Day 10 to 16 – Yo no quiero agua

Hello fellow readers!

After a busy weekend I finally find some time to drop a few lines. Unfortunately my Internet coverage is getting less, so be prepared to read less often from me. Right now I’m sitting in a American fast food franchise which advertises WIFI in all their locations – I’m writing this offline while the stuff tries to figure out how to switch on the Internet gateway :)

Let’s climb another volcano…

Last time I told you about the volcano Cotopaxi. This time it is about the Pinchincha. The Pinchincha is the “house volcano” of Quito. It is located at the southeastern boarder of the city. Fortunately they built a gondola called Teleferiqo from the city limit to about 4000m altitude. Although this was the slowest gondola I’ve ever used (Monica, you would be really pissed if the ones in our ski resorts were that slow :) ) It helped us a long way to get to our goal at 4600m. Most of the tourists stop at the 4000m high sky terrace and enjoy the view of the in mountains embedded capital city. But then again, it was cloudy and you couldn’t see anything :)

All of us were eager to climb the mountain (which is actually 4800+ something, but the last bit is kind of tricky) but we needed to fight the altitude again. Compared to Cotopaxi, the hike was easier, not that steep, but a LOT longer. Our teacher estimated about 3h to 4h round trip. After round 1,5h the first 2 turned around. While climbing, the group got ripped apart and two subgroups were formed – smokers and non-smokers ;)

Eventually both made it to the 4600m “summit” and enjoyed, well, not the view, but the break :)

While I ate my banana, the smokers enjoyed their cigarettes which I reckoned hard to light because of the thin air ;)

Off to Banos

Banos is a very touristy adventure offering small town, south west of Quito. It took us about 3h with the bus to get there. Our plans included white water rafting, canopy, mountain biking and cannoning – all depending on time and money. We found a cheap nice hostel (only US6,50 a night) and checked out the next bar, it was Friday night after all…

After a good night sleep (more or less) it was time to find the activity of the day – It happened to be a canopy, mountain bike, waterfall visiting combo for just 30 bugs. Because I missed out on the canopy experience in Costa Rica, I was quite excited about that. The tour company drove us south American style (on the back of a pickup) to the start point of the tour from where we went up the rain forest for about 30min. Harness tightened and about to conquer our fears we were ready to get hook to the 1cm steal rope which spanned a 300m wide crack in the beautiful rain forest. This spectacular experience was about to happen another five times, in different positions – upside down, super man and the “butterfly” :)

After 2,5h of hiking and sliding down ropes the first part of our tour was finished and our guide prepared the mountain bikes (which were quite decent).

A view of us were greatly relieved after the announcement that about 80% will be downhill (of course not me :) ) . The whole thing took about 4h, with stops at cascades and a kind of open gondola to cross a large river. Oh, and food of course… Quote: “You know, you are in Ecuador now. So be aware of the food you eat, it’s all dirty and just a Ecuadorian stomach can cope with it properly”
Guess what I did next – right, got myself delicious meet sticks (pollo I guess) with whole potatoes and something like a sausage (thought it is a tomato until I tried it) from a woman who sold that stuff on the street… Looks like I got an Ecuadorian stomach already :)

Last stop of the day was a big waterfall behind which one can climb. The way there was built for – how do I say that without offending someone – very, very small people. So we 185+ Europeans had trouble squeezing trough the passage with all our backpacks and cameras. But we managed it after all.

Conclusion: got very wet and the way back through this small ail was even harder – but worth it

On Sunday we slept until 9:30 or so and were all a bit chuchaqi (hung over in Quechua) but managed to motivate ourselves for yet another adventure although it was raining. And because it was raining, we decided to go white water rafting – we gonna get wet anyway.

So we squeezed us in already pre-wetend wet suits and heaved the boat into the brownish swollen river. Our guide predicted a wild ride because of the rainy night and we weren’t quite sure if we should be excited about that or not. The water was freezing, so we tried to start paddling very hard to keep us warm. After a quarter of the way our guide decided to train an emergency maneuver. And while I was talking to him nicely on carm waters I got suddenly pushed into the river – yes, it was cold :)

Although I was the one in the water, the others had to do the work, pulling me back into the raft, so no harm done ;)

After a few more rapids and heavy passages we ended our trip tired but happy and we never needed to use the emergency procedure we practiced -.-

That was my weekend. And after a last night in Quito my flight to Galapagos will leave tomorrow morning at 9:15…

Hope I will get an Internet connection today so I don’t have to rewrite all the dates ;)

Greets

alex

EDIT: I did get Internet :)

On the Pick Up Truck

Hiking in the rain forest

The first Zip Line

Guess the position :)







I doubted that guys professionalism :)


Biking Ecuador



The gondola...


waterfall - getting wet