LA PLAYA

Greeting from Bahía! Moira and I are still on the coast of Ecuador, waiting for the night bus that will take us back to Quito.

Starting with Saturday, our excursion to Cotopaxi was great. We got to the base of the trail around 10:30 that morning (we left Quito at 7:00) and it took us about an hour to climb up to the little refuge just at the base of the snowline. The side of the mountain is red from all of the iron deposits and it looks incredible next to all of the greenery covering the surrounding mountains. Cotopaxi is an active volcano and supposedly erupts every 100 years (Last eruption? 1895. So looks like she´s due.) and apparently smokes and spurts from time to time. One of the problems visitors to Cotopaxi often face is dense fog, but it was completely clear during our entire hike. Anyway, once we arrived to the refuge, we rested for a moment then climbed for 45 more minutes up to the glaciers. I think the elevation there was something like 5000 meters, so Moira and I felt pretty tough. We showed up all of the other climbers in their North Face gear with our rugged Colorado dispositions, even though I forgot gloves and was wearing several pairs of socks on my hands instead. While I'm sure that does reflect somewhat on my poor planning skills, I would also like to think that it reveals what a tough lady I am.

When we got back to the parking lot, we were each assigned to different mountain bikes and had to bike down to a little laguna for sixteen kilometers. This was mostly terrible since all of the bikes were in an incredibly low gear, and were partially disassembled so as to be unable to shift. So it was really hard to maintain any stability on these things and we had to ride our brakes the whole way down, which is particularly unpleasant on an unpaved, bumpy incline on a mountain road. Oh well. The views were spectacular, so I can't complain too much.

Sunday, we left for Bahía around 1 in the afternoon and arrived at 9:30 that evening. We spent the night in some hotel that smelled kind of like drying paint and Clorox, took a sea taxi to San Vicente the next morning, and then a little commuter bus to Canoa. To be honest, not much to say about our time there. We spent the past three days taking naps on the beach for hours (no terrible sunburns to speak of on my end, although Moira is noticeably pinker in places), reading, and hanging out with some herpetologists who are working in refuges in northern and central Ecuador. One of said herpetologists, Paul, gave us a clue that there is a little shop in Canoa whose specialty is frozen bananas covered in chocolate, so we got a few of those before hopping on another bus back to Bahía.

Tonight, another 8-9 hour bus ride awaits us to get back to Quito. Our plans for my birthday include seeing Harry Potter 6 and eating cake, which is pretty much all it takes to please me. Hopefully we'll also figure out how we're getting to the Amazon, since we are presumably leaving for Yanacocha wildlife rescue on Saturday night. Fingers crossed for baby ocelots!

Take care all.