Lucie & Rhys´s Honeymoon Adventure: Week 25 - Mindo, Mitad del Mundo, Quito, Quilitoa (Ecuador)

The week started with a long journey. We left Canoa at 7:30am and caught a taxi to San Vicente 20 minutes down the road, spending the entire journey debating whether to go to Bahia for a direct bus to Quito or whether to try our own route. We decided we’d left it too late for Bahia and got dropped off at the terminal in San Vicente where we sat in a bus office waiting for the 8:30am bus to Chone. When the bus arrived the guy ushered us out the door to the parking lot and another man swept us away from the bus and into an amazing open sided truck thing with rows of seats. It all started well, hurtling down the dirt tracks through the lush green hills and the fish farms, pointing out the wildlife and brightly coloured birds to each other, and then we started stopping to pick more people up. Rhys got wedged in and spent an hour only being able to put one foot on the floor. We can’t really complain though, our row had us, our bags and some man in. The row in front had 6 adults and 6 children squashed in. We made it to Chone with plenty of time and boarded the 10:30am to Quito, on schedule to get to Quito for our bus to Mindo.

The route was beautiful, we had a 2,000m ascent through cloud forest from Santo Domingo to Quito with the hills shrouded in mist making it even more dramatic. We arrived in Quito at 4:00pm and figured we had plenty of time to catch the 5:00pm bus to Mindo until we realised we were at a different terminal and had to get to the complete opposite side of Quito – bear in mind this city although only 8km across is 50km long and we hit rush hour traffic. At 5:05pm our taxi arrived at the northern terminal just to find out that the last bus to Mindo actually left at 4:00pm. Disheartened we decided to get a cab to yet another bus terminal where we could catch a bus to the turnoff to Mindo. In the cab though the driver offered to take us all the way, we bargained him down to £26 and decided it was worth every penny to cut an hour and a half off the trip and to not have the problem of being stuck 7km outside of Mindo at a road junction in the dark after an already long and stressful travel day. We arrived in Mindo just after 7:00pm and checked in to Casa de Cecelia, a great little place with wooden cabins next to a river surrounded by tropical vegetation and flowers. We dropped out bags and headed in to town. Having decided we deserved a decent meal we treated ourselves to steak.

Our first day in Mindo we headed into the village to buy some rolls and ham for lunch then caught a cab 7km out of town to the La Tarabita cable car. The cable car takes you across the valley 150m over the river basin from where there are trails through the forest leading to 7 waterfalls. We only found 5 of the waterfalls and none were overly spectacular but the walk was pleasant enough despite Rhys falling in the river. After we had caught the cable car back we intended to go zip lining but the rain set in. In Mindo it would seem that at 2:30pm every day it rains and it rains until dinner time. We walked the 7km back down the track to town and got absolutely drenched. Back at the hostel we changed before heading to a nearby restaurant, El Quetzal for a chocolate tour. Along with two other Brits we had a brief history of chocolate, tasted raw cocoa beans and learnt about the process before being walked around the small farm to see guava, bananas, cocoa, peppers, coffee beans and other herbs and the like growing. Then we continued to see the drying tent, the fermentation boxes and then the best bit, the processing room. The last bit of the tour was a tasting, unrefined chocolate is nasty, add some sugar or some ginger syrup and its incredible.

Our second day in Mindo we caught a cab to the zip wire centre where we spent 1.5 hours flying through the trees over the cloud forest on cables hanging by our harnesses. To spice things up we did the superman pose where you lie face down with your legs wrapped around a guide and your arms out in front of you, and I did the butterfly which was a little more disconcerting where you lie on your back with your head slanting down while a guide holds your legs in the air, hard to explain but quite a giggle. We had a great morning. We had intended to walk to a refuge on our way back to town but the rain started again so we headed back to the hostel for lunch and sat by the river watching tropical birds at the feeders. After lunch we headed out to a lodge called Mindo Lindo to sit on the porch, drink herbal tea and watch hundreds of hummingbirds of all different sizes and colours feast on sugar water feeders. We had intended to walk some of the trails at the lodge but the rain was just too heavy to make it fun.

