon street of crafts, weavings, clothing, hats, jewelry, carvings, pottery - basically, any artistic item you can think of. Oh, and lots and lots of tourists - the locals aren't that interested in that kind of thing. We did visit the local market, however, stocked with much less traditional clothing and much more everyday equipment, and also the small-animal market where everyone seemed to be carrying puppies, chickens, pigs, and kittens, and where one could buy uncooked cuy (guinea pig) by the pound. It was great day despite the rain and we returned with a few souvenirs and a few more pictures after bargaining for both.

The other trip was to the equator - you can't come here and not visit it. Being the highest point in the world on the equator, they make an especially big deal about it here. There are two places you have to visit while you're up there. The first is the giant official monument that the French explorers marked when they first established the location of the equator close to 300 years ago. There's lots of tourist stuff going on (though it's costly and, quite frankly, kind of boring), buses come and go, people take pictures. Move 200 metres down the road, however, and you find the real equator. What's the difference? The real equator can physically demonstrate its claim by showing the change in the Coriolis effect - clockwise on one side, counterclockwise on the other, and no circles right on the equator. Christine took some videos and they're pretty awesome to watch! There were a number of other tests which all put my mind to rest as to where the real equator was. You have to give credit to those French guys, though, to get this close 300 years ago was pretty amazing. The pre-Columbian natives had them all beat, however. They erected a semi-circle nearby that was not only exactly on the (real) equator, but it was also built at an angle from the sun on the solstice that showed they knew the Earth had a 23.5º tilt. I think I know people that don't know that Earth has a 23.5º tilt. It was a pretty incredible day.

As I said, out of all the countries we visited, I feel we got to know Ecuador the least. Most of our time was spent in the capital, which was a shame, as we heard so much about the wonderful shoreline and jungles and, of course, the Galapagos - more for next time, I guess. That said, Quito was a lot of fun to just walk around in, so we ended up lucking out there. We boarded our first plane in a while (breaking our tradition of traversing the Andes in buses) and were off to Bogotá, Colombia to visit the last country of our South American tour.