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Published: November 4th 2005
Quechua house
This is a Quechua house for those living in the Andes. Ok, so our titles aren´t too original. Give us a break - we´re trying to communicate in a different language half the day, one that we don´t know very well. Anyhoo...
Since you last joined these travelers, they´ve been hiking volcanoes and cloud forests. From Cuenca we took an 8 hour bus ride to Latacunga - the sickliest ride in our trip thus far. Very curvy roads weren´t very fun. At one point we stopped in a small town so the bus driver and his ´helper´could eat a merienda (lunch of the day) at a little restaurant. It was a little annoying to have to wait for them, but it allowed us to get our land legs back. Made it to Latacunga where we stayed at Hotel Cotopaxi (decent place), and ate lasagne for dinner at Buon Giorno. Can you tell we´re needing to branch out some from the Ecuadorian food?
The next day we hired a guide to take us around part of the Quilotoa loop. This is a very rural area to the west of Latacunga where lots of Quechua (indigenous) people live. Some of them in grass ´huts´that we actually thought might be for animals. It´s
a pretty rough life out there, and very cold and windy a lot of the time. Quilotoa is actually an extinct volcano that has a crater full of water at the top - basically a lake. We hiked down to the bottom where the lake is in about a half hour, stayed down there for a while, and trudged uphill for about an hour or more. Very steep terrain. Some people didn´t feel like, or couldn´t, make it up themselves, so they hired a Quechua girl and her horse to take them up hill (they rode the horse, obviously 😊. These girls are amazing - they´re walking up these steep, sandy slopes in little dress shoes basically with no tread - and a whole heck of a lot faster than we did in our sneakers and boots. We had a fun lunch at the local hostel interacting with the owner and her adorable kids who were pretty excited to have their pictures taken with the digital camera. Kids are everywhere in this country - must be the Catholic influence.
The next day, Tuesday, we went back to Quito and to the Museo de Guayasamin - a very cool artist
whose paintings you have to see to appreciate. On Wednesday we made our way to the Mitad del Mundo - the center of the earth, a.k.a. the equator. This is the place where the French decided it was the center of the earth, and thus created the metric system... or something like that. Somehow they did this without actually getting it right - the actually equator is a few hundred meters away, where there´s another very cool museum where they can do all these neat experiments that you can only do at the actual equator. For example, at the equator, water goes down a hole straight down, whereas in the northern hemisphere, 10 feet away, it goes down counterclockwise, and in the southern hemisphere, clockwise. And you can balance an egg on a nail right at the equator too. Something to do with equal forces, blah, blah blah. Anyway, it was cool.
That afternoon we went to Mindo, a cool little town in the cloud forest where Ecuadorians as well as other travelers come to vacation. We got up at 5am this morning to bird for 7 HOURS!! with our guide, Julia Patino. She doesn´t speak a lot of
english, but we communicated fine, and she knows all of her birds in english. She was amazing, and we saw some awesome birds, including a toucan and quetzal. Just an introduction to what we´re hoping to see in the Amazon. We´ll be here part of tomorrow, then head towards Otavolo where there´s a huge market on Saturday.
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Dawn
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Hi Traveling Moreys!
I was barely going to make it through my last hours of work w/out falling asleep on my keyboard, when I saw your blog come up now I’m wide awake! So, I’ve got to ask where are you guys finding the computers to write this stuff? Looking at the first picture alone, it’s hard to imagine that you can find an electric socket much less a working computer! Speaking of the pictures, they are fantastic! It looks like you guys are seeing some pretty neat stuff. Looking forward to the next update take care.