 Quito City Views |
The escorted Quito city tour is scheduled for today. To start, breakfast is served at the hotel's Bistro Latino which overlooks the beautiful pool and hot tub area. The Bistro offers traditional breakfast buffet selections, plus a few regional specialties like empanadas and tamales rolled in either traditional corn husks or banana leaves. There's also an omelet station offering fresh made omelets or specialty cooked eggs. All meals today, breakfast at the hotel, lunch and dinner this evening are included in the 10 night Cruisetour. After breakfast the city tour departed from the hotel lobby around 9am. With nearly the entire ship's complement of 90 passengers, we were split among 4 tour buses making for plenty of comfortable open seating. A tour guide accompanies each of the tour buses, some of the same guides we first met at the airport last night. The first stop was Quito Old Town where we visited several cathedrals including the Municipal Catherdral, San Francisco Church and the Presidential Palace. After a couple hours in old town we re-board the bus for a trip out of town to the site of an inactive volcano called Pululahua, which is last believed to have been active around 500 BC.
The warm sunny conditions of downtown Quito gave way to cooler, cloudy weather as we arrive at "El Crater", a restaurant and art gallery perched on the edge of the volcanic crater. Here we enjoyed lunch with selections of Chicken, Beef or Pasta. The service was great, and we enjoyed a complementary soda, wine or beer with lunch. After lunch, there is a bit of time to browse through the works of local artisans before re-boarding the tour coaches. Traveling back the direction of Quito, we stop at Middle of the Earth park which straddles the equator. We spent a little over an hour at the park, taking the elevator to the top of the monument for a good view of the southern valley and then wandered through the local artisan shops. Make sure you take your passport if you'd like to collect the Middle of the Earth stamp. And, of course your camera is necessary to capture the requisite shot of you and your travel partners straddling the equator, one foot in each hemisphere.
Returning to the hotel around 4pm, we had time to relax for a few hours before dinner. We again met the tour coaches for the short trip to Teatro Nacional Sucre, the impressive theatre house of Quito. Dinner here was again a pre-set menu, offering a Beef, Chicken and a Pasta meal. The theatre also houses a unique wine bar with an extensive list of South American and other wines. Soda and beer was included in the meal, but bottles of wine ranged from $30 to $200. Following dinner we enjoyed a short program by a male opera singer and then were returned to the hotel around 10pm. After a quick stop in the lobby bar for a night cap, we were all off to finish packing before our 7am departure the next morning to the airport for our flight to Baltra.
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