We left Mindo at 10am the following day and caught a taxi in town to take us to the Mindo turn off on the main road where we could hail a bus to Quito. We waited about 30 mins when a car pulled up and offered us a lift to Mitad del Mundo. We agreed a fee and climbed in with the little car struggling under the weight of our bags. Half way to our drop off point we had to stop for a digger to clear the road after a landslide, our driver says landslides are common on that road so we were greatful to be back in the vicinity of Quito in one piece. After paying him double the agreed fee (the cheek!) we bought tickets for Mitad del Mundo and dropped our backpacks in security guards booth. Apart from a big monument built where the equator was initially thought to be and a hundred souvenir shops and restaurants there wasn’t much more there so we headed 300m up the road to the real location of the equator – crazy that they built the original monument in the wrong place. The museum on the real equator was far better. An English speaking guide took us around to show us some of the ethnographic displays before showing us some experiments to prove it was the equator, like watching water go down a plug hole clockwise on one side of the line, anti-clockwise on the other and straight down over the equator. Rhys balanced an egg and was given an egg master certificate before we headed back to collect our bags and catch a bus back into Quito. The bus took us to the outskirts of the old town from where we walked in the rain for an age to find our hostel.

As we didn’t want to do any sightseeing in Quito until my Mum had joined us, we used our first day in Quito as a planning day booking flights for the second year of our trip – South Korea and Taiwan here we come! We went for a quick walk around town to find a well hidden cash point and to grab lunch – the Old Town is not the place to go if you want to eat. At 5pm we grabbed a taxi to the airport to pick up Mum. We stood with a hundred other people in arrivals who were waiting for some famous guy called Phillppe before spotting Mum and whisking her back to the hostel for a quick dinner of super noodles before bed.

We were up early on Monday for a bus to Latacunga 2 hours south of Quito. Half way there the bus got pulled over by the police and the guys behind us were searched. The policemen were asking us if we’d seen anything unusual (very hard to understand that question in Spanish) before moving us to empty seats near the front of the bus. We got to Latacunga in decent time, bought a slice of pizza at the bus station and bought tickets for a bus to Quilatoa, another 2 hours away. The bus was slow but eventually, along with a handful of other tourists we were told to get off the bus seemingly in the middle of nowhere. A few hundred metres down a little road and we found the small village of Quilatoa. We found a cheap room, £8 each including breakfast and dinner, drank some herbal tea in the common area, donned our waterproof coats and headed to the mirador to see the crater lake. It was stunningly beautiful and incredibly peaceful. The 2 mile wide, 250 metre deep lake was formed by the collapse of a volcano after it erupted nearly 800 years ago. Although all the tour books show it as bright blue it’s actually quite green in colour from dissolved minerals. After seeing the lake from the mirador I was keen to walk down into the crater. Rhys headed back to the hostel to watch TV while Mum joined me. We walked the 400m down to the lake edge and half way down stopped a guy with two mules to ask him to come back for us. He gave us his blanket to carry as assurance that he’d come back and we continued to the bottom until he returned. The mules were so hot and tired poor things but they did look incredibly healthy. Despite being quite stubborn and needing some coaxing to continue to climb back to the ridge they got us there in record time. We walked back to our cabin to find Rhys stoking a fire. We bought beers and sat in the room playing cards until dinner time. Dinner was in the main building around a communal table. Rhys spent the rest of the night collecting pieces of wood from the building site next door to put on the fire in our cabin - it was toasty.

The next morning we were up, packed and fed by 8:30am and started the trek around the crater rim – the crater itself is about 9km wide so although we don’t know how far the actual hike was I’m guessing at nearly 25km. The village is at 3,914m so the edge of the crater probably varies from about 3,600m to 4,300m. Having not really considered the altitude we hadn’t really given mum enough time to acclimatise so we took it slowly and spent 6 hours on the walk getting lost only for about 20 mins in the middle. It was spectacular, really too difficult to give a fair description in words. We couldn’t have been more lucky with the weather, the sun shone all day and only when we were on the home straight with the village in sight did the thunder start. We got back to the hostel, had a cup of tea by the fire and caught the 3pm bus back to Latacunga. It’s a bit bizarre in Quilatoa in that no one seems to know what time the buses go – either than or they don’t want to tell you so you have to get a truck to the next town paying someone local for the trip.

In Latacunga we checked in to a lovely hostel and headed straight out for Mexican. Back at the hostel we were showered and in bed by 8:30pm doused in aloe vera since we all managed to get varying degrees of sun burn as we thought it would rain all day instead of being glorious sun shine at altitude.