I alluded earlier to all of the mistakes I made in planning and preparing for this trip. Little did I know that some of the worst mistakes wouldn´t show up until I was on the road.
#1 - I should not have listened to those who said it is a bad idea to carry a laptop when doing an RTW. While it is easy to find Internet cafes, the variations in quality of equipment, speed of connection, operating systems, software and keyboards (not to mention using sites in Spanish) makes keeping a blog, with or without photos, a genuine challenge. The situation is made all the more worse by the noise level in most of the cafes. It intrigues me -- okay, it drives me nuts -- that many places with otherwise decent equipment and connections have both a TV and a radio on at the same time! If I had my laptop I could work on my photos and my blog and then upload everything by using the connection at an Internet cafe. Also, I could add music and other media to my iPod. (Little did I realize when I was uploading all of my CD´s to my Mac and then my iPod that I would lose everything if I switched to a PC -- a fact that was buried on page 63 of the little handbook!) Finally, I was surprised to find that movie theatres are few and far between here in Ecuador (and won´t be much better the further away I get). It would be nice to be able to buy and watch some of the very cheap DVD´s available on every block. I am at a loss as to how to correct this mistake without spending a bundle on shipping and import fees to get my Mac or a similar bundle to buy a Mac somewhere on the road.
#2 - I should not have listened to the advise to not use rechargeable batteries. I can´t remember the argument against but, in my experience, it is absolutely wrong. In one week I went through four high-power batteries made especially for digital cameras. At that rate I would go broke real fast, not to mention the bad effect discarded batteries have on the environment, nor the reality that it can be a signifant problem in many places to get good quality batteries that aren´t on their last leg. It took $72 to correct this mistake with the purchase of a dual recharger, eight AA´s and four AAA´s.
#3 - I did not realize what a pain it would be to always listen to my iPod with ear phones, even though the ones I have were a lovely gift of high-end Shure´s. When I have a private room it is nice to listen to music while getting dressed or reading. I solved this problem with lovely, compact Altec speakers ($118). When the speakers are in use they also recharge the iPod.
#4 - I should have purchased my wonderful digital camera (Canon Power Shot A710IS with 7.1 megapixels and 6X optical zoom) months not days before leaving. Learning to use the camera on the road and with different computers and software has caused me to spend unnecessary hours (and dollars) trying to get my photos from my camera to my Flickr account. That said, I LOVE this wonderful camera. It is such a treat to be able to take all of the photos I want, erase the bad ones, edit the ones that need it and then store as many as I want for free (as long as my home phone and DSL connection are active).
#5 - I should have spent more money on my first travel guide. I chose Rough Guide South America as I didn´t want to carry lots of books for the countries I plan to visit here. BAD decision. I didn´t realize how bad until I happened to see a copy of Footprint´s South America edition. If you are planning any travel to an unknown or relatively exotic country I hope you´ll seek out the Footprint editions. It´s an English imprint and may be hard to find in stores but it´s well worth seeking out. They list numerous suggestions for lodging and food in every price range in almost every place worth visiting, along with detailed descriptions of how to get to/from these places and what to see and do while there.
#6 - I should not have spent $80 to buy an attachment for my iPod that can record sound. This is one of the things I most enjoy about travel and was delighted when I found this great little object. Problem is, without my own computer (see #1) it is essentially useless. Not only is it a battery hog, the title of the entries cannot be changed from date and time to something more useful.
#7 - I should not have laughed at travelers who listed an LED light that fits on the head like a miners lamp as an essential piece of equipment. Not only is it a great lamp to read by, especially in shared rooms where one wants to minimize the impact of the light to one´s dorm mates, or where the room light switch is far away from one´s bed, it is also useful in situations in which the electricity either fails or isn´t there to begin with. I was gifted with a nice ¨book lamp¨ from Brookstone but, unfortunately, it only illuminates part of the page and one has to constantly move it to get enough light. I was also gifted with a wonderful gadget that gives a strong LED light but it only stays on for a couple of minutes and I prefer to keep it for emergencies. This problem is solveable but not until I get to New Zealand.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Saturday, August 4, 2007
At Zero Latitude
On Saturday, July 7, I set off to visit El Mitad del Mundo, the location just outside Quito that marks 0-degrees latitude. I had been given directions to the bus terminal but as I kept walking I had the feeling that I was lost. I approached a young man walking with his very young daughter and asked him to direct me to La Martin bus station. He didn´t know what I was talking about, which was disconcerting as I was certain it was very close to where we were standing. He asked where I wanted to go and it turned out he and his daughter were also taking a bus to Mitad del Mundo, not to visit the monument but to attend a gathering close by. This is how I met Wilson and Samanda.
