Goodbye Ecuador, thanks for all the volcanoes

The time has finally come to say goodbye to this old 1990s musical chestnut! Thank God. It has been whirling around my head all month.

                                                   Sash! - Ecuador (press play at your own risk)

Our month (and a bit) learning Spanish in Ecuador is up. Tomorrow, Murry and I are off to navigate our way across the Colombian border at Tulcan. When I say 'navigate', we won't really do much. We will probably be groggy from sleep on a bus, perhaps watching some strange film or other, maybe featuring a wolf. 

We are heading for Popayan, a town close to where the 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit in south west Colombia last Sunday. Luckily the tremor was deep enough underground not to cause too much damage. 

The previous earthquake to hit Popayan in 1983 was not so kind. At 5.5 on the Richter scale, it destroyed/damaged many homes as well as old Colonial buildings and churches. Over one hundred deaths were counted, and many citizens were left homeless. The quake occurred at 8.15am during Easter Week, and as a result, sadly, many died due to damage caused at the main Cathedral, where Holy Friday Mass was underway. After careful and costly restoration, the city retains its old colonial charm. 

If the news is anything to go by, fingers crossed not much of the restored city has been ruined again by Sunday's earthquake. We shall see. How frustrating it must be to build a city on unhappy fault lines? All that work, and then the earth moves, and you have to go again and rebuild it all like a game of lego, except far less fun. 

I've been thinking the same about some of the other towns and cities here, built menacingly close to volcanoes. Beautiful places, but dangerous places for town planning, no? Quito is the most obvious example; a sprawling, thin capital city that stretches itself like a cat in the valley between the Andes and at the foot of Volcan Pichincha. It's huge and developed. I imagine it as a cat that's getting all cosy and doing that morning-cat-stretch-thing where they remarkably change shape completely and become really thin and twice as long. Yet, it is the only city in the world, supposedly, to be nestled at the foot of an active volcano. 

          That's Quito the cat down there somewhere, poking out from below Volcano Pichincha

Volcan Pichincha has many peaks, we climbed to the top of one of them: Rucu Pichincha (4700m). Guagua Pichincha is the active peak. The largest eruption occurred in 1660, when ash covered the city. The most recent eruption was in 2003. Fingers firmly crossed that Quito never has to have a full on brawl with the volcano. I think we know who's likely to win. 

                                           At the top of Rucu Pichincha (4700m)

If you look straight ahead between the clouds, you can make out the mighty snow-peaked Cotopaxi volcano in the distance.

In other volcano related news, we stayed in one of the only inhabited and farmed volcano craters in the world. Pululahua Geobotanical Reserve is not far from Quito and up the road from the Mitad del Mundo (Equator monument). 

            Looking down into Pululahua crater from the top before hiking down for the night

It was quite eery in the crater at night as it seemed deserted, bar the quite creepy chef in our hostel. We couldn't get the horror film 'Wolf Creek' out of our minds as we tucked ourselves up in bed. And then the cows outside started screaming, which didn't help. At first it sounded like a human man letting loose the most piercing scream, and then we realised it must be cows. I think they were having sex, I hope it was more enjoyable than it sounded.

                                        Waking up in Pululahua volcano crater

                                            Volcanic rock

   We found a geothermal pool where you could see bubbles rising to the top of the water from    the earth's core

Volcanoes aside, Ecuador has much more to offer. I might write about that another time though...will let the volcanoes have their say for now...

I love old people!

I have changed continents, and so far, the above is what I have learnt.

Murry and I woke up at 5am in London on 1st September, and ended up in our rented apartment in Quito, Ecuador exactly 24 hours later.

Flying into Quito was exciting. It was 10pm so the night outside was dotted with those glittering white and yellow city lights that always look so inviting from the sky - a bit like a man-made attempt to recreate the stars up above. What made it really exciting though, was the contours. Quito is all hills. On the outskirts of the city, where the lights stopped, we could just about make out the dark looming triangles of volcanoes.

This morning we woke up to a view of Pichincha volcano outside our window. The hills above us, and below the volcano, were scattered with whitewashed houses. What is it about hills and mountains? I can't get enough of them.

  View from our bedroom window, Quito, Ecuador

 Then there's the steep ups and downs of the cobbled streets in The Old Town, where we are staying. When we arrived we had to crouch with our arms out ready to catch our bags, by the car boot, as the steep hill would have seen them tumble out the boot and straight down the hill. 

After a big wander around Quito's Old Town today, I can confirm that my other instant love in this city is the old people.

The old people here are amazing. I have gathered this much just by watching them, like some kind of creepy reverse paedophile. I think I have a fetish. I am already scheming some kind of 'grab a granny/ adopt a grandpa' plot. The old faces here are so weather-beaten and wonderfully wrinkled. Maps of lives and stories to be told. The grandmas look so kind and wise; really open faces and lots of toothless grins. Many of them have shrunk to tiny proportions, and oh my! Their feet! Old people in Ecuador have the smallest feet I have ever seen!! Their shoes are tiny.

My favourite grandma so far is an old lady I spied in The Plaza Grande who can't have been more than 3 feet tall. She was wearing a white dress and a big colourful woolly cardigan with slippers on her feet (tiny slippers of course). She was wandering around eating an ice-cream cone. That was it really. I didn't speak to her, I just fell a bit in love from a distance.

Murry sometimes gets annoyed when I say old people are cute. They are, after all, much older, wiser and more experienced than we are, so it's pretty patronising. But I mean cute in a lived, totalled, whole, shrunken again, and 'they-don't-give-a-shit' kind of way. They tend not to rush about like us younger folk, preoccupied with forwards and back, ups and downs, ego worries and life strains. They are sort of done with it and let go. Sometimes it seems people revert to a sort of childlike form in old age. Maybe we shed all of those other layers, keep the lessons we have learned and perhaps just learn to be a bit still with it all? 

Anyhow, still a bit jetlagged. I had a huge siesta earlier (could get used to this lifestyle).

Tomorrow we are going to look for a Spanish school to try and get our tongues rolling out the lingo. Then perhaps, once the language is on my side, I can start making my moves on some of the old folk...

All very wrong, I apologise. I really just mean have some innocent chatter with them.