Mar. 8-9 - Return to Mindo

This weekend I decided to return to Mindo with Lee, Anna and Kat to show them the town and it's beauty. As is always the case, traveling to Mindo was a challenge since I was arriving in Quito from the overnight bus and was going to meet them all in the morning for the 9:00 bus (the last one of the day) to Mindo. Simple enough ... right? Well the only problem is that no one told me where to meet them. Lee and Kat decided to meet at 9:30 without telling Anna. They wanted me to call Anna, even though I didn't have her phone number. All of this including the simple fact that the bus leaves at 9:00. So I had to wander around the city to visit our usual locations before finding Anna at a random bus station .... not one of our usual locations. By now it was time for us to get Kat, so we sent Lee on the Kat finding mission and an hour later had success. It wasn't until 11am that we managed to hop on a bus heading in the right direction and would drop us off at the turn-off from the main road to Mindo....about 14km from town.

Once we got off the bus we opted to take a combineta down to the town and headed off to the same hostel I stayed at before. Once there I was greeted again by Cladudia who instantly started grilling me about why I hadn't returned to Mindo. Now, a week after I had left she was able to provide me with a description of the project I was to have done when I was last there. Still, I know I made the correct decision to change projects.

After settling in and having dinner, we headed off to the frong concert. Yes, that's right, Mindo's main attraction in the evening (aside from the three karaoke bars) is the frong concert. This is an hour long walk after dusk through some ponds where you listen and try to find 19 different species of frongs. It was a lot of fun wandering around in the dark listening to them. The most interesting thing was wood covered with local algae, which glows in the dark.



The best part of the evening was waiting for dusk when we were blessed with the presence of no less than 20 humming birds flying around less than six feet in front of us. This is one of the things for which Mindo is known.

The next morning Kat took a little while to get ready, so we had a later than expected start to the day, but we were going to make sure it was a full day.

The first stop of the day was at the Cascadas des Nambillo, which required a very bumpy taxi ride back up the same road I took to my first volunteer project. The entrance to these waterfalls is by a rickety cable car that crosses a deep ravine. By any standards, this shouldn't have been safe, but who was I to argue.

The other side provided us with a three hour walk up and down hills and around about seven waterfalls (or at least that's what the map said .... we only saw three). The first of these waterfalls had what appeared to be a hacienda beside it, which we all thought would be a great place to stay, aside from the constant roar of the waterfalls and the sheer cliff you had to scale to reach the top.

After our lovely hike in the woods, we started our walk back to town. On the way back we stopped at the zip-line course so that Kat, Anna and Lee coudl experience the same joy I had when I went through a few weeks earlier. Sadly they didn't find it as much fun as I did. Once back in town we had a quick bite then headed back to Quito.