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!