Adventures of a Sun Seeker: Day 13: The Human Knot

Have you ever played the human knot? You grab hands randomly with a bunch of friends and then everyone works together all scrunched up and giggling to untangle into a big circle without dropping hands.

I was riding a "trole-bus" in Quito up to the botanical garden. And it was so packed with people it felt like a human knot. Just we weren't holding hands. Doors would open and more people would mash inside, backpacks on the front against pickpockets, somehow making space in the knot. If someone needed to get out--bless them--there was ducking under arms and mushing past. I was positioned near the doors, which gave me a slightly less claustrophobic experience because I could be near one of the filthy windows. But every time we came to a stop, the doors would wack open. If I made myself narrow, I had exactly enough room for my body to fit between the opened door and the handrail bar without getting wholly pinched. I watched incredulously as one guy got on with his dog, carrying the beast into the slew, legs floppy and draping. Somehow we get where we need to go.

The system is painfully slow, stopping nearly every block to load and unload, in addition to stopping at red lights nearly every block. It takes a weaving sore-footed handrail-grabbing forty-five minutes to move only halfway up or down the city. It's no wonder we don't see any other pale tourist people traversing Quito in this way. Finally at a destination, I come knocking out from the wack-doors, stupified and stiff and disbelieving it's actually over. This is when I miss the bicycle the most.

Once at the botanical garden, I breathed in the peace and relished walking slow and gazing at leaves and flowers. I was so excited to learn some of the Latin names for the exotic plants I'd been seeing the past couple weeks, happy that Latin doesn't need to be translated from Spanish to English. I love seeing which plants fall into which families ("oh! So you ARE an Onagraceae! You looked like it!"), maybe this is my love of organization and finding patterns.

When I entered the orchid space, it felt so serene and so sacred and I thought about how there are 4,000+ species of orchids and all this beautiful biodiversity and I actually kind of teared up a bit.

I'm glad I had this plant appreciation nugget in the day, for the rest of it was walking around Quito hungry with Elise finding that the places where we had hoped to eat (last chance for salads) were closed, in addition to spending more interminable time riding that horrid human knot, and then waiting in a hard-seated grey bus terminal for hours for a bus to the town of Sigchos, south of Quito in the Andes. When traveling in Ecuador, I'm learning there are things you just can't know. Google maps may tell you a restaurant is open and then inexplicably it's not. You expect you need a series of buses with transfers to a place, but learn happily you can go directly to the place instead. There are gorgeous hiking trails available that are not listed in any guidebooks.

Speaking of hiking, we are going to attempt the famed Quilotoa Loop, which traipses past supposedly stunning views and a series of small towns with hostels, so you can stay along the route without camping. (This will be my last venture before I fly across the ecuador and back to the dark grey of the north.) I say "attempt", because the AccuWeather report for the next couple days includes key terms like "rain", "downpour", "thunderstorms", and "48 degrees". Ew.