The end of Ecuador

Hi--Warren, again.

Nearly three weeks after the fact, this will be the last post concerning Ecuador until we go back in 2031.

We did some searching and booked a new hotel room starting Friday morning. Melody just couldn't do the other hotel any longer, and honestly I was pretty sick of it, too. Our new room was in Hotel San Francisco de Quito, and was quite a bit better in amenities, appearance, and atmosphere. It was a step up, certainly.

Melody and I located a nice bakery and had a breakfast of pineapple pastries while sitting on a shaded curb on a bustling side street while waiting for the masses to assemble for the procession of Jesus, El Gran Poder. This is billed as the largest and most pious Easter procession outside of Spain. And it definitely deserves some kind of notoriety, for reasons you are about to read.

With the sidewalks packed with people, the procession began with a police squadron in the lead, followed by a police band playing a trumpety durge, followed by the real eye-candy of the procession. These are the cucaruchos, or "sinners," who dress themselves in purple robes, clutch icons of Catholicism held to their chests, and who sport pointed hoods with eye and mouth holes. Yes, they look like purple KKK members marching on and on. Then, interspersed between groups of the cucaruchos are the Jesus impersonators who drag large wooden crosses (sometimes with help and sometimes not). A few of these men had pasted fake beards on their faces and had crowns of barbed wire wrapped above their brows. Some have crosses so heavy that a few of the cucaruchos help with the lifting while another poors water over their Jesus wigs. Roman soldiers in cardboard armor lash fake whips. Waves of marching bands follow, playing the same brassy, funereal music.

It gets successively stranger. Kids dressed up in the purple robes, or dressed like small Jesuses and carrying crosses made of nailed plywood. There are the cucaruchos who walk barechested, with barbed wire wrapped too tight around their torsos in an X pattern, sweaty and bleeding from the puncture wounds. They shackle their ankles and drag chains down the streets. They slap tied bunches of weeds over their swelling, irritated backs. Six foot tall Jesus statues are hoisted on platforms shouldered by the cucaruchos. The Virgin Mary moves through afterward.

This lasts for two hours.

We didn't really know what to make of all of it except for being weirded out.



We went to the top of Pichincha volcano, which overlooks Quito, soon after. We met the personal pilots for Axel Rose's South American tour on the top and they talked about how much of a bigoted idiot he is. We laughed. We got sunburned.


Saturday was our last real day in Quito and was ironically the day of our true introduction to the city via our official tour. This was provided by a member of the tourist police, who was in the process of studying for English so as to cater to gringos like us.

She took us to beautiful churches and cool museums over a period of two and a half hours and explained everything in quirky English. It was good.


Bought some souvenirs at the official tourist store and at a place where all products were made by indigenous people and all profits went back to them.

I went to the Ecuadorian central bank museum. It was uninteresting except for a huge space in a wall encased with transparent plastic and filled from floor to ceiling with a portion of all the Ecuadorian coins taken out of circulation when the country adopted the dollar back in 2000.

We left Quito Sunday morning. At the airport, while we stood in line to be checked in, we heard English spoken behind us. We turned around to see the two personal pilots for Axel Rose in their crisp flight uniforms, hauling their bags into an elevator.

Next stop, Medellin. Melody has agreed to pick up from there.

It was nice posting for a while. Maybe I'll jump back on board again soon.

Happy Earth Day!