Two Nights in Quito
We arrived in Ecuador on Sunday evening and got our brainstems tickled at the airport medical authority. Mariscal Sucre International is so modern and bright that it makes American airports look like dingy subway stations, or maybe DMVs (though, to be fair, American airports do that pretty well without help). The medical authority was no exception: we were in and out in twenty minutes with watering eyes and a promise we’d have results in email in 24 hours. This was my biggest fear about the trip, even though we were all vaccinated and had been careful, because a breakthrough positive test would mean one or more of us missed the Galápagos entirely.
An endless taxi ride from the airport saw us through to our hotel, San Jose de Puemba. (It was only 18km, but speed bumps the size of fallen trees required a one-wheel-at-a-time surgical approach, giving street dogs ample opportunity to mark the car at each one.) We had missed last call at the restaurant, so we made a dinner of airplane snacks and four tiny bottles of Knob Creek that I had sacrificed priceless carry-on space to bring along. I managed to light a fire in our cottage’s wood stove without burning down the building, which by that point seemed like a win.
The sun came up on a sprawling, green resort campus, roughly 3,000 species of birds (pretty sure that’s what Mark1 told me), and a cadre of negative COVID tests.
Golden Grossbeak!
Vermillion Flycatcher is super proud of himself.
Sparkling Violetear sounds like a name my 7-year-old made up.
Saffron Finch
Apparently the birds were amazing, but I was enchanted by Happy the Dog, Larry the Llama, coffee, and assorted benches and hammocks. 
In the afternoon, the rest of us left Mark to the birds and struck out on an adventure, though the resort staff gave us funny looks when we asked for directions into town. A nice police officer dissuaded us from taking a wrong turn with words like ‘peligroso’ and ‘violencia,’ which we appreciated since we wanted an adventure, not a knife wound. A nice long walk brought us to a sort of commercial block with a few small groceries, fabricators, contractors, repair shops, and a tiny liquor store.
There and back again (photo credit David Spratte)
It wouldn’t be an adventure without buying something local sight-unseen, so I made the biggest mistake of the trip: a bottle of “Black Owl” Ecuadorian whiskey. Public service announcement: Do not buy this. It is not whiskey. It might be a banana liqueur, but not a good banana liqeuer. It’s like if you fermented a bag of banana-flavored Now & Laters left over from Halloween 2007. Unlike many bad liquors, it failed to get better after a drink or two, and continued to evoke cat-about-to-deliver-a-hairball facial expressions after every sip. Nevertheless, we packed the remaining half-bottle on our flight out the next morning.
Finest Rare Old
Bird photos by Mark Garbrick↩︎
