birds and butterflies

---

I am traveling outside of Quito for a few weeks, and will put up new pictures soon, but just wanted to post some that have been on my flash drive for a while (and now that my friend Bernhard has sent some of his (better) photos... danke!)

These are from a trip to Mindo a couple of weeks ago. Mindo is a teeny town two hours away from Quito at the edge of a giant biological reserve. Bernhard (another friend from the Spanish school) and I visited a waterfall and a butterfly “farm,” and I discovered that bird watching is more fun that I ever thought it would be. Mindo seemed to be an interesting example of “do it yourself” tourism... If you need to rent a car, for example, someone in town will find someone who can give up their car for the day, and when we wanted to schedule our bird watching, a tour operator drove us around to guides’ houses until he found one who would be free to do it. The only downside to this sort of informality is that people aren’t always where they’re needed... Maybe because there were hardly any tourists while we were there, the man who operates the bridge that allows you to cross the river didn’t show up, which meant an extra hour for us to get to the waterfall. But, it was a good trip and a lovely place…

---

Photos

Bernhard and Stalen...
Our bird guide had the name of the Soviet dictator, although spelled differently. Fortunately, he was nicer...

toucan! (look, Heather Wax.)
OK, look hard. If you can blow it up somehow, it´s in the middle somewhere... (thanks to Bernhard for the photo, it´s better than the one I took...)

Comments

[chhavirina]

ooh! pretty!!
I'm getting more and more envious of you -- cavorting in waterfalls and chasing butterflies while it rains down on us desk jockeys back home :( mwah!

[Niklas]

Just like Quincy
Very nice! This is kind of how I imagined that all of Ecuador would look like. The centipede (or is it a millipede?) is the best. I'm looking forward to more pictures of exotic animals and plants.