After another nice breakfast and a visit to a few tour operators down the street to try and nail some things down, I decided to heel it to Quito’s Old City district to check out the fabulous historic Spanish architecture. There were endless cobblestone streets along rows and rows of beautifully preserved buildings and massive cathedrals.
Unfortunately, for me, finding English translations or speakers has been a bit difficult to find around Quito. Yeah, sure I took Spanish in high schools years ago, and many words are beginning to come back to me, but it isn’t a language that gets much airtime in Australia. There were some nice exhibits in some of the cathedrals, but not a word of English to help me understand exactly what I was looking at. It’s one of those experiences I’ve had while traveling the world that make you realise that you are possibly on the back of a sleeping giant that is too big to really care much about what us in the 1st world think is important. This sleeping giant being South America. The experience reminding me of my visit to India in 2005 – where the focus in the media was primarily on themselves with rare mentions of what was happening in the U.S., Europe, or Australia.
On my walk home from the Old City, I was drawn to a massive Basilica on top of a big hill overlooking the rest of the city. Not knowing whether it was something you could see the inside of. I finally found a guy selling tickets near the side who told me I could climb to the top of the spire there. Sounded pretty cool to me, so I forked over my $2 and headed up a stone staircase hat lead up a corner of the building through windowless channels. There were a few floors to stop at on the way up that gave views looking down inside over the cathedral interior, along with some intermediate external views, but I kept climbing as long as I could find stairs.
Thinking I was at the top, I found a creaky plywood board walk that lead directly over the top of the length of the church over the ceiling but below the roof that led to a steep staircase up to some daylight. I kept going, thinking this must be it, only to find a few more scary looking steep steel staircases proceeding up to the very top of the spire. Or at least to it’s highest platform. A few people were going up and down, but I had to wait a few minutes to psych myself up for the last bit of the journey.
From the top you could see the entire punchbowl of Quito, surrounded by volcanoes and snow-capped mountains on another beautifully clear, sunny day.