I walked with them almost a mile to catch the first of two buses. We had a great talk about our respective lives and especially about life in Ecuador. Wilson comes from Ambato, a small city about three hours south of Quito. (A classic misunderstanding came about when I asked where he came from and assumed that he had just come from Ambato that day. I was so impressed at how well behaved his daughter was considering that she had been traveling for three hours. Turns out they had just left their apartment when I met them.) Even so, little Samanda WAS very well behaved, as are most of the children I´ve seen in Ecuador. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that one of the rarest things one sees here is a stroller. I can count on one hand the number that I´ve seen in almost two months (and one of those was for a child who was obviously disabled). Children here are either carried or they walk.
[Stepping on soap box] I think one of the most disturbing trends in the US is that children as old as seven are carted around in strollers. While I´m certain this is a labor saving device for overworked parents, I worry that we are raising a new breed of children whose bones will not have developed properly because they didn´t spend enough time walking. Not to mention the fact that hauling around strollers large enough to haul one, two or even three children requires an SUV! [Stepping off soap box]
Children here seem to fall into two catagories, the doted upon and the exploited. Though poor children may be just as adored as those who have money, it is only the poor who are exploited, often by their own parents. One of the most heartbreaking things one experiences, especially in Quito, are the young indigenous women with babies who sit on the sidewalk selling small candies and gum and who send their older children out to either sell or beg. The level of exploitation is dreadful as the women are being just as exploited as their children. Afterall, those women are not the ones buying the candy and gum, someone is supplying them and they wouldn´t be doing it if they weren´t making money. That is surprising as one very rarely sees anyone buying their goods. Sometimes the children seem very well taken care of, with clean clothes and shoes that fit, other times they are wearing little more than rags. The most pitiful are the shoe shine boys, who range in age from teens down to six year olds. Their arms, hands and clothes are filty and they compete with one another and the older, established men who have stands for the few customers who want their shoes shined.
Wilson works in a factory about one hour outside of Quito repairing refrigerators. He makes $200 per month. His wife, Isabela, works at a customer service call center for banks and credit card companies, where her hours can vary from 9-5 to 2-midnight. They share an apartment with Isabela´s brother and his three children, one of whom is disabled. They don´t have a car but they both have cell phones. They would like to buy a house but it seems like an impossible dream given their salaries and the cost of living. He was surprised, though, to learn that most people in the US get loans to buy a house; he assumed one should pay cash. We said goodbye at the entrance to Mitad del Mundo and made arrangements to meet again.
Once inside the park I heard some very familiar music and as I came around a corner saw a troop of dancers and singers. The reason the music was familiar is that they came from Mexico! They gave a wonderful show with Aztec dancers, a mariachi band, the famous ¨Old Folks¨dance from Oaxaco and dancers from Veracruz but as it was almost unbearably hot that day and there was little shade, the audience was quite sparse.
The monument and park were quite nice.
and, of course, I had the obligatory photo taken with one foot in the northern hemisphere and the other in the southern.
I walked with them almost a mile to catch the first of two buses. We had a great talk about our respective lives and especially about life in Ecuador. Wilson comes from Ambato, a small city about three hours south of Quito. (A classic misunderstanding came about when I asked where he came from and assumed that he had just come from Ambato that day. I was so impressed at how well behaved his daughter was considering that she had been traveling for three hours. Turns out they had just left their apartment when I met them.) Even so, little Samanda WAS very well behaved, as are most of the children I´ve seen in Ecuador. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that one of the rarest things one sees here is a stroller. I can count on one hand the number that I´ve seen in almost two months (and one of those was for a child who was obviously disabled). Children here are either carried or they walk.
[Stepping on soap box] I think one of the most disturbing trends in the US is that children as old as seven are carted around in strollers. While I´m certain this is a labor saving device for overworked parents, I worry that we are raising a new breed of children whose bones will not have developed properly because they didn´t spend enough time walking. Not to mention the fact that hauling around strollers large enough to haul one, two or even three children requires an SUV! [Stepping off soap box]
Children here seem to fall into two catagories, the doted upon and the exploited. Though poor children may be just as adored as those who have money, it is only the poor who are exploited, often by their own parents. One of the most heartbreaking things one experiences, especially in Quito, are the young indigenous women with babies who sit on the sidewalk selling small candies and gum and who send their older children out to either sell or beg. The level of exploitation is dreadful as the women are being just as exploited as their children. Afterall, those women are not the ones buying the candy and gum, someone is supplying them and they wouldn´t be doing it if they weren´t making money. That is surprising as one very rarely sees anyone buying their goods. Sometimes the children seem very well taken care of, with clean clothes and shoes that fit, other times they are wearing little more than rags. The most pitiful are the shoe shine boys, who range in age from teens down to six year olds. Their arms, hands and clothes are filty and they compete with one another and the older, established men who have stands for the few customers who want their shoes shined.
