Denver – Quito
In the morning, we went to find a place to have breakfast. There were two cafés next to each other and close to our hotel. One was noisy, unpretentiously furnished and packed to capacity with locals; the other was more formal, with starched tablecloths and empty.
It was going to be our first meal in Ecuador. We decided to play it safe and went for the latter café thinking that it should be cleaner. Breakfast at it was rather expensive and took a lot of time. So on the following day, we tried the other café and loved it.
The waitress was friendly and efficient. She did not speak English; our Spanish was rudimentary and it did not matter. The breakfast menu was a wide selection from eggs to meat with rice. It included coffee and juice that was squeezed from fresh fruit of your choice.
Ecuador is a major exporter of coffee beans. Ecuadorians drink a lot coffee but the way they do that deserves a separate description. A waiter brought us a jar of instant Nescafe and two glasses filled to the brim with hot steaming milk. We stared at the jar, at each other, then looked up questioningly at the waiter. He smiled at us, oh those foreigners, and showed that we should add a teaspoon of instant coffee to the hot milk (no water!), stir it and here was your coffee ready! We tasted the brew and decided against having coffee a la Ecuador. The milk however was excellent. I drank it every morning to soothe my scratchy throat irritated by Quito’s polluted air.
Our room was the only “suite with a bathroom” in Casa Helbling. Other guests used shared facilities. The hotel occupied an old residential house that was renovated to make rooms out of the apartments. The balcony of our room was turned into a bathroom. Availability of hot running water was unpredictable. We had to take showers at different times of the day and it was kind of funny to do that on the balcony.
Casa Helbling had a kitchen where others cooked their meals. The hotel guests were mostly young people from all over the world who came to Ecuador to take Spanish courses. Apparently, it was a cheap and popular alternative to studying Spanish in America and Europe. In the evening, the students gathered in the cozy common area with a fireplace to do their homework.
Besides us, there was only one middle-aged person at the hotel – an anthropologist from London who worked on her thesis about an Amazonian tribe. She was going to live with the tribe in the jungles for one year. She complained about the paperwork and bureaucracy of government agencies that needed to authorize her staying for a year with the tribe. While waiting for her permit, this amazing woman took language lessons from a tribesman who moved from the jungles to the city.
I asked if the tribe was going to feed her.
“I suppose so,” she said.
“What if you fall ill or something happens to you?”
“I guess they will airlift me. I also have homeopathic medications with me. They work,” was her response.
We spent our time exploring Quito and looking for a guide who could take my husband to Cotopaxi. Initially, Sergey sought to join an organized group that would go via the standard Northern route. We checked all tourist agencies in the area and to Sergey’s disappointment, did not find any that could do that within a specific timeframe.
