Along the Spine of the Andes

Cotopaxi

Most people wouldn’t consider it a plan at all but for us it is, albeit simple.   We’ll just be working our way in a generally southerly direction along part of the Andes, the longest mountain chain on earth at about 4,300 miles (or 5,500 miles on Encyclopaedia Britannica site !).   We had good views of Cotopaxi, a magnificent  classic cone shaped and snow-capped volcano near the equator.  Further south, a volcano called Chimborazo at 6310m (19,500 and a bit feet) is the point of earth furthest from the centre of the planet because of the equatorial bulge (other shapes for the earth are available).  

First though, we explore a bit more of Quito with Bonnie and Newt who have been here before.   It looked to be a clear day so we set off for a bus to the cablecar which rises high above the west of the city.  You will have noticed that a map is flat while I can tell you that Quito is not and when we got up the hill to where the bus should be running, we found that it was but in a tunnel somewhere underneath us, so we got a taxi instead.  The views in full sunshine from the top of the cablecar at about 12,500 feet were spectacular with a couple of snowy coned volcanoes in sight beyond the city laid out below us.  There are a chain of these volcanoes running along the Andes at these latitudes and we expect to see more of them as we head south.  As it happened, to see seven or eight snowy volcanoes at once, all we had to do was go to the viewpoint which had a giant statue of a winged virgin Mary and stood a mile or so behind our hotel.

The official currency here in Ecuador is the US Dollar which makes things nice and easy for us.    Buses and trolleybuses generally run in a rough north/south direction and have a fixed fare for any distance of 25 cents (18 pence) while a $5 taxi ride gets all four of us pretty well anywhere we want to go in the city.   Quito does have a very good Botanical Garden which contains the best collection of Bonsai I’ve ever seen and we only came back from Japan in November.   I know a few days provides scant evidence to sum up a whole city but I can’t say I’m wildly impressed with Quito as a capital city although we did find a fantastic hot chocolate shop.

We headed north across the Equator to a place called Otavalo which was a two hour, $2

at Otavalo Market

(£1.50) ride away in a comfortable coach.  This was a pattern which repeated itself , the coach fare works out to about $1 per hour of travel and the buses are far superior to Costa Rica or Guatemala but they do insist on playing awful films with high volume dubbed soundtrack.  We’re always near the front if possible so that I can nip off at bigger stops to check that no one has ‘accidentally’ unloaded our bags.   Otavalo turned out to be quite a lively place and the market attracted huge numbers of local indigenous people in to sell their goods and to buy.   It wasn’t in any way a tourist market although as always there were a few of us there.  Of course we aren’t ‘tourists’, we’re ‘travellers’.  Ha, Ha.  The vast majority of stalls were clothes and a lesser amount of handicrafts with less fresh produce than I was expecting and thankfully fewer dismembered corpses of various animals too.  It was time to get some washing done as we prefer to travel light if we can and stocks of clean clothes were running low, so Heather asked a policemen.   His directions were good and we found the shop but unfortunately the request had been lost in translation 

and there we stood outside a shop selling washing machines. 

fancy hats at the market

On leaving Otavalo we doubled back to recross the equator and  passed  a large modern looking building a little north of Quito.   It was a tourist attraction called La Mitad del Mondo (the Middle of the World) which is all about the various alleged mysteries at the equator  e.g.  water draining clockwise or anti-clockwise north and south of the equator, demonstrated by two basins a few yards apart showing the effect.   There’s information about things weighing less at the equator which is true but the difference is only a fraction of the claim made here.   It’s all a fake set up of course, the building isn’t even on the equator so the water ‘evidence’ is a clear lie and the claim isn’t true anyway, it’s all to do with the plumbing.  No, we did not pay and go in.

 

Yellow House Hotel

It was Mindo we were headed for and a hotel called the Yellow House set just above the

Pale-mandibled Aracari

town in a large conservation area.  The hotel had various lodges in the ground, inexplicably painted yellow and we chose one set by itself with views across the valley.  There were just the four of us in two rooms and a first floor balcony for cursory birdwatching and relaxing.    Mindo was one of those towns which I describe as a one-horse town where the horse has died.   We were here for three nights and had dinner in the same restaurant every night, such was the abundance of suitable choices.   However, the birding was really good and we had a good four hour early morning guided walk.   There were lots of humming birds, a couple of species of Toucan and a good variety of familiar and unfamiliar tropical species plus various orchids in bloom and lots of bromeliads perching on branches.  What was great was that although we were close to the equator, the altitude meant it was comfortably warm and not humid.   A bit like a good English 

a Small Postman

day.   One thing we all learned was that the limes we use, those hard green fruits about the size of a golf ball are the completely unripe fruit.  A ripe lime doesn’t taste of very much but is sweetish with pale orange peel and about the size of a large orange.

Many of the birds have great English names and the four of us have each picked a favourite one, which we haven’t necessarily seen.   The test for you is to decide which of the five names below is the fake one.

1.     Buff-fronted Foilage Gleaner

2.    Yellow-bellied Shit Shoveller

3.    Horned Screamer

4.    Tawny-crowned Pygmy Tyrant

5.    Grey-necked Gnatcatcher

unidentified Humming Bird