Hola! from Ecuador

Buenos nochas from Quito...

Welcome back to all you regulars and a big Hi to all you newcomers. This year´s trip is to my 6th continent - the only one I´ve yet to visit now is the last great wildlife wilderness, the big white continent that is Antarctica!!!

Approx the size of the UK, Ecuador straddles the equator on the pacific coast of South America; the Andean range running north to south splits the country into the west coastal lowlands, highlands and the eastern jungles of the Amazon. Ecuador is one of the most species rich countries in the world with over 20,000 species of vascular plants, 1,500 species of birds (apparently twice as many as North America, Australia or Europe), 300 species of mammals and thousands of species of insects.

At 2,850m above sea level San Francisco de Quito - otherwise known as Quito - is the second highest capital in the world. It is located 22km south of the equator in a valley flanked by mountains (volcanos) which are visible on a clear day. Named after the Quitus (early inhabitants pre-inca), it was founded on the ruins of an Inca city in 1534. In 1978 it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site (well the old town was as it´s divided into new and old towns).

When we first arrived we spent our first two days in Quito - recovering from the 24hrs of travel to get here and mild symptoms of altitude sickness due to Quito´s high altitude. We visited some parks and generally got a feel of the place (New Town) including our first tentative steps speaking pigeon latin american spanish such as trying to order food! We also visited the small but excellent Museo Etnografico de Artesania de Ecuador - about the artwork, clothing and utensils of Ecuador´s indigenous people.

On our third day we joined a Footloose trip via a local company - Ecuador Odyssey - for an 8-day snapshot / taster of what the country had to offer, starting with an historic walking tour down the cobbled streets of the Old Town, popping into several cathedrals and churches and other important sites such as Plaza Grande with the Presidential Palace where we caught the changing of the guard. The oldest church in Quito is the monastery of San Francisco from where it gets it´s name. From there it was up to "El Panecillo" (The Little Bread Loaf), a small rounded hill with a statue of The Virgin of Quito on top with panoramic views of the city and surrounding volcanos.

Just beyond the small village of San Antonia, 22km north of Quito is Mitad Del Mundo (the official government equator monument) which was our afternoon stop. The monument is a 30m high stone trapezoid topped by a brass globe 4.5m in diameter. This is where a French expedition did some measurements (in 1736 I think?) which resulted in the invention of the metric system and where they discovered that the Earth wasn´t entirely round but bulged at the equator. From there it was onto our night stop of Otavalo via the little village of Peguche where we visited a local family that made (and played) musical instruments such as various types of panpipes, guitars, drums etc.

Otavalo is a famous indigenous market dating from pre-inca times. The food market for the locals was an interesting experience to visit as there was more to see than your normal butchers!!! From there it was onto the main craft & handicrafts market for which Otavalo is best known to buy a few goodies and do some bargaining. Peguche Waterfall was our next stop where we got soaked as the rain was bucketing down also, but it was a terrific little waterfall. The area around the waterfall is dense with eucalypts - aliens to this country but not eradicated as they grow quicker providing wood and firewood many years sooner than native trees.

If Otavalo is famous for handicrafts then Cotacachi is famous for it´s leather goods. It was also the place that we tried the national delicacy "Cuy" - spit roasted and served with fried beans, boiled beans, potatos, cooked veg and salad. I thought what little meat it did have on it tasted like over-cooked chicken; Andy said his was like an anorexic dessicated rat! Suffice to say, it was an experience but not one that either of us is intending to repeat. For those who don´t know, cuy is guinea pig!!!

Still with taste of rodent in our mouths we moved onto the Cayambe Mitad Del Mundo - the little-known but correct equator monument called "Quitsato" (http://www.quitsato.org/) in the shape of a huge solar clock which has been confirmed as precisely on the equatorial line by satellite technology. It was better than the more famous official government site as it was also more informative. Our final stop for the day was "El Quinche", another cathedral, before passing over the 4100m pass of the Cordillera de los Andes (rim of Amazon basin) and arriving to Papallacta (pronounced Pa-pa-yac-ta) for our second night stop. This was the worst hostel we stopped in and was nicknamed Faulty Towers, with it´s own ecaudorian version of Basil Faulty. It was also freezing cold, but we were high up in the Andes after all!

The hostel might have been dodgy but the reward for staying there the next morning was an early dip in Papallacta´s hot springs. It has various pools of different temperatures and there was an icy cold plunge pool for those of us brave (or stupid) enough to try it out... Then it was onto the warmth and humidity of the Amazon Jungle or Amazon Rainforest by paved road, then rough bumpy pot-holed road and finally motorised canoe to our jungle lodge. One of our stops was a visit to a little town with Capuchin monkeys running wild down by the riverside - you have to hang onto everything as they are not worried about running off with anything.

Yacuma Lodge is in it´s own area of primary and secondary rainforest on Chontayacu River, a tributary of the Rio Napo, the largest tributary of the Amazon River (http://www.yacuma-lodge.com/). It was dark by the time we got there the first night so our only contact with the jungle was being soothed to sleep by the sounds of the rainforest. Next morning though after a hearty breakfast we set off on a 3-3.5hr jungle trek to be taught about the medicinal properties of plants and those used for building etc. It was hot, sweaty and at times almost treacherous underfoot as heavy rain overnight made the paths slippery. Even the "main highway" between two villages was a muddy donkey track. In the afternoon we visited "Amazoonico" (http://www.amazoonico.org/), an animal rehabilitation centre in Selva Viva, a 13km2 reserve of primary forest, 1.5hrs away from the lodge by motorised canoe. This is where we came face-to-face, albeit often with wire between us, with ocelots (wild cats), tortoises, terrapins, various birds, monkeys, jungle fowl, wild pigs etc etc. Then it was back to the lodge for dinner and a soothing sleep to the chorus of frogs and grasshoppers.

