mindo continued

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So I left off when we went to sleep in Mindo. Wehen I woke up I was covered in bites and mum had hardly slept at all Luckily the very nice lady who actually owned the land {broche turned out to be the housekeeper) turned up and gave me some natural ccream for them and then we walked round her garden being shown tropical plants etc,, rather nice really. We made it down to the river and mum was excited about the bamboo.
After that it was time to go to the zip lines. This incvolved an overpriced ride from Broches friend in the Tuk tuk on a stony road NOT comfy! When we got there it was an absolutely beautiful day. Mum was nervous but went first with the guide. Then followed about 2 hours of ziplines high over the forest canpopy with a few hundred feet drop and up to 400m long. I found it really fun. Even mum enjoyed it once she relaxed a little! Once you have done a few, you can vary it by going upside down or face on... the view over the canopy was lovely too..very green! There was some walking in between lines, so we got a good forest experience too.
We managed the walk back into town. Its a strange place Mindo. It seems to be similar to Banos in that its somewhere people come and get stuck..there a lot of hippy young women with a local boyfriend running cafes and little bars in the tiny town. I stopped an got some chocolate made from raw ingredients by some gringo. It’s a very pleasant place.
By this time we had decided we had had enough of Broche. There is nothing quite as irritating as someone trying to rip you off whilst pretending to be your friend. Luckily we met him in town and told him we weren’t going on his trip that afternoon for 30 dollars..it actually was an ok price but we didn’t wnt to d=spend time with him and enquiries at the tourist office had provided a viable alternative. We had originally planned to maybe go with him and his friends to a private waterfall to swim. Anyway it turned out that he couldn’t take us anyway, I managed to extract the change he had withheld earlier and we returned to the hostel to get our things...
The nice lady gave us another tour of the garden as mum thought Lindsay would bbe interested. By this time I was sick of tropical flowers and wanted to go to the waterfall but eventually we were on our way. Having left our things at our new hostel, we ccaught a taxi to the waterfall el Corazon.
Turned out to be a very good choice of outing. You pay a dollar to enter the reserve and a guide shows you the first part of the way. He also showed us a strange fruiet..yellow on the outside and pink and mushty on the inside with hard seeds and a kind of mushy texture..sweet and delicious and everywhere. Then the track continues along a dry river bed until you reach the waterfall. Perfect for what we wanted. Not huge but picturesque and about ten metres down the river is dammed to make a swimming area. We had the place to ourselves which made it much lovlier. The sun had gone down a bit so we had to force the swim a little, but the setting was so idyllic it had to be done.
After the swim we trekked upwards to see another waterfall whose claim to fame is being very tall, which it is,. On the way we encountered a mandarin tree. They looked big and juicy but when you bit them they tasted of lemon or lime...really wierd. The cloud forest was beautiful I think more so than the jungle.
In the evening on the way back to our hostel we passed a hummingbird feeder outside a restaurant and spent some time watching the brightly coloured birds feed on the sugar water..
Dinner was at a stone oven pizza place..nice for me not so nice for mum, but what was interesting was seeing how rich everyone is in Mindo. So many new pickups passing our window..Its hard to see where the money is coming from but it’s obviously coming from somewhere!
The night in the hostal was so much nice.r Clean insect free non smelly room in a wood en houselike cabin thing,..so different!

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