Volunteering at Alto Choco - Ecuador

We spent the last couple of weeks living and volunteering in a cloud forest reserve in the North of Ecuador. The NGO called Zoobrevian (http://www.zoobreviven.org/) was set up to help conserve the forest and wildlife in the area, WWF and world bank ranked it among the top 10 biological hot spots of the world so it's a pretty special place. A nice guy called Ramiro runs several of the reserves and headed up the camp, he did a great job of organising and knew how to have a good time too (he liked the local moonshine!).

Living in the middle of the forest was beautiful - if not a bit damp as we were literally living in the clouds! There were 10 of us in total, volunteers and biologists from Ecuador, England, America, France and Germany. It was a pretty big team to keep coordinated but it worked out. It was a great little camp and Pete of course kept the fire going to keep us all warm in the chilly nights.

During our time we planted sapling trees (needed due to mining companies), worked in the nursery and with some local farmers to dig vegetable gardens, laid a new lawn at the local hot springs (they were given the land by the government to create a business and needed help making improvements) and worked in the botanical gardens building new boxes for the different Orchids and Bromileads they have there. It was a good place to be as we could be creative with choosing our projects!

The charity is also big on protecting the Andean bears and work with the WSPA / WFF on releasing bears, tracking them and are also aiming to make a sanctuary in Alto Choco again. We didn't get a chance to get involved with the sanctuary as it is only just starting again but we did a lot of hiking around the reserve and monitored the bear activity on our way which was fun - like finding claw marks on trees (like the pic).

It was an action packed couple of weeks, we had fun visiting a local farm who made 'spirit of Ecuador' - a 95% proof sugar cane rum. Wow, it was strong stuff and at 50 cents a litre it makes a fiesta in Ecuador. It also came in handy when Jorgen was having trouble lighting the fire one night!

We hiked Lago Mojanda on a Friday afternoon, a volcanic crater lake, it was a crazy walk with Ramiro taking us through bogs, crawling under trees but we made it round just about - it was good fun all the same. Pete and I decided to stay the weekend on the reserve by ourselves, going for hikes up to the waterfalls, over the valley and making cosy fires which was a treat.

On the reserve we also had a heard of horses which I loved, we managed to 'tame' one nicknamed Loco (quite a saga) but in the end I had brilliant fun galloping around the reserve on him. For Pete and the boys, the local bar was the village bus stop a 1 and a half hour round trip where you could get a big cerveza for a dollar at the shop next door. Despite the distance, the trip was made quite a few times!

It was a great project to be involved in, the community was really lovely. At the end of the couple of weeks we were all looking forward to heading back to civilisation and caught the bus back to Quito. A couple of the other volunteers, John and Jorgen were really cool guys and have joined us down in Tena to hang out for my birthday!

Otavalo, Ecuador

On our way up to the reserve we stopped off in the nearest town, Otavalo. In the Imbarra Provence of Northern Ecuador, its mountainous and surrounded by three volcanoes. The town is indigenous and famous for its weekend market that sells beautiful textiles, lots of warm alpaca clothing and jewelry in the aptly named Plaza de los Ponchos. The food and livestock for sale are pretty impressive too. The women still wear traditional clothing and the men rock some seriously cool hats. Otavalo is also known worldwide by those in the know for it's Inca influenced music - it's a really beautiful sound. I took this little video of some guys who were playing some great tunes in a little restaurant we stopped off in for lunch.

Southern Ecuador - Down on the beach again!

After all the fun of Quito we decided to head to the coast to chill out for a few days. After a bit of inter-netting we found the absolute perfect spot - Viajemar! A little surf lodge with bamboo cabanas set on a deserted, wild and windy beach next to a little village called Las Tunas. We spent five days relaxing, taking walks on the beach, and having lovely camp fires. We were watching out for migrating whales as it was whale season but unfortunately we didn't get lucky. We'll have to try again down in Peru! The beach rocky and absolutely full of gorgeous different colour quartz - rose, turquoise, reds, browns - so we collected the prettiest ones.

The lodge is owned by a lovely Chilean guy called Roderigo, an ex-correspondent who has chosen the good life on the beach. A special kind of guy, he had built a magic labyrinth garden with the quartz where you could say your wishes and leave your 'rocks' (problems) to build something special. We made some wishes, made 'with intent' as instructed!

The food was home-cooked and we loved taking time out all by ourselves. Spoilt!

We also took a trip south down to Montinita (15km or so), a surfers and party peoples paradise. It was good for a few hours but it was a bit like a building site. We bumped into some familiar faces from Colombia which was cool and got the low down on Ecuador's hallucinogenic jungle herbs! We also made a visit to the tranquillo village of Puerto Lopez, a little fishing village north of Las Tunas taking a little road trip with Roderigo. We're looking forward to meeting up with him again in Santiago in September, he's offered to show us some sites in his home town as our dates co-inside. It will be great to see some of the city with a local and it's the bicentenary party then too!

