Quilotoa and Baños

Good morning boys and girls!

It´s been a while since I have been able to use a computer so I´ll stuff a few updates into this post.

Sunday was my last day staying with the Proaños in Quito. They are a great family and I´d recommend the Vida Verde program to anyone. I´ll miss em. These are a couple of pics from a visit to an overlook of the city and our last breakfast on Sunday, when I hopped on a bus down south.

About an hour or two south of Quito, off the Panamericana highway, things get a little hairy on the roads. There is a loop of very small, mostly indigenous towns high up in the mountains that seem to revolve mostly around agriculture and just a little tourism. It´s known as the Quilotoa loop. The busses are convenient in the sense that you can count on an outstretched hand from the open, moving door to haul you and your backpack on board at the last second while a bus is pulling out of a town. The drivers are also very helpful with dropping you off where you want to be, especially if you stick out like a gringo in...a town like Quilotoa. The busses do, however, have their inconveniences. Especially off the beaten path.

Mid-afternoon Sunday I arrived in a town on the Quilotoa loop called Chugchitlan, where I shacked up in a hostal called "Hostal Mama Hilda." True to its name, Mama Hilda herself pledged to treat me like her son, and showered me with food, wine, and firewood, and a discount rate because I spoke Spanish in this luxury getaway that seemed to be completely carved from Eucalyptus wood.

A 4 AM bus took me to Quilotoa to see the main attration of the loop, the Quilotoa lake (elevation 3914 meters). Hindsight tells me I should have dressed warmer. Think strong, cold, pre-dawn wind. I ducked into a hostal in Quilotoa (which was pretty much a ghost town) and had breakfast with a Quichua family who spoke just a little Spanish. If I wasn´t cold and pretty much de-sensitized to awkward situations, it would have been a little weird. But it wasn´t!

A little after dawn, I set out to hike to the lake.
It was incredible. Quilotoa Lake is really a large volcano crater filled with sulfur-tinged water, giving it a greenish-blue tinge (and preventing anything from living in it). The volcano last erupted before 1800, and scientist types think it was actually an implosion, not an explosion. The hike down and back took about 2 hours.

After the lake, I hiked back to Chugchitlan. It´s about a 4-6 hour trail through "roads" and canyons, and it was truly some of the best hiking I´ve done, even when I got lost and had to ask farmers the way.

This internet cafe is expensive. Will finish later.