Greetings from Quito

December 10, 2007 – 8:37 pm

It’s Sunday morning and church bells peel across the narrow valleys in this Andean city at 9,400 feet. From my hotel room I can see the patchwork fields of potatoes and grain on Volcan Pichincha, which is still geologically active. Down in the streets, vendors from indigenous villages to the north sell everything from chewing gum to deep fried pig heads. It’s “summer” here, but at this elevation it isn’t that warm. Storm clouds build to the west, but I haven’t seen a drop of rain since I arrived from Eugene, Oregon a few days ago. On Wednesday I fly to the Galapagos Islands to settle in and begin writing my new book, Galapagos at the Crossroads: Encounters with Pirates, Boobies, Creationists and Biologists in Darwin’s Cradle of Evolution.