Quito

Two days of travel including a night in Toronto, finds me arriving very late in Quito. An hour bus ride takes us to a quaint hotel and we finally find a bed at 1am to which I am very glad to crawl into.

We begin our tour of old Quito with a delightful indigenous woman who is a traditional healer and shaman. She is full of energy and stories and is anxious to help us see this city and country through her eyes. She introduces us to traditional healing tea, passes arounds samples of dried herbs and plants and talks about the connections between these practices and traditional spirituality. We then go to an amazing museum of indigenous spirituality when artifacts dating back to 1300 bce show spirals, labyrinths, burial practices and a belief in the spiral nature of life and rebirth. These are the kinds of things Joseph Campbell highlight in his work of finding the tremendous interconnections between ancient religious traditions and our modern myths. Carl Jung had also made similar observations in his alchemy works stating that the Mandela ( or spiral) was an ancient symbol that transcended time, culture and consciousness. This spiritual museum certainly provided further evidence of this conclusion .

The rest of the morning is spent walking uphill to a church and along the streets. One can certainly feel the effects of being in a high altitude while doing such. We board our bus which takes us to a hilltop where we can see an almost panoramic view of the hills and valleys below where Quito is nestled in. The roads through the city are very hilly, steeper than San Francisco but with similar cobblestone.

After lunch up there we head to the equator on an hour long bus ride ( on which i start to feel quite nauseous) and on our tour we learn more about indigenous peoples and tribes in that area, their burial traditions. Like Egypt I am again struck at how central death and life after death questions so dominate religious traditions around the world.

We get to experiment with a variety of things while standing on the equator, from telling time, to shadow positioning, experiments with water that flows clockwise south of the equator but when you move the basin to north of the equator it spirals the opposite direction. A variety of other experiments and insights are fun for this group of teens I'm traveling with. Unfortunately a combination of the altitude and bus ride sends me to bed for the night while they head out to supper .

Rest will hopefully make the eight hour bus ride to the Amazon tomorrow bearable.