Quito to Mindo

Our first full day on the tour is pointing towards a wonderful two weeks. It turns out that we are the only people on the tour which is a pity in that we don’t get to meet any other fellow travelers but a bonus on that we are essentially going to have a pretty flexible fully guided private two week tour of Ecuador. Our guide is a German girl called Julia who has lived in Ecuador for the last two years. The girls love her and she seems like she will have the tour running smoothly.

We spent the morning seeing the old town of Quito which is a UNESCO listed world heritage site. Very colonial and quite European in its architecture with tiny, steep cobbled streets leading to open plazas with grand buildings, cathedrals and convents. We spent some time inside one of the Cathedrals which could have been anywhere in Europe apart from the refreshing touches of South American style Catholicism. Glorious stained glass windows were accompanied by gaudy cheap looking dolls of the Virgin and the Nativity scene in the knave would have looked right at home on the front lawn of a Gunnedah house complete with a flashing neon star and curtains of flashing Christmas tree lights.

The old town really was very pretty and the city of Quito has made a huge effort to clean it all up. There are police on every corner and a lot of the buildings have been renovated. Get about half a block away from the tourist centre however and you definitely know that you are in a developing country. Mangy dogs roaming the streets, child beggars and an almost ghetto like accumulation of haphazard buildings. Quito has two very distinct halves with the southern end (surrounding the old town) very much what you’d picture a third world country to look like while the northern end is full of Mercedes dealerships and Starbucks. I don’t know how much the kids took in but for Tammy and myself it was a real eye opener.

After seeing the old town we took a cable car ride to the top of Pichincha, one of the inactive volcanoes surrounding Quito. The altitude was 4200m and we were all sucking in the big ones trying to get enough air. Unfortunately we had poked out through the top of the clouds so there wasn’t much of a view of Quito but it was still pretty cool being up that high.

For most of the trip in Ecuador we will be getting around in a comfortable little mini van driven by Ivan, who thankfully is a lot less frantic than our friendly taxi driver from the other night. This afternoon we traveled about 2.5 hours north of Quito to Mindo which is in the “cloud forest”. While our driver is very good it was certainly an interesting trip up observing the behaviour of others on the road. Almost the whole trip was a spectacular if not slightly hair raising crawl through jungle clad mountains. Ecuadorians seem to have a habit of stopping in the middle of the road whenever it suits them and if on a blind curve with a 200m sheer drop off to one side then all the better. For most of the way we were following a much larger tourist bus who cleared the way for us but when we came up behind an oversize load going around a long blind corner he decided that is was a perfect time to overtake and forced several oncoming cars into the ditch in the process. Thankfully Ivan decided to bide his time behind the truck for a while and we lost site of the bus.

After a final few km down a single lane dirt track through the jungle we came to our lodging, the Septimo Paraiso eco lodge. It was a surprise to say the least. A fantastic wooden building set into the forest with hundreds of hummingbirds of about 6 different types flitting around feeders in the garden. To the girls delight, a huge heated (its quite cool up here in the mountains) pool and massive spa with the jungle towering overhead. Being a rainforest it was of course raining when we got here but it didn’t seem to matter as we floated in the pool looking up at the moss covered trees listening to the strange sounds from the forest.