Wilson works in a factory about one hour outside of Quito repairing refrigerators. He makes $200 per month. His wife, Isabela, works at a customer service call center for banks and credit card companies, where her hours can vary from 9-5 to 2-midnight. They share an apartment with Isabela´s brother and his three children, one of whom is disabled. They don´t have a car but they both have cell phones. They would like to buy a house but it seems like an impossible dream given their salaries and the cost of living. He was surprised, though, to learn that most people in the US get loans to buy a house; he assumed one should pay cash. We said goodbye at the entrance to Mitad del Mundo and made arrangements to meet again.
Once inside the park I heard some very familiar music and as I came around a corner saw a troop of dancers and singers. The reason the music was familiar is that they came from Mexico! They gave a wonderful show with Aztec dancers, a mariachi band, the famous ¨Old Folks¨dance from Oaxaco and dancers from Veracruz but as it was almost unbearably hot that day and there was little shade, the audience was quite sparse.
The monument and park were quite nice.
and, of course, I had the obligatory photo taken with one foot in the northern hemisphere and the other in the southern.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Meeting Meryl
I arrived in Quito on Thursday, July 5 and spent the first two days getting oriented and dusting off my Spanish. I was excited to see an ad for a folk music concert on Friday at 7:00pm. As I didn´t have a good map of Quito, I asked one of the Spanish teachers how to get to there. This turned out to be a bad idea that ended well.
Instead of giving me directions to the concert venue, she gave me directions to Papayanet, which is in the heart of La Mariscal, otherwise known as Gringolandia. This is the area in New Town known for it´s foreigner-friendly restaurants and bars. And it turned out she really didn´t know her city as well as I thought. Papayanet is an Internet cafe and bar, not the information center she imagined it to be. They had no idea what I was asking about when I asked about the concert. By the time I learned this it was too late for the concert.
But that´s where all´s well that ends well. I found a quiet place to have dinner (not an easy thing to do on a Friday night when the Mariscal is filled with a mix of foreigners and locals). As I walked to my seat I noticed a woman I took to be English finishing her dinner. As I was enjoying a glass of excellent Chilean wine she came to my table and asked if I spoke English as she had a question about her bill and couldn´t speak Spanish.
That is how I met Meryl, a South Australia farm wife and mother of four grown children who was leaving the next day for a trip to the Galapagos Island. The primary purpose of her trip was a church project in Honduras. But instead of just going from Australia to Central America, she had made a world tour of it. Though one of her children joined her for part of the trip, most of it was done solo. I was very inspired by her story as she took on physically challenging adventures that I could only dream of. I expected her to say that her physical fitness came from years of hard work on the farm. Nope. She´s a regular at her local gym. I hope to meet up with Meryl again when I visit her part of the world.
That is how I met Meryl, a South Australia farm wife and mother of four grown children who was leaving the next day for a trip to the Galapagos Island. The primary purpose of her trip was a church project in Honduras. But instead of just going from Australia to Central America, she had made a world tour of it. Though one of her children joined her for part of the trip, most of it was done solo. I was very inspired by her story as she took on physically challenging adventures that I could only dream of. I expected her to say that her physical fitness came from years of hard work on the farm. Nope. She´s a regular at her local gym. I hope to meet up with Meryl again when I visit her part of the world.
The Secret Garden
The first few days in Quito were spent at The Secret Garden Hostal, which is in a historic building at the edge of Old Town. There is a terrace on the fifth floor with a stunning view of mountains to the West and the Panecillo to the South. On this historic hill a massive statue of the Virgin of Quito was constructed about 40 years ago. (More about the Panecillo later.) The terrace serves as the reception area, the restaurant, the bar and the hangout for the international clientele. The hostal is Ecuadorian-Australian owned and most of the young people who volunteer to work here in exchange for free lessons from it´s Spanish language school are Ozzies or Brits.
My first room here was lovely. There was a shower right outside the door and a toilet down the hall. That´s one great thing about TSC, toilets and showers are plentiful, though the hot water wasn´t always as available as they claimed. The public areas and rooms are painted in wonderful colors with imaginative designs.
It was here that I realized how terribly heavy my bag is. Though it only weighs 11 lbs, by the time I filled it with a few clothes and tons of toiletries and electronics it weighs a hefty 40 lbs. Getting that bag up three flights of stairs would have been impossible without the kind help of one of the young volunteers, especially the first day at 9,000 ft of altitude.
My first room here was lovely. There was a shower right outside the door and a toilet down the hall. That´s one great thing about TSC, toilets and showers are plentiful, though the hot water wasn´t always as available as they claimed. The public areas and rooms are painted in wonderful colors with imaginative designs.
It was here that I realized how terribly heavy my bag is. Though it only weighs 11 lbs, by the time I filled it with a few clothes and tons of toiletries and electronics it weighs a hefty 40 lbs. Getting that bag up three flights of stairs would have been impossible without the kind help of one of the young volunteers, especially the first day at 9,000 ft of altitude.
