Quito

We arrive in Quito at 12:30am and take the world’s shortest cab ride around the tarmac to the airport Wyndham. The driver is ecstatic for the five dollar fare, even if it dumps him at the back of the airport cab queue. (We’d later learn that such cheap taxi and Uber fares are courtesy of a large fuel subsidy, one that appears equally economically unsustainable and politically untouchable. In the fall of 2019, efforts to reverse the subsidy led to violent riots in these same streets that seem so peaceful and welcoming today.)

We sleep well, if not as long as afforded by our loose Saturday schedule, and we end up killing time in the lobby waiting for our ride to Rumiloma. I am hoping to go on a hike before it rains, which is the standard afternoon forecast in Quito in February.

Our ride is scheduled for noon. Shortly after, the front desk relays a call from our driver saying he’ll be fifteen minutes late. He rolls in just before 12:30 and estimates a forty-five-minute drive, which Quito traffic graciously inflates to an hour. We reach Rumiloma around 1:30 p.m.

The hotel is spectacular, nestled at about 10.5k feet into wildly steep hills (which in most places would be called mountains). Christina the hostess shows us to our hacienda, an amazing split-level perch, with Spanish tile and exposed wood beams.

The lock on our front door is a chastity belt for a juvenile T. rex, and the key is the size of a velociraptor femur.

A wood-fired stove is chugging in a lower-level lounge, designed for a romantic escape, which Jeff and I will repurpose for gear overflow and sipping duty-free tequila.

After a tasty lunch of chicken cordon bleu, we explore the trails above the property. We hope to gain a bit of altitude — if only as a nod to the acclimatization adage of “climb high, sleep low” — but dead-end repeatedly after netting only 500 feet over a short mile.

We haven’t yet run into any of the three other climbers who are on our trip, and we are set to meet Ossy — the head guide and owner of Rumiloma — at 8:30am Sunday. Back at the hacienda, we unpack and organize large duffle-loads of gear, inaugurating what will become a familiar pastime.

At dinner, we explore the cool, old Irish pub downstairs of the main hotel restaurant, but tonight it’s completely deserted. A waiter soon comes down, delivers us each a cerveza (a local beer known simply as Pilsener) and then vanishes with his broken promise of musica. With the temperature and atmosphere a bit chilly, we drift back upstairs.

Ossy later explains that the Ecuadorean economy is doing poorly, and his staff has shrunk somewhat with the declining business. That said, Ossy is transitioning Rumiloma a bit from what’s already amazing to something better, including perhaps a bit more space to accommodate larger groups.