2012-08-02
I had heard lots of stories of people being mugged in Quito, so I always carried as little cash a possible, but in the end, nobody tried to rob me. I wasn't overly impressed with Quito overall. The old town area has a few nice buildings and churches, but nothing spectacular. It does have an excellent gondola that I rode to a nearby mountaintop to look down on the city. It's amazing how long Quito is. Fitting in between hills, it is fairly narrow, but stretches endlessly into the distance in both directions, so much so that there are different climates in the south and north of the city. The south is green, similar to the Ecuadorian highlands, while the north of the city is nearly a desert, similar to southwestern Colombia. I was told that some residents commute over an hour each way, the whole time within the city.