In Southern Ecuador after 13 hours of bus

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Well, we have been in Vilcabamba, in the far South of Ecuador for three days now. It is sunny and warm but still has the feeling of being in the highlands. There are orchids and cacti everywhere. We were going to stop in Cuenca after Banos but we looked at it and our timelne and decided to head straight for Southern Ecuador and skip Cuenca. We will be in Peru a bit earlier now and will have time to break up the bus trip from the Peru/Ecuador border to the Peru/Bolivia border. We are going to stop somewhere near the middle to break up the 40 or so hours of bus that it will take to get to Lake Titicaca.

Vilcabamba is a sleepy little moutain village that supposedly is called the valley of longevity because people live to a very old age here. There are a lot of foreigners that have come here to work/retire and it shows by the large, beautiful houses in the valley.

After arriving early in the morning, we wandered around the town, checked things out and got our bearings. It takes 10 minutes to walk across the whole town and there are not a lot of people around and it is all pretty laid back. Yesterday, we travelled into Loja to visit a zoo and botanical garden. Loja is the largest city nearest Cuenca and is known for it's parks. We spent the day wandering around the city through the parks and eventually to the zoo and orchidareo. We paid 25 cents each to get in and we got to see a lot of the local animals of this area including a pair of Spectacled bears which are native to the highlands in Ecuador. The highlight for me (the highlight for Jenn was the Zoo becuase it had Galapagos turtles) was the orchidareo. We sent over half an hour looking at the colection of over 200 species of orchids native to Southern Ecuador. They were amazing and many were in bloom. Oncidiums, Masdevalias, Cattaleyas, and many others I have not heard of. We took a lot of pictures and it was definitely a hidden gem for us to find this place. Anyone travelling in Southern Ecuador and are interested in plants or orchids, this is a must see place. Outside the greenhouses, there is also an amazing vivero (tree nursery) where there are literally thousands of palms, highland trees and many others that are used for planting around this area. It was well kept and well displayed.

Today we hiked out of Vilcabamba to another zoo that wasn't quite the same as the on in Loja but was still nice nonetheless. The orchidareo was closed though and didn't look as nice as the one yesterday. Walking through this area is nice because the weather is so temperate and always quite nice. We only have one more day here though. We are heading to Peru tomorrow via night bus and then onto another city somewhere in central Peru. We haven't totally decided where to go. It will probably be in the mountains though, maybe a city called Huaraz which is surrounded by 20,000 foot cliffs.

We have pictures but we wil post them later tonight.

Cheers,

Lee

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Photos

Orchid in Loja
One of the many beautiful pictures of orchids we got in Loja

Vilcabamba
Beautiful valley of Vilcabamba

Another orchid
Too many to post here but here is another one