I’ve had my eye on Quito’s Teleferico for a number of days now, but every time the weather is looking good over the city, I turn my head to see a lot of clouds smouldering the mountain tops. One of these days I will get up there when the skies are clear, but until then I am running around town doing a few other things and trying to do some planning for my last week here.
In lieu of the cable car ride to the top of the mountains, I decided to head to the financial and cultural district of Quito to see a few highly recommended museums. Interestingly, there were two combined museums of modern art and musical instruments in a huge round cultural building that were pretty run down and neglected, but charged an entry fee ($2!), and another modern, well presented, well maintained archeology museum next door in the same building that was free. Go figure.
The musical instrument museum housed many indigenous musical instruments from South American countries as well as from many other countries around the world. It also had very old artefacts of prehistoric musical instruments made out of bones and other similar materials. It was quite fascinating, but a bit dark and neglected. There were plenty of school kids there, however, so it wasn’t totally forgotten.
Upstairs in the same museum was a collection of dusty modern art from Ecuador that included, among other things, some impressive and intricate designs made from thousands of nails being hammered into a plywood canvas. I couldn’t help but wonder how much they weighed!
Just a short walk around the building was a far more impressive archeology museum full of artefacts from around South America. It explained the cultural histories of three major regions in the area: The Amazon, the coast, and The Andes mountains. Included were dioramas depicting sacrifices and head shrinkages. Good stuff.
In one particular section there were many displays of gold metalwork in the form of masks, jewellery, and other items used for religious purposes. There were also extensive displays of historic maps from early days of European settlement that were quite interesting.
Having had my cultural fill for the day, I proceeded to head back towards my guest house, but not before taking a shortcut through the Hyatt hotel to remind myself how sterile, cold, stuffy, and corporate my accommodation could have been.
As soon as I stepped back out of the building and onto the street, I started to hear a few gunshots ring out. I’ve heard many loud noises that sounded like gunfire in various city around the world that turned out to be cars backfiring or other false alarms over the years, but these sounds had everyone on the street in the area freeze in their tracks and then dive for protection. I couldn’t see exactly what was going on, but I knew it had to be gunfire and so did everyone else. The shots were being fired just 10-20 meters down the street and behind some bushes on a corner I was heading towards. I took refuge behind a big cement wall next to the Hyatt along with several street vendors.
After about 5-10 shots and some screaming, it became quiet again and people began to start slowly moving – many towards the shooting location to investigate what had happened. An English couple I crossed paths with immediately afterwards said they were sitting at a cafe just across the street from the incident. They said that a man had been shot in his leg and the gunman fled down the street (out of my view) afterwards. By the time I got up to the scene of the crime (which I had to pass through to get home, anyway), a huge scrum of 50’ish people swarmed around a man talking on his mobile phone, possibly as he made a call to the police, to eavesdrop on his conversation.
My feeling was to just get out of there and not hang around, but I never did hear anything more about the incident. I mentioned it to my hosts at the guesthouse and they seemed genuinely alarmed, which I guess is a good thing because it shows this sort of thing doesn’t actually happen around here very often.