Rainforests are important in their own right for a number of reasons - great biodiversity: half of the 2 million known species live in them and many more possibly yet to be discovered; tropical plants provide habitat, food and medicines; disease-resistant strains of wild crops can be bred with commerically-raised to provide an eco-friendly way of providing disease resistance to cultivated crops; they are still the home to indigenous peoples such as the Quecha who rely on the rainforest to maintain their cultural identity and way of life; they globally moderate climatic patterns. By protecting the rainforests in national parks & reserves and making them accessible to tourists and travellers, they provide an important income for the country. However in Ecuador there is a constant threat from the petrolum industry which has opened up the rainforest for mining and created roads through indigenous communities that in turn create knock-on effects distroying more rainforest.

A very early start the next morning and we retraced our steps in motorised canoe and by bumpy pot-holed road to Puyo. Here we stopped to see bolsa-wood carvings being made (by hand) and painted. From there we followed "La Ruta de Las Cascades" (the road of the waterfalls) that snakes parallel to the Rio Pataza canyon from Puyo in the Or¡ente (the Ecuador name for the Amazon jungle) at 950m to Baños in the central highlands at 1800m. Lunch was in Rio Verde (the Green River - village on river of the same name) with a hike down to "Pailon del Diablo" (the Devil´s Gorge) waterfall which could be viewed from a suspension bridge and/or tunnel that came out almost underneath the falls. Manto-de-la-Novia was our next waterfall stop; a tarabita (open cable car) ride 500m across the gorge 100m up took us above the waterfall. Agoyan was the final waterfall before we arrived in Baños. Sitting in the foothills of the active volcano Tungahua, the first task was to give us the emergency evacuation procedure in the event of an eruption: run like hell over the bridge across the river... This is a reality as the volcano erupted only last year destroying a little village on it´s slopes.

We had a full free day in Baños so we hiked up the nearby mountains to La Virgen del Agua Santa, a viewpoint over the town, and then onto Bellavista, another viewpoint looking over the town from the other end. Since the name Baños means baths and it has thermal baths, we thought we´d have a nice warm bathe to ease the aching muscles before bed. We ended up in a writhing soup of (mainly latino) bodies sharing the murky-looking waters with more closeness than I´d intended to get with the locals. It wasn´t a patch on the springs of Papallacta. Baños also means toilet and it would have been more appropriate in this case, although the murkiness of the water is due to the minerals it contains apparently.

We spent our last two days visiting volcanos. On our route out of Banos we stopped at San Martin (The Black Saint), a deep river gorge cut into lava from previous eruptions and up the road, the site of the most recent eruption where the village of Las Juntas was destroyed with only part of one hotel and one house remaining. Nearby was the meeting of two rivers - Rio Chamba from Volcan Chimborazo and Rio Patate from Volcan Cotopaxi - which became the Pataza river, the one we'd been following from Puyo. Via Pelileo, a town famous for it's jeans (and not so famous for it's freakish mannikins) and the Gardens of Benigno Velo in Ambato, where Cypress trees have been fashioned into all manner of figures such as Mickey mouse, Humpty Dumpty, Galapagos animals etc we headed off to the snow and ice-peaked volcano.

At 6310m Chimborazo is the highest mountain & (considered extinct) volcano in Ecuador. It is also the farthest point from the centre of the Earth due to the Earth´s equatorial bulge and it is higher than any other mountain in the Americas north of it. We drove up gradually worsening roads til we were onto bumpy potholed gullied tracks up to the hut at 4,800m. From here we hiked very very slowly up to the hut at 5,000m where climbers and mountaineers spend a few days acclimatising before ascending the mountain further. At this altitude it is easy to get out of breath very quickly and become dizzy. Half-way up my legs turned to lead and it was all I could do to shuffle one in front of the other. Slowly but surely we plodded on until we´d reached the hut ok. Our descent was much more rapid and although I felt like I´d just done a marathon, one of our co-travellers remarked that we looked like we´d just walked round the block!

Our overnight stop was an old hacienda converted into a hotel a short ride from Cotopaxi volcano near a town called Machachi where we stopped the following morning to buy lunch before heading off to the Cotopaxi National Park. First we visited Lake Limpiopungo for a short walk before heading off to the volcano. At 5897m Cotopaxi is Ecuador's 2nd highest mountain and the world's highest active volcano. We arrived at the hut at 4,500m but the cloud and mist decended rapidly accompanied by horizonal ice-sleet and very cold temperatures. Other people who had started hiking up to the acclimatisation hut at 4,800m were turning back so we decided not to bother. Just a quick walk in the near-blizzard conditions left you breathless and hacked by ice particles.

So it was back to Quito where we've also spent today visiting another park in the north of the city complete with a small natural history museum, botanic gardens and vivarium where we both ended up holding a snake!!!

The weather has been so-so, Quito was like a typical wet British spring, the northern highlands were wet and cold, the rainforest although hot, humid and sticky was also wet on occasions (hence being a rainforest) and the central highlands were warmer with more sun but also some (at times heavy) showers and so you have a general reoccurring theme here.

Having a fantastic time though as you might have guessed from yet another epic.

Tomorrow we meet the Galapagos trip group and then it's a island-hopping trip round the Galapagos which you'll no doubt hear about on our return.

Adios and good night from Quito

Kath