Escaleras de Quito

I found this blog post saved as a draft from over three years ago, and it was practically finished.  Added one last picture and posted.  Sorry for the "out of order" ness.

Quito is in the valley of several mountains.  Everywhere I look there is a mountain or a hill that is towering above me or looming below me.  We had to climb a hill to get from the airport to the bus station.  We climbed hills in our search for hostels (several hills!).  

One of the hostels we checked out had their reception on the 5th floor.  While it was a beautiful view from there,  you had to go up four flights of kind of uneven stairs in order to even find out if they had room:

View from above at the annoying uneven stairs leading up to the fourth floor.

and then a spiral staircase (which isn´t easy when carrying a backpack):

Final flight of stairs to the roof!

The hostel we finally chose is about halfway up a hill: 

These stairs start on the street our hostel is on.  They keep going too.

and our room was on the second floor:  

First flight of stirs to our room

The kitchen and place to do laundry was on the roof, another three flights of stairs up from our room.

The restaurant we ate at a couple of times had very little space to sit and eat, so we climbed the stiairs to get to the upper floor where there were seats available.

Up to the second level of the restaurant

 The next day we decided to climb the towers of the Basilica.

These are the clock towers.  There is a slightly shorter one that we climbed as well.

It has absolutely beautiful architecture but some of the stairs used to get to the top of the towers were a bit, no, really horrifying.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, there were stairs, hills, slopes, and mountains everywhere.  Needless to say, my calves got quite a work out.