Quito - First impressions
Quito is a vibrant city set between lovely mountains. It is blessed with a temperate climate and many lovely parks. The city is home to about 3 million people and about as many buses and cars. Like New York, public transportation (in the form of buses and trolleys) and taxis are plentiful and cheap (a bus from one end of town to the other only costs $0.25). Though many of the gazillions of buses spew black soot from their exhaust pipes and there are limited restrictions on emissions from cars, the level of visible pollution is remarkably low and the air feels good.
The Old Town (or El Centro) as the locals call it, is filled with very old colonial buildings set on streets that are invariably steep. Streets and sidewalks are cobbled. In the 1940´s, for reasons I´m still not clear on, the rich decided to abandon their Old Town homes in favor of ¨New Town,¨ a mile or so to the north. The divide between the two is almost palpable.
In the New Town one finds several first-class shopping centers and hotels, the kind that make you feel like you could be most anywhere in the world. All the newest movies play here at large multiplexes. (Sadly the ones I want to see [Ratatouille and The Simpsons] have been dubbed into Spanish and the ones with Spanish subtitles are just the ones I don´t want to see [the latest Harry Potter and The Transformers]). In New Town, everything is very ¨de la moda¨ (fashionable). In some ways Quito feels very familiar because, like in the US, there are ads EVERYWHERE for everything -- from fitness centers and spas to cellular phones and consumer goods.
In Old Town one finds most of the tourist attractions -- the gilded churches, the lovely pedestrian plazas -- and many of the poor. It is here that one can experience the richness and sadness of the indigineous residents. Though there are prosperous indigineous communities throughout Ecuador, they are not much in evidence in Quito.
On the inevitable TV´s in restaurants, cafes and bars one sees FOX Sports LA (Latin America), HBO LA, Direct TV and highly polished programs in which the only difference between those in the US and here is that the language is Spanish.
The Old Town (or El Centro) as the locals call it, is filled with very old colonial buildings set on streets that are invariably steep. Streets and sidewalks are cobbled. In the 1940´s, for reasons I´m still not clear on, the rich decided to abandon their Old Town homes in favor of ¨New Town,¨ a mile or so to the north. The divide between the two is almost palpable.
In the New Town one finds several first-class shopping centers and hotels, the kind that make you feel like you could be most anywhere in the world. All the newest movies play here at large multiplexes. (Sadly the ones I want to see [Ratatouille and The Simpsons] have been dubbed into Spanish and the ones with Spanish subtitles are just the ones I don´t want to see [the latest Harry Potter and The Transformers]). In New Town, everything is very ¨de la moda¨ (fashionable). In some ways Quito feels very familiar because, like in the US, there are ads EVERYWHERE for everything -- from fitness centers and spas to cellular phones and consumer goods.
In Old Town one finds most of the tourist attractions -- the gilded churches, the lovely pedestrian plazas -- and many of the poor. It is here that one can experience the richness and sadness of the indigineous residents. Though there are prosperous indigineous communities throughout Ecuador, they are not much in evidence in Quito.
On the inevitable TV´s in restaurants, cafes and bars one sees FOX Sports LA (Latin America), HBO LA, Direct TV and highly polished programs in which the only difference between those in the US and here is that the language is Spanish.
July 4 - And we´re off!
I could write a book about how NOT to prepare for a very long Round The World (RTW) trip. Just about everything that one could do wrong I did. But, lucky for me, my brother Tam was there at the last minute to help pull together most of the loose strings and to take care of things left undone. How I can ever thank him I know not.
By the grace of the Universe I made it to the Bakersfield airport bus just in the nick of time. Though this put me at LAX several hours before my 2:20am departure, I was just glad to be there at all!
This was my first experience with Terminal 2 and finally I understand why people think that LAX is one of the worst airports in the world. When I finally went through security about 11:30pm, what I found was dreadful, with torn seats and trash everywhere. Finding a bit of clean floor on which I could take a little nap was a real challenge.
What a contrast between LAX Terminal 2 and the arrival hall at the San Jose, Costa Rica airport. At 9:05am we were greeted by a sparkling clean facility and a guitarist playing lovely classical music. Clearly they were very interested in appealing to gringo investors as huge ads for developments and land, in English, of course, were plastered all over the walls. Though a bottle of 625 ml water cost $3, at least I could refill it for free at their filtered water fountain.
Arrived at Quito International Airport precisely on time at 1:35pm and was in the cab on the way to my hostal 15 minutes later. This included getting my luggage! I had feared that they wouldn´t let me in because I only had a one-way ticket to Quito, however they didn´t ask for proof of a return ticket or onward travel. Ah, the joys of ¨traveling grey¨ (haired, that is).
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