Today we spent in
Our hotel room is suffering from what Matt insists is not a plague of locusts because two is not a plague. Matt killed the noisy one in our room, and the one up where he couldn’t reach was quiet, but there is a third one across the hall that was chirping all night. Grasshoppers are definitely not one of the insects we were worried about having problems with in South America.
We started with a nutritious breakfast that had strawberry juice and pineapple jam. I guess things are a bit different south of the equator.
We wandered up and down the walkway by the river.
The river is extremely wide and even siltier than the North Saskatchewan, and in this portion the direction of flow changes with the tide.
There were lots of crabs in the sand:
The houses are colourful:
But not as colourful as Matt:
There was a nice little garden and koi pond:
Being unable to speak Spanish we were unable to read the plaques next to most of the art. But we’re pretty sure this guy was upset about losing his arms:
This guy is indicating to his buddy that the ground ahead is level:
This is a wild boar that China gave to Ecuador in 1991. I couldn’t read the rest of the sign. I assume Ecuador was hungry?
Not sure what this guy is up to.
There were lots of birds.
Before ruffling:
After ruffling:
These guys were trying to build a nest:
This is the Cathedral. The stained glass circle is really pretty from the inside.
We also went through a small park with a bunch of giant iguanas.
This guy lost his tail and is growing two new ones!
We went to the museum of anthropology, which has the world’s largest collection of pre-Incan artifacts. They wouldn’t let us take pictures though, so Kerri decided to blow the museum up with a cannon.
In the museum they had artefacts from this area dating back to 5900 years ago. Most of the pots that old had very little engraving visible, but one had hundreds of little flat topped triangles covered in hatches. I thought they looked like pyramids, but this was thousands of years before they built pyramids.
(Artist’s representation. My drawing skills aren’t great, but the guy was carving freehand into a pot with a stick, so that’s about what it looked like.)
There were also little carvings from that time I thought looked like stone voodoo dolls.
As they got more recent the carved designs were more and more intricate. Some of the newer pots were also coated in an iridescent paint, which you had to look very closely to see.
In general the artefacts looked a lot like Greek ones from about the same time, but with more monkeys and armadillos. And most of the people had nose rings, which started out as a lump of clay under the nose and gradually become more ring like, until finally they embedded metal jewellery into the clay. And by 600BC the people are wearing little shorts/sarongs with polka dots painted on them.
There was an exhibit on the patterns found on the artefacts, but because we don’t speak Spanish we didn’t understand much of it. We might try again after our lessons.
