Cotopaxi

At 19,347 ft. Cotopaxi is one of the world’s tallest active volcanoes. I had been planning to climb it since I found out I would be studying in Ecuador, so I was very excited when I finally had a free weekend.

View of the refuge at 15,748 ft.

My friend from my program and I decided to climb it together. We planned the trip Ecuadorian style: on Monday we called a guide that a friend had used and asked if he could take us up that coming weekend. “Sure!” he said, “I climbed it last weekend too and the conditions were great.” He said he would call us later that week to tell us what we needed to bring. 

On Wednesday we emailed him asking about important specifics like a time and place to meet and what type of gear we needed to bring. We got a reply on Thursday with such atrocious spelling and lack of grammar that we had to send it to an Ecuadorian friend to translate it into Spanish. It turned out his first language wasn’t Spanish, but Quichua, a dialect common in rural parts of Ecuador.

We decided after the email experience that communication by phone was easier, so after confirming on Friday night we left at 6:30 am on Friday to take the bus out to Cotopaxi. For $0.25 we took an hour and a half bus ride down to the very south of Quito, and then for $3.00 we took another hour and a half bus ride out to a town close to Cotopaxi National Park. There we met our guide in the bus terminal and he took us to rent our gear. He turned out to be a great guide - very knowledgeable and a great cook. He has climbed Cotopaxi over 200 times!

Picking out our gear

We stopped at a nice viewpoint on the drive from the town to the volcano.

After getting all suited up we hopped in the car and started driving up to the volcano. We stopped to buy all the essential provisions: coca leaves, coca caramels, snickers bars, and Gatorade.

We left the car in the parking lot, strapped on our backpacks and started the hike to the refuge. The hike was pretty slow going because of the slippery gravel, our heavy backpacks, and the high altitude.

Taking a break on the way up to the refuge

A lot of people go up to the refuge for a day trip. As we were hiking up we saw a bunch of people playing in the snow. We were so tired just walking we couldn't imagine how they were running up and down the slopes.

When we got up to the refuge we claimed beds for the night, unpacked a few things, and ate lunch prepared by our guide. The refuge was much bigger than I though and can sleep over 100 people. In a nearby snow bank we practiced walking with our ice picks and following in the footsteps of the guide.

We ate dinner around 6 pm in order to be in bed by 7 pm. The plan was to wake up at 11 pm and start climbing. It takes 5-8 hours to summit, so by leaving at 11 pm or midnight, you hopefully summit just as the sun is rising.

However on this weekend the weather was so bad that most groups (there were about 80 people at the refuge) didn’t make it up. Another group from my university had to turn around 2 hours from the top because their guide got sick, and in the morning we saw another couple that didn’t make it up because of the wind and fog. We only made it up about 2 hours because the friend I was climbing it had a combination of altitude sickness and food poisoning. 

So we didn’t have the kind of adventure we were expecting, but we did have an adventure: we got to tromp around in the snow, drink coca tea, meet some new people, see some beautiful views, and learn how to use ice picks. This was also the highest elevation I have ever been at. I’m not sure how high we hiked up to, but the refuge is at 15,748 ft. I didn’t feel the altitude too much when we were walking slowly, but in the middle of the night I woke up completely out of breath gasping for air.

I hope to go back and try to climb it again. The part we did climb was gorgeous. We started out with another group, and looking ahead all I could see was a long line of headlamps snaking up the mountain. It was almost meditative hiking through the snow with only the sound of the wind and heaving breathing. It felt like we were completely isolated in our own world on the volcano, completely separate from time and our normal lives.

 

Playing Catch Up

Mindo

A few weekends ago I went with two friends for a daytrip to Mindo, a small mountain town about an hour drive from Quito. We packed in a full day of zip lining, a visit to a butterfly house, and a tour of a chocolate farm.

 Some of the many butterfly cocoons.

Different parts of the chocolate making process.

The part we didn't get to see at the farm - the drying of the cocoa beans.

Brownies made from the home made chocolate.

Zip-lining through the forrest.

Fútbol

I went to a soccer game one evening with some Ecuadorian and American friends. The game was Barcelona (from Guayaquil, Ecuador…I know, it’s confusing) against Deportivo Quito, one of the teams from Quito (there are multiple). The Ecuadorians we went with are fans of Barcelona, so we sat in that section. When I told my host family (fans of Deportivo Quito), they felt slightly betrayed.

The fans didn’t stop yelling, whistling, and singing the entire game. They also had a guy with a huge drum who was pounding it the whole time. I had never encountered fans that took the game so seriously - the guy in front of me sat down and looked like he was going to cry when the other team scored. The Ecuadorians we went with were definitely more into it than us Americans, but we had a great time, especially eating all the food that kept coming by, such as hotdogs, popcorn, and empanadas.

The police separating the fans.

Quilotoa

A view of Cotopaxi on the way to Quilotoa - remember this volcano for the next blog post!

My program took a day trip to a crater lake in the volcano Quilotoa. We walked 30 minutes down a very steep dirt trail to the gorgeous lake and rented some "kayaks" - the paddles that were provided were made out of wood and very small, making it extremely difficult to move anywhere at all. We paddled very slowly out to the middle of the lake and then back and along the shore. We found some bubbles (some sort of volcanic gas or air trapped underground) rising from the bottom of the lake and seeping out of the rocks on the shore, which we thought was pretty cool.

The walk back up to the top of the crater was extremely difficult. The crater is at 12,000 feet, which is challenging enough, but additionally the trail is probably the steepest I have ever walked up, and it takes roughly 40-50 minutes.

On the road to Quilotoa we passed many beautiful mountains that are not usually visible:

Mom Comes to Visit!

My mom arrived late on a rainy Thursday night to visit for Semana Santa, the week leading up to Easter. The next morning I took her to the university with me. She even sat in on one of my classes even though she couldn’t understand any of it and then went out to lunch with some of my Ecuadorian and American friends. That night we went to Café Mosaico with my host parents, an old house that has been converted into a café. It looks out over the historical center where all the old churches are located. From up on the hill you can really get a sense of how extensive the city it. 

My host parents don’t speak English and my mom doesn’t speak Spanish, so I got a lot of practice translating. At first it was hard to translate and one time I spoke to my mom in Spanish - my host mom caught the mistake and laughed when my real mom didn’t respond. However, communication was much easier than I had expected.

The next morning we met the rest of my program at the bus station at 5am to go to a farm called Rio Muchacho on the coast of Ecuador. An hour into the 7 hour bus ride, I was starting to doubt if it would be worth it: my mom and I had planned on a shorter Galapagos trip in order to go to the farm, but with the long bus ride we would only be able to spend one full day at the farm. The farm turned out to one of my favorite places I have visited in Ecuador (tied with the Galapagos and the Amazon).

On our way to the farm we stopped for three hours at a beach called Canoa. While we were swimming we met a surfing instructor and he let us use his board for free! This type of friendliness and generosity has been very common during my experience in Ecuador and it is one of my favorite parts about the people here.

The best part about Rio Muchacho was the food. I think it was the best food I have ever had in my life. All of it was grown on the farm (or in the case of the fish, it was caught locally). The vegetables were so flavorful and mixed so well together.

Lunch the first day 

Breakfast: this also came with granola, bread, and chocolate sauce. 

 

Lunch on the second day.

The first day on the farm we woke up at 6:00am to do our morning chores. The farm has a large education/outreach component and relies heavily on volunteers for its operation. I got to feed the chickens, collect passion fruit, and sprinkle saw dust in the pigpens. When the volunteer coordinator said that he needed several people to shovel the pig poop, my