Up in the Clouds

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From a hot sticky Amazon, we were transferred by fast boat, small plane and 4WD to a mountainous area outside of Quito called the Cloud Forest. This mystical place serves both as an ornithologist's paradise and a get-away-from-it-all location. A mad Englishman came here in 1992, bought a valley and a couple of mountains that had been turned from native forest to agriculture and set them back to the way they were. Just like that!

In 19 years the forest has regrown and now there are an amazing number of bird species living there. A once thought extinct brown speckled bear has also re-established himself.

After a night sleeping in a treehouse, Sarah and I went for a walk with a guide and a bloke from Tasmania. Now Tasmanians are not usually the first people you would select to spend a morning with but Brad turned out to be a really nice guy. Ok, so he did have a funny ponytail, he was a biologist who studied sea birds and had spent the last 12 months on a remote island off the coast of Australia Ll by himself, but he seemed to be able to converse really well and not once mentioned incest or killing lots of people.

Walking through dense mountain rainforest enveloped in mist was a strange experience. Made stranger by the fact we we actually walking very slowly, whispering and looking for small birds in trees. At one stage I had to pinch myself when Sarah got all excited about spotting a woodpecker. I could have related to it if it had been deer we were seeking and the cameras we carried had been lethal weapons, but small birds and cameras? What would anyone back home think of this?

But time flew past and we had soon passed our two and a half hour time frame. We wanted more! The forest was simply stunning. The moss hung down like cobwebs in a scary movie and views across the valley at times were stunning.

We saw quite a few birds, some of which were apparently rare, making our guide very excited and causing him to exclaim that this was the best September outing ever.

Sarah and I came away from Cloud Forest with a calmness about us. Feeling like our souls had been somehow cleansed and that we had spent a day or so in another world entirely. It turns out the the Cloud Forest is one of the most important places on earth for something in the bird world and is protected. I discovered that, although I like taking pictures of birds, I am not and never will be a true 'birder'. I prefer the non feathered variety.

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