Ecuador - Capital Quito!

Ecuador's capital Quito is a crazy town - big, dirty and full of 'characters' but we liked it all the same. Arriving late at night we got a nights sleep in the back room of a cosy cafe called El Cafecito and set out in search of a home for a week the next morning. We ended up renting a room in Alberto's house, a big characterful shared house in the New Town area Mariscal! The house is twinned with various NGO's and a Spanish school next door. Consequently the house was full of cool kids - all interesting and lovely uni-aged people mainly from Europe. I signed up for their Spanish school - my (head)teacher Julio made it really fun 'y yo apprendo mucho'!

We met some great people, especially three dutch guys Sean, Gideon and Bas who Pete rumba-ed the week away with. We had some ace house BBQ's and dinners - like living in a student house again.

We also rode the TeleferiQO up the side of Volcan Pichincha to 4100m Cruz Loma to see the amazing views of the city. It goes on for miles along the valley floor for a city of only 1.4 mil. We wanted to hike up to Rucu Pichincha to get an even better view but the hail and lighting stopped us in our tracks. Maybe just as well, as the altitude took your breath away!

The Old Town in Quito is beautiful. Having inherited the trait of looking around every church I pass (why!?) we spent a lot of time looking at chapels, churches and monasteries. We also watched the locals practicing their traditional dancing for a parade which was cool to see. We've seen a lot of colonial centers, but Quito's is special - even on a freezing cold, rainy day. I got through a lot of chocolate caliente in Quito just to keep warm!

We also enjoyed checking out the indigenous weekend craft markets in the parks and backstreets and did our shopping at the huge Santa Clara food & fruit market. Pete and the guys took advantage of Quito's ace climbing wall and 'bouldering' facilities during the week too.

Finally, we took a day trip to the Mitad del Mundo - the equator! Seriously touristy but how could we not when in Ecuador. We visited the 'fake' and 'real' equators. The fake equator being the place where the French marked the equatorial line in the 1736, the expedition created the metric system and proved the world not to be perfectly round. It was fun of Quiteno families, tourists and school kids (we got interviewed for English class projects a few times). We had lots of fun posing for pics on the equator and they had a traditional pipe band playing. After, we went to the 'real' equator a few hundred meters away - the Museo Solar Inti Nan. Modern GPS has shown that the French were slightly out with their calculations but that the indigenous had got it spot on. The museum is on the indigenous site and has an exhibition of astronomical things and people showing crazy water and energy experiments that demonstrate the power of the equator. There was a cool ancient sun dial that sits on the equator line and reads the exact month, day, year using rays of the sun!

Sadly we haven't got any photographic evidence of this once-in-a-life-time visit as we got robbed on the metro on our last day - Opps. So our visit was not without drama, we had a trip to the local police station and not to diverge from our recent pattern of events, I made a day trip to the local hospital with some crazy toxic seafood poisoning. It was like something out of one of those gross medical textbooks - nice!

Still, on the mend now and enjoying the wild, windy and very beautiful coast of Southern Ecuador! We're about to go and have a camp fire on the beach and toast some marshmellows...

Bienvenidos a Ecuador!

Looks like June is our month for travelling Ecuador! We plan to check out the capital Quito, enjoy the Pacific coast and learn to white-water kayak in the highlands but the main aim of the game is volunteering for an NGO on a cloud forest reserve called Alto Choco in the north. We've met with the NGO manager and it looks brill, we can't wait to get involved! http://www.zoobreviven.org/introduction.htm

Here's some snaps from the Colombia to Ecuador border crossing... always hours of fun!

Colombia - Popayan to Pasto!

Heading south towards Ecuador we thought we would stop off at a couple more towns on our way. Travelling through the Cauca valley we stopped off in the colonial town of Popayan. Picture perfect and white washed due to a post-earthquake rebuild in the 80's, Popayan was a nice stop off but there wasn't a lot going on. We walked to the 'mirador' for a good view of the town and wondered around the pretty streets.

It probably felt so quiet as it was election weekend - you couldn't buy booze, the town was littered with posters and polling stations and there were lots of police patroling the streets. We watched the Mockus v's Santos presidential race on the TV, the other candidates didn't really get a look in! But because neither recieved a majority, they have another poll in a couple of weeks.

Next stop was Pasto, a town just two hours from the Ecaudorian boarder. We really liked Pasto, it seemed like a unique melting pot of Colombia and Ecuador and was really busy and buzzy. It also had lots of yummy pasteleria's (cake shops)! We met some nice Brits staying at the same house and had a fun evening chatting at a local cantina that served anything and everything including guinea pig! Must be getting close to Ecuador!