Ecuador Part 3 - The Highlands

The final part of our trip was visiting the Highlands south of Quito.  The area is known as the Avenue of Volcanoes because there are so many there (10+).  

We visited an old hacienda (grand estate) on the drive there.

It was a beautiful old house...

With beautiful furniture.

And a eucalyptus-tree lined driveway, which was pretty impressive.  There are plenty of these old-style houses around, mostly used as hotels nowadays.

Much of the highlands looked like this - mountains with winding roads, trees and fields everywhere.

Ecuadorian houses in the highlands, with laundry hanging everywhere and mountains in the background.

They don't use terracing in Ecuador - if their field is on the side of the mountain, they just deal with it.  

Some local people looking after their sheep in a field.  

We visited a local market on the way there, which was a riot of colorful costumes and loud Spanish.  It's hard to see from the photo, but most of the people are wearing traditional outfits - it's not a tourist market, that's just what they do.  Most of the women wear black panama hats, black skirts and brightly colored shawls, and the men wear the same hats with colorful ponchos over the top.  You should be able to click on the picture to see a bigger version.

We visited Quilotoa Lake, which is in yet another volcano crater.  Unfortunately I couldn't get far enough back to fit the whole lake in one photo!  We were slightly crazy and decided to walk down to the lake for lunch - the vertical distance was 400m.

It only took us 30 minutes to get down...

 ... but it took us nearly 2 hours to get back up.  The lake's at around 4000m above sea level, so strenuous uphill walking was more strenuous than normal.

We visited Cotopaxi volcano, but unfortunately this is the best picture we got as the weather was not cooperating. Cotopaxi is 5,897m high.

We decided to walk up to the climbers' refuge at 4800m, where climbing expeditions to the summit start from.

Unfortunately we weren't really dressed for the conditions - it was hailing and icy cold, maybe 5 degrees C temperature, and our shorts weren't cutting it.

So we stopped at 4610m and went back down again for a warm lunch.  Hey, it was our vacation!

On the way down, we were overtaken by some local nuns, who had walked up to the refuge and were on their way back down again.  This made us feel rather wussy about going back down, so we consoled ourselves with delicious Andean soup for lunch.

A signpost showing nearby volcanoes - I did say it was called Avenue of Volcanoes for a reason!

A llama... or is it an alpaca?  We have no idea!

The next day dawned bright and sunny, and we could actually see Cotopaxi volcano!  Here's the top part. Now if you can imagine this and the previous picture together, you should get an idea of how big the volcano is.

Cotopaxi behind our hotel.  You can see that the clouds are rolling in already.

We spent our last day in Ecuador riding horses in the Andes.  I had checked specifically the day before with our guide that we would not be required to wear any stupid outfits to ride horses, and he said no, absolutely not.  Apparently that wasn't actually true.  Stephen quite enjoyed his outfit.

Here's me with Cotopaxi in the background on my horse, also known as the laziest horse of all time.  It wouldn't go faster than a walk.  You can see the clouds rolling in - it started hailing about 90 minutes in to our 4 hour horse ride, which wasn't much fun for us or the horses.

 Mountains and rolling plains - the scenery of our horse ride.

Leaving the Highlands for home.

All in all Ecuador was a nice place to visit - the people we met in the Highlands were lovely and seemed really excited about people visiting their little corner of the world (in stark contrast to the people of the Galapagos).  The food was great, the scenery was beautiful and there were plenty of interesting things to see.  We highly recommend it - although we'd recommend more time in the Highlands than on Galapagos :)

This is Part 3 (Highlands).  Part 1 (Quito) and Part 2 (Galapagos Islands) are also available.

Ecuador Part 2 - The Galapagos Islands

We set off bright and early for the Galapagos Islands - first a flight from Quito Airport to Baltra Island Airport via Guayaquil, then a short ferry from Baltra Island to Santa Cruz Island, then a 40 minute drive across the whole of Santa Cruz Island, then a 2 hour long speedboat trip from Puerto Ayora on Isla Santa Cruz to Puerto Villamil on Isla Isabela, which is the largest of the Galapagos Islands.

The speedboat was not the greatest experience ever, and I am very thankful that we had seasickness tablets.  It also felt like people were trying to shaft us for money at every possible opportunity - $10 to leave the Quito Airport, $100 to enter the national park, $1 for the ferry, $1 transfer fee from the dock to the speedboat and then again from the speedboat to the dock, $10 docking fee at Puerto Ayora.  I get that people need to make a living, but it gets very annoying after a while.

We had two days in the Galapagos - Day 1 was to learn about the islands' formation, and Day 2 was to see some of the animals.

We started Day 1 with a 16km hide to the Sierra Negra volcano.  The Galapagos are volcanic islands (created by volcanic eruptions), and everywhere is evidence of this.

Much of the scenery looked like this, and it was raining.

We were hiking around the rim of the Sierra Negra caldera, which is about 10km in diameter.  It last erupted in October 2005.  You can just see the rim of the crater off to the right.

The line on the ground marks the transition from the older eruptions to the newer ones.  It's a few thousands of years old natural straight line.

We walked across where the most recent eruption had been.  Here's a lava tunnel - formed when a river of lava goes out - the outside cools in the air, and creates a tunnel down which the lava continues to flow, insulated from the air.

There were many colors of rocks - it looked a bit like the set of Star Trek.

More colors on the lava field - yellow sulphur and red iron.

Time for animals!  We stopped off at a local lagoon, where the flamingos were feeding.  They actually feed by sifting silt through their beaks upside down, which made a very weird swooshing noise.

We visited the Giant Tortoise Breeding Center to learn about the program and see how they were taking care of the tortoises.  Apparently there are around 10 or 11 different subspecies of giant tortoises, and they all live on different islands.  Introduced animals (dogs, cats, goats) killed nearly all of the tortoises, so now they mostly reproduce in the breeding center - they keep them there until they are 6 years old and then release them into the wild again after their shell has hardened and they're big enough to fend for themselves.

The tortoises were kind of scary looking, because they were so big.  You got the idea that they could bite your feet off if you they didn't like you.  And no, they didn't let us sit on them.

They had a lot of tortoises there.  There was probably a thousand in the breeding center we saw, which was one of three breeding centers on the islands.  No more extinctions for these guys!

Another species endemic to the Galapagos is the marine iguana, an iguana that has evolved to be able to swim and eat algae.  Apparently Charles Darwin wasn't a big fan of them:  "The black Lava rocks on the beach are frequented by large (60-90cm), disgusting clumsy Lizards.  They are as black as the porous rocks over which they crawl and seek their prey from the Sea.  I call them 'imps of darkness'.  They assuredly well become the land they inhabit."  Here's the local iguana crossing - they really did just wander across the road whenever they felt like it and they were EVERYWHERE.

They liked to sit over the paths like this and hiss at you when you tried to walk past, and they blended so well into the black rocks that are everywhere that sometimes you would turn around and one would be 30cm away staring at you.  Imps of darkness indeed.

Blue footed boobies hanging around on the rocks.

We visited a wall built by prisoners called the Wall of Tears, which was actually not that exciting, being a wall built in the middle of nowhere for no reason.

There were plenty of stealth tortoises to see though - you can see the one on the right, but you can see his ninja buddy hiding in the bushes to the left?!

In the afternoon we went on a boat trip around the Tintoreras Islands, which are in the harbor of Puerto Villamil.  On the way there, we found this sea lion hanging around sunning himself on someone's boat.

They were everywhere too - here's another one lazing around on the dock.  We were struck by the resemblance to Jax.

And another one sunning himself on the beach.

 Galapagos penguins on the rocks.

And finally some white-tip sharks in a canal (with some iguanas on the rocks above - I told you they were everywhere!).  

Sunset over the Galapagos Beach.  We did go snorkelling (not with the sharks) and saw lots of fish including puffer fish, two types of rays, and three sea-turtles, which were huge!  Obviously no pictures :)

The Galapagos was a very strange place.  Stephen said it reminded him of a pacific island, as it seemed to have a very laid-back lifestyle and we were surrounded by beaches.  I was pretty disappointed by how we were treated in a lot of places - it was clear that they saw tourists as a resource that would just continue to renew itself regardless of how they were treated, and ripe to be exploited at every possible opportunity.  It doesn't give you a great feeling.

This is Part 2.  Part 1 (Quito) and Part 3 (Highlands) are also available.