I am quite sure this will be one of my favourite walks in the book. It is a four hour hike up the Mandango mountain, a prominent, strangely shaped hill just next to Vilcabamba. I did the hike together with Chris and Luc. We were told we should be careful, as there were sometimes robbers on the trail, and even a rape had been reported recently. So we brought very little money, and I just took my small camera. We did not encounter any robbers, luckily, and in fact the only person we met was a farmer, towards the end of [View Full Entry]

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Daniela, a Swiss girl who works on the hostal took me on that trip. It was another very beautiful hike. We went east of the hostal, up and down over the hills with many beautiful views again. As this wasn’t yet one of the ‘official’ trails of the hostal, we had to mark it. So Daniela went around with a yellow color spray and we painted the trees, fences, rocks etc. with yellow dots.....We walked for a bit less than 5 hours. [View Full Entry]

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This was a guided trip from hostal. We were a group of 11 plus the guide which was clearly too many. We first went for an hour south in a car which was a beautiful ride. We then went into the forest. It was any of the official entry points to the National Park, so we didn’t have to pay the 10 USD entry fee. We went on a tiny, and mostly very steep and slippery jungle trail. It was quite strenuous to climb up and down on those muddy path and we were getting really dirty. We saw lots of [View Full Entry]

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I am currently heading down to the very South of Ecuador, with the final destination being Vilcabamba, a small village not far from the border to Peru. My first destination was Riobamba, a city which I had visited already last year. Therefore, I did not do much sightseeing there, mainly just bought my ticket for the Devil´s Nose train ride. When I arrived at the hostel in the afternoon, they told me that it was probably too late to buy a ticket for the next day (the guidebook had said the tickets should be bought the night before or in the [View Full Entry]

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On Wednesday I made my way to Papallacta to explore the termas de Papallacta , the best thermal springs of Ecuador, and its surroundings. The termas are rico, hermoso, chevere, i.e. just super. At home I usually don't go much to thermal baths, always giving as an excuse that I find it to boring to spend hours lazying in the warm water. Well, here I didn't regret any second of the 3 or 4 hours I spent every day in the baths. In fact, I really had to force myself to get out of them or even was kicked out by [View Full Entry]

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The past four days I have spent in Mindo. Mindo is 2 hours from Quito, is in the cloud forest and is renowned for being one of the places with the highest wildlife biodiversity in the world. A cloud forest is is a generally tropical or subtropical evergreen montane moist forest characterized by a high incidence of low-level cloud cover, usually at the canopy level. It is usually found at the eastern slopes of tropical and subtropical mountain ranges, mostly above 800 m. In the Bosque Protector Mindo Nambillo live around 500 speicies of bird, including many different hummingbirds, toucans, mot [View Full Entry]

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The other night I went back to the hostal where I had stayed before I moved into the apartment, just to say hello to the guys there. There was a party ongoing the very moment, and they offered me a drink and I was part of the party. We played some games which I didn´t really understand and apparently most of the others neither, but it didn´t matter, we had a lot of fun. As after 23:00 it's quiet time at the hostal, we went out to a club. We all danced happily with each other, then José, one of the [View Full Entry]

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The police story was only the introduction in order to prepare me for further adventures with Ecuadorian bureaucracy. At the consulate in Munich I had been given two adresses where I had to register within a month upon arrival in Ecuador: at the Ministerio del Gobierno and at the Migracion. For the first one the bus station and the street was mentioned on the sheet. When I went to that bus station and aksed around where the street was, nobody knew. Everybody was trying to be very helpful though. One man walked around with me for about half an hour to [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday I went up to the IGM again to buy some more maps. While I was studying the various maps, and trying to select which ones to buy, an female employee came up to me and asked me whether she could help me. I said thanks, but I was just looking and selecting for myself. She then said whether I could help her. I said, sure, with what? She said she needed help with a translation of an English email. So I translated it for her and it turned out to be a love letter from a 46 year old guy [View Full Entry]

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Sorry for not having written any new entry for quite a while now. I was pretty busy with Spanish and Salsa lessons and a lot of other things. So I'll try to update you all now on a number of topics. At least I have started climbing some mountains now: Sincholagua (4893 m) and Pichincha (4794 m), although not nearly as many as I would have liked to have done by this time. The first one, Sincholagua I did together with a local climbing group, 'Rumbo al Chimborazo'. We started the day before with a climbing training in the 'Rocodromo'. We [View Full Entry]

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