Gringo Blogo

Last weekend we’ve been to the cloudforest in Mindo, a little village west of Quito. It was really good fun to do tubing (racing down the river on big black tubes) and see the butterflyfarm; although by the time we got there, most of the butterflies were already having their butterflysleep and butterflydreams….

Oh, and it was amazing to literally have breakfast with humming birds, there were thousands of them! No, i don’t mean we had humming birds for breakfast, but with them! People there feed them some kind of sugar solution using a birdfeeder. The humming birds were only one meter away from our breakfast table! 

We stayed in a cabaña with big glass windows all around it, so you felt like you were sleeping open air in the middle of the beautiful nature. Our bathroom though had a really big whole in the ceiling and big glass windows, too… 

We visited the waterfalls, too: after we have walked for about one hour we arrived at a river, two men were taking us over the river in a weird construction consisting out of a rope and a cage which was opened on the sides.

Then we were hiking for up the mountains in the deepest jungle for ages! The “path” was really narrow and wet, because it had rained a lot and the there was loads of humidity. There were no ropes or any other safety precautions. The signs they’ve put up were totally misleading because they did not say the distance to the waterfalls in the right order, so when we thought we’ve always made it there appeared another sign saying it was still ages away….

After a lot of other really dodgy rope bridges and about three hours we arrived at the waterfalls! There was one pretty mental slide out of thick concrete, at the end of which followed a 4 metre freefall into ice cold water. We both touched the ground and Ciarán hurt his feet.

There were two different places from which you can jump into the waterfalls, one is 12 metres high, the other one is 4 metres high. I consider jumping from the waterfalls was actually safer than the slide, because the water was deep enough…

It was really good fun to jump, although we only had the guts to jump from the 4 metre one….. 

Oh, and we discovered our new favourite Ecuadorian food: Platanos (fried cooking bananas with melted cheese and onion!)!As greedy as we are we eat a lot of the Ecuadorian food here, because it is sooo cheap to eat out here! Think we both took on weight since we arrived, but this still needs to be scientifically proofed!

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 25th, 2006 at 5:07 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.