Galapagepilogue

The Galapagos is a pretty tough act to follow.  But despite the fact that we'd spent over a week there, Sarah and I had seen relatively little of Quito other than our dentist's office, so Ecuador's capital still had plenty to show off.  Plus my family were all still with us for a while longer, so our final days in Ecuador were still pretty great.

Most of our time was spent with the whanau visiting Quito's old town.  It's not as attractive as Cuenca, but as a former capital of all of Spanish South America, it's big.  And it manages to strike a fine balance between being pretty and remaining an active, lived-in city. Particularly impressive was the way the Bus Rapid Transit heads right through its heart without having destroyed much of its surroundings.

We did some good Ecuadorian eating too.  When we arrived back in town on New Year's Day, no shops or restaurants were open, so dinner came from the food stalls in the holiday-busy Carolina Park.  Cevichocho (corn and crunchy bits flavoured like Ceviche), chorizo on a stick, pizza. All quick and yummy.

We also are and drank yummy juices at the central market, an experience slightly soured by my mom's (fortunately old) mobile being plucked out of her backpack just before we arrived.  The market was mostly food and juice stalls, with a smattering of fresh produce and meat down on the ground floor. It was also here where my BiL Ka-hung bought nephew Desmond a set of light up devil horns, most suitable for adding to the image/nickname he'd picked up on the Galapagos boat: el Diablo Loco.

The family all went together to do some souvenir shopping, browsing the traditional (modern tradition anyway) Ecuadorian handicrafts: knitted touques and mittens with llama patterns, woollen ponchos, bread dough Christmas ornaments, football jerseys (oddly  one of the most popular Ecuadorian clubs is called Barcelona and has almost identical jerseys and logo to the Spanish club of the same name) and so on.

And (possibly the funnest bit of our second spell in Quito) the whole crew went to get haircuts together.  The staff at the salon seemed to find the whole affair just as entertaining as we did. They did a fab job, making most of the family look very sharp and tidy, and Desmond suitably crazy with a pseudo-mohawk sort of a 'do.

Most of the family went home eaaaarly in the morning on January 4, but my sister Melanie and her family stuck around for one more day.  With them we wandered around the old town one more time, popping into two breweries to have our final taste of Ecuadorian offerings. The first was depressingly bad, with thin, infected beers of the sort we'd drunk way too many of at small breweries in Ecuador. The second, Bandidos Brewery in the old town produced some very good brews, all fault free, and in styles that quite appealed to me: guyasana herbal honey wheat, coffee stout and a great IPA full of grapefruity, pine resiny old school American hops.

Before our final night in Quito we said a sad goodbye to the last of the family.  It had been a real treat to spend so long with them, and their presence for a couple of weeks did lots to stave off any creeping homesickness.  Fortunately for us, the next month or two of travel will be full of visits and meetings with a wide variety friends and family in a wide variety of destinations.

On our final day in Ecuador we made a quick final visit to our dentist (who had very kindly opened the office on a Saturday, the day after she returned from her Christmas holiday).  From there it was straight to the northern bus terminal where we got a ride to Tulcan, about five hours north on the Colombian border. (As with just about every bus terminal in Ecuador, there were multiple cute puppies preparing to travel with their owners, a fact that Sarah reminded me I ought to point out).

The trip was very pretty.  Big snow capped volcanoes and seemingly bottomless chasms passed by during the first half of the trip, changing to mountainous semi-desert for the second half.  We arrived in Tulcan just before sunset, which gave us just enough time to explore the city's cemetery before crossing the border.

Why, you ask, would we want to explore a cemetery at dusk?  Because, as we'd learned by reading a travel guide on the bus while headed there, the Tulcan cemetery contains a huge (some say the biggest, though I have my doubts) collections of topiary in the world.

It was an honest to goodness tourist attraction, with dozens of people climbing on top of the crypts (they had stairs and handrails that actively encouraged this!) to take photos of the decorative gardening with the setting sun and 4700m volcano in the background.

At the border things were busy.  We were joined by dozens (hundreds?) of Venezuelan migrants headed south.  But the numbers may have gone down a bit from their heights in the preceding months.  And the Ecuadorian government had expanded the opening hours from 07:30-16:30 to 24 hours.  And they'd constructed temporary facilities (showers, sunshades, vaccination clinics) to help them along their way.  So even with the half hour of computer problems, it was only just over an hour until we got to the almost empty Colombian immigration hall.

As a Canadian I had to pay a “reciprocity fee” imposed by the Colombian government to match the Canadian biometric information collection fee that Colombians have to pay to enter Canada.  But I knew to expect this, and the immigration officers were very nice about it, even giving me a discount when they didn't have change for my 205,000 Colombian Peso payment of the 201,000 Colombian Peso fee.

Once through we tried and failed to find a collectivo (shared minibus) heading north to the town of Ipiales.  In fact we couldn't even find a taxi. We asked the border officials how to get into town and they took us for a little walk and found us a private car with two young men getting in.  It's sometimes a bad idea to get into unofficial taxis. And often (in South America at least) to get into a taxi with anyone other than the driver. And areas of Colombia near the Ecuadorian border are described as “avoid all non-essential travel” by the Canadian and NZ governments.  But then the ride had been recommended by a police officer and a representative of the UNHCR. So we decided to go with it, and had a quick and pleasant trip, chatting with the guys and listening to their loud and cheerful music as we approached Ipiales, our first stop in Colombia at around 21:00.