fun in Baños

Baños

someone´s pet tortoise

and me with the tortoise

fern leaf

artesans selling their jewelry

and the view from the other side of the table

Baños

My plan was to stay in Baños for a couple days, and then head south. Well I got here on Sunday and now it´s Friday and I´m still here. I actually didn´t like this town at first, but now I feel like I could live here. I´m not sure what it is about it. It´s a small town that covers a valley at the base of Volcán Tungurahua. The volcano is definately active. I´ve felt three earthquakes since I´ve been here and there´s constantly a cloud of ash rising from the crater at the summit. Unfortunately it´s almost always cloudy and I haven´t had a really good view of the volcano yet. There´s a lot to do here. I´ve been hiking and horseback riding on some of the trails around here. The other day I rented a bike and road 60 kilometers from Baños (about 2000m) to Puyo (900m) and watched the ecology change from mountain forest to flat Amazonian rainforest. They call it the `route of the waterfalls´ because there´s about a dozen along the road. I´ve met a lot of great people here, locals and other travelers, and I´m staying at a really fun hostal. My plan now is to stay for the weekend, then head north to Mindo on Sunday. Then I fly home on Thursday. So I´ll see some of you pretty soon. Hasta luego.

Pictures from Chugchilán

in the clouds at almost 4000m

sheep

waterfall in the cloud forest

me at Laguna Quilotoa

ice cream truck

So I kept on hearing what sounded like an ice cream truck driving through town. Well yesterday I finally saw what it really was. It´s the garbage truck. It drives through the streets playing music like you´d hear on an ice cream truck, and when people here the song, they bring their garbage out to the street.

Chugchilán

I´ll try to post pictures later. The computer I´m on now doesn´t have very high resolution. I spent three nights at a permaculture farm/hostel in the tiny town of Chugchilán. Getting there was an adventure. The town is high in the Andes (at almost 4000m) so the road is very winding and narrow. Also, it had been raining a lot resently so the already scary road was even scarier. I would never have guessed that a bus could have made it up that road, but the drivers here are amazing. My first day there me and two other travellers hired a guide (14 year old kid from the village) and hiked 7 miles from an old crater that´s now a lake. At 4000m elevation, 7 miles took us 5 hours! The next day, we hired another guide with some mules and rode through the countryside and up to a cloud forest reserve. To me, riding a mule through fields of corn and beans, passing indigenous women women with their children strapped to their backs, was a true Andean experience.

The next day I met a group of Germans who had met someone with a pickup truck who was driving out of town. After weighing the risks and benefits of riding in the back of the truck versus taking the bus again, I jumped into the truck with the four Germans. The ride was pretty uncomfortable and uneventful, until the driver decided it was time his daughter started learning how to drive. She did very well for a 11 year old!

Now I´m in Baños, and I´ll write more about this town later.

wow

It was really hard to choose which pictures to post. There are more that I´d like to show you, but some need a little editing and the computer I´m on now doesn´t have the software. So obviously I just got back from an AMAZING trip to the Galapagos Islands. I was on a boat for 11 days with 15 passengers (including my dad), a naturalist guide, a tour leader, and the ship´s crew. I have to admit that I was a little nervous about this trip. I´ve never been on "cruise," so I didn´t know how that would work out. Also, the way it works in the Galapagos National Park is that you can´t set foot on the islands without a certified naturalist guide. Not all the islands are open to visitors and the ones that are have marked trails that you have to follow. Those of you that know me know that comfortable yaughts and guided tours are not my normal mode of travel. Well I have to tell you that I was pleasently suprised and very impressed. Our naturalist guide (Martin Loyola) was wonderful and I can´t imagine the trip without him. He was incredibly knowledgable about the animals (terrestrial and marine), plants, and geology of the Galapagos. The islands by far exceeded my expectations. It´s hard to describe just how close we could get to the wildlife. Because of the lack of predators and the constant presence of visitors, the animals aren´t afraid of people at all. It was a wildlife photographer´s dream. Here´s a list of some of the highlights from the trip:

• baby birds everywhere
• swimming with hammerhead sharks
• seeing giant tortoises in the wild
• not getting sick when everyone else on the boat did
• swimming with a pod of false killer whales
• floating in the middle of a pelican/boobie/penguin feeding frenzie
• Martin´s stories
• swimming with a flock of penguins
• always getting to the islands before all the other tourists, just after sunrise
• breaching manta rays
• stargazing at the ecuator from the top deck
• pretending to be a sea lion in the water

lotsa pictures!

mangroves in the morning

lava heron with a yummy sally-light-foot crab

flirting nazca boobies

baby boobie

mmmm... cactus

flightless cormorant

flamingo lagoon

marine iguanas and mangroves

male lava lizard

penguins and blue-footed boobies

bathing giant tortoise

hungry marine iguana

giant tortoise

frigate birds

a new view

Now this is the view from my room

I leave tomorrow for my tour around the Galapagos Islands. I´m sure I´ll have plenty more pictures to post when I get back.

Still in Quito

Every Sunday in Quito there´s an art and craft market in one of the parks. I´ve been struggling to find things to do here when I´m not in my class. There´s a lot of cool stuff to see outside Quito, but you need at least a whole day and I have class in the mornings. If you like old buildings and big churches, this is a great city. I´m looking forward to getting out of the city and finally breathing some fresh air. All the buildings and roads are black from exhaust. My spanish professora says that a lot of cars here don´t have catalytic converters. I don´t know exactly what that means except for more pollution. The city also doesn´t have recycling facilities. I´ve been trained so well my whole life that it´s difficult to throw a plastic bottle in the trash.

The food is great (lotsa yummy soups) and I´ve met some nice people. But I´ll be happy to leave Quito on Wednesday. Oh something interesting I´ve noticed...People are really interested in the U.S. primaries and general election. I was suprised to hear people in Ecuador telling me why they wanted Obama to win, or Clinton. They blame Bush for some of their problems here, especially with Columbia. The fighting between the U.S. backed Columbian government and the FARC rebels just spilled over into Ecuadorian territory this past weekend and people here are not happy about it. Anyway, no more politics. I hope all is well en Los Estados Unidos.