Writings By Location| Ecuador and the Curse of Quito | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
Things are particularly bad in the capital city of Quito, where mugging and pickpocketing outpace bullfighting and guinea pig roasting as the national sports. Tourists are constantly reminded to keep their valuables in their hotel room, not to carry their passport around, and to have as little money as possible at all times. The latter part isn't so much a problem, given that about two-thirds of the banks refuse to give out money. It took us three days and seven banks before we found one that would. In fact, some banks in Ecuador have a habit of just randomly closing for two or three days at a time, with no access to any accounts. Other banks take the more stealthy approach of eating ATM cards on the last Friday of the month, preventing people from withdrawing from their latest paycheck, and allowing the bank to make an extra three days worth of money on the float. How clever.
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| Entrance to Museum |
Visitors are also warned to always take a taxi, prices of which double or triple at night. The city is already overcrowded, and with no money or space to improve roads, traffic is a nightmare. What should be a ten-minute walk becomes thirty minutes of sitting around breathing diesel fumes. However, this form of organized robbery is still better than the alternative one will undoubtedly experience on the streets. It's said that "In Quito, they mug you; in Guayaquil, they stab you, then they mug you." Really, about the only nice thing that can be said about Quito is that it's not Guayaquil.
The preferred form of mugging in Quito is "mustarding". Someone will walk behind or beside a victim very closely and inconspicuously spray his or her clothes with mustard. The attacker, or his accomplice, will bring to the victim's attention what someone has done, then valiantly offer to help clean it up. This distracts the victim enough to allow the attacker, the accomplice, or pretty much anyone, including a passing policeman, to pick his pockets and/or purse.
This form of attack is easy to pull off at any time of day, so naturally, it happened to us in the first 24 hours. Walking only a block or two from our hotel around lunch time, some passersby pointed out that Erin had something on her shirt. When we turned to look, we discovered several square inches of freshly squirted mustard all over the bottom of her shirt and her pants. We backed ourselves against a wall and started trying to get most of it off with napkins offered by other pedestrians, whom you could tell were sympathetic because they handed us the napkin, but didn't try to clean it up for us. We were fortunate in that we started crossing the street when it happened, so we appeared to have thwarted the efforts of our golden yellow assailant. And most of the stains came out in the laundry, so the only lasting effect it's had on us is a stronger preference for condiments such as ketchup and sauerkraut. However, our luck ran out on us three days later, when I was pickpocketed on the bus from the market town of Otovalo. The bastards couldn't get my wallet with only $10 and a credit card that would be easy to replace; instead, they had to get my Palm organizer.
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| Chiva at Days of Quito |
Muggings and lack of public safety in general tend to get particularly out of hand during holidays and festivals, so it would have to figure that our visit would coincide with its biggest celebration of the year, the Days of Quito. For the entire week around December 6, the city celebrates its founding through wild celebration involving drinking, dancing, music, bullfighting, more drinking, and continuously shouting "Viva Quito!". Most of this is done on chivas, minibusses complete with their own band that drive around town, stopping every so often to pick up more people or alcohol. Our hotel was lucky enough to be right in the center of all the action, so we got to enjoy the same three marching band songs over and over until about 3am. Funny, our travel agent never told us about this when she chose the hotel for us.
