The (Mis)adventures, Revisited

Quito, Ecuador, July 10, 2003 — We returned from Cotopaxi to spend our final day in Ecuador back in Quito before heading off to see many other parts of South America.  It was another day of errands, including a trip to the LanChile airline offices.  We went to confirm our flight to Santiago, only to find out (despite having a confirmation number) that we had no flight.  The agent told us the next flight to Santiago with seats available was nearly a week away.  After much pleading, yelling, cajoling, and looking desperate, the agent and her manager somehow managed to find a couple of free seats.  So, that being said, it wasn’t really a photography kind of day.  But I did snap a couple of shots of Quito’s “Gringolandia,” including one that sort of makes me chuckle of a motorcycle driver in bumper-to-bumper traffic waring an orange vest that says “educacion vial” (driver’s education).  I’m sure there is a perfectly reasonable explanation, but I look at the picture and think that he’s not in the best of positions to teach anyone to drive.

Quito, Ecuador, June 28, 2003 — Day 21 was our first full day on our own, having left behind Rosa’s comfy home in the hills of Quito.  Spanish classes were over, and we were truly about to start our round-the-world backpacking adventure.  But it started with a little jolt of reality as we awoke to some commotion outside our hotel window.  A homeless family (or two) was encamped on the street below us, reminding me that Rosa’s suburban style home in the hills was not the norm.

As an aside, this photo demonstrates once again one of the ways my photography has changed thanks to digital cameras.  I shot this frame with my first digital camera just a few weeks after buying it.  And clearly I still had the habits I’d acquired from shooting film for many years.  I look at this shot now and wish I had shot many more, but that day I shot just one single frame.  Now I shoot multiple frames a second quite often.  Memory cards were still very expensive back then and we didn’t have a lot of extra storage space on the laptop we were carrying with us, so being conservative with the number of pictures I took was perfectly reasonable.  But I surely could have afforded to have taken a few more shots.

Quito, Ecuador, June 25, 2003 –When you’re traveling for an entire year, not much happens on some days.  Day 18 was one of those days.  The photographic highlight (and I use that term very loosely) occurred at our Spanish language school in Quito, when our language instructors decided to teach us salsa dancing.  When you think of Ecuador, salsa dancing does not immediately leap to mind, and these language instructors didn’t exactly make you think of dancing either.  But it was fun, and this snapshot makes me chuckle (though I’m fairly confident that my time would have been better spent learning the past tense).

Quito, Ecuador, June 24, 2003 — While in Quito, we stayed in a fairly posh little neighborhood in the hills above town, and walked down every day to get to our Spanish language classes.  This picture was taken from the top of the stairs near the beginning of our walk (and their were many more stairs and roads down after this one).  Quito is over 9,000 feet above sea level, so the walk home was considerably more tiring than the walk to school, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Quito, Ecuador, June 17, 2003 — Ecuador is right on the equator (thus the name), but Quito proved to be a cold, wet place in June.  We spent day 10 inside again, studying our Spanish.  On the plus side, I really like this portrait of Sherri in her new Otavalo shawl (which she still has).   And although it may be very common now, we were very cutting edge in 2003 backpacking with an Apple computer.  And trust us, there were many fewer Apple stores back then — which we discovered when our motherboard died on us (twice).