Ecuador: The Basilica

View of La Virgen de Panecillo from the Basilica de Voto Nacional

On the second day of sight-seeing, we decided to take a tour bus we had spotted while walking through the neighborhood.  It was only $15 for a three-hour tour of the city, and you could hop off at any stop and stay as long as you wanted to, and get back on the next bus which would come by each hour.  This was one of those fun double-decker tour buses, so of course we had to sit up on the roof, which is how I got this beautiful red sun-burn ring around my neck.

I don't remember much of the tour information blaring from the loudspeaker in both English and Spanish.  I remember it was saying something about the stadium and I chuckled about the line "where important soccer games are held."  The population of Ecuador is pretty dead serious about soccer.  The games are broadcast EVERYWHERE.  And EVERYONE congregates to watch and/or listen with rapt attention.  When we went to the park, the game commentary was blasting loud enough so everyone within ten city blocks could hear, all day long.  When a goal is scored, you can hear all the sounds of people cheering (especially by honking their car horns) all around the city.  And the announcer says, "Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllll!" One time it was more like "Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllll!"

And when the announcer says "Ecuador" he really rolls the "r" at the end in a celebratory fashion:  "ECUADORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!"

So anyway, the tour bus.  We got off the bus to take a close look at the Basilica de Voto Nacional, a monstrously, unimaginably, mind-bogglingly, impossibly large cathedral inspired by French Gothic architecture.  Of course it was very beautiful.  It felt like going back in time hundreds of years (although I think it was really only finished a little over a hundred years ago).  We took long-distance photos of each other in its courtyard to show the drastic scale, in which we look like little ants.

When I looked up to the top of the cathedral, I shuddered to see tiny-looking humans climbing into the highest spire on a rickety-looking wrought-iron ladder.  Holy shit, I thought.  Let's do that.  At least I guess I must have thought that on some level, because some time later I found myself up on that spire, in a cold sweat, clinging to this narrow little wrought-iron ladder, with thin wire mesh between some of the rungs.  I'm really not a person who fears heights and actually I usually enjoy them. The higher the better!  But there really were some dicey moments when I thought to myself, This is not okay.  We should not have done this.  (Maybe Adam had felt the same way at Termas Papallactas when he swam across a pool full of freezing cold spring water, egged on by Marco, an Ecuador-and-New Jersey resident, and he amused onlookers by screaming, "THIS WAS A TERRIBLE DECISION!!")

By the time I got to the top of the needle-like spire, I was pretty shaken up, and was afraid of going back down because I didn't want to be on the ladder. The tower was narrow.  Being on top was like being on the point of a pin.  The walls were high enough to make me feel safe there - that is, until it was time to go back down the ladder.

Did I mention that in order to access that terrifying ladder, we also had to walk across a very narrow cat-walk made of wooden planks, with no railing - only a rope suspended between intermittent wooden pegs - inside the roof of the cathedral, along and underneath the "ridge-pole" so to speak?  Well.  We did.  And people were coming from the opposite direction and you had to squeeze past them somehow (the same was true on the harrowing ladder).  And none of this was managed by anyone.  No one was being herded along, there was nobody playing traffic cop.  The only "employees"or authority of any kind was a person situated safe on the ground floor far below who collected two dollars per person to let you go up there.

It became so crystal clear that in America we are being gypped out of remarkable experiences because anything remotely dangerous is regulated up the ass.  It was eye-opening for me to realize that even though I have criticized that knee-jerk "There oughtta be a law!" mentality for a long time, this experience revealed that culturally, I still have that automatic reaction when I feel physically unsafe of, "Isn't anyone going to ensure my safety?  Aren't the people in charge going to make sure I don't hurt myself?" We're kind of stuck in a perpetual childhood, where we never quite fully graduate to feeling responsible for ourselves.

That reminds me (this is a side-note) of the drive up to Termas Papallactas, when I looked out the window and saw a lot of ramshackle huts made of anything and everything (mud, plastic, tarp, tin, scrap metal, scrap lumber), scattered along the way.  I marveled that people were "allowed"  to slap up any kind of structure without regard to any "building code."  In America, those homes would be condemned and destroyed, and then perhaps the people would have no shelter.


To Be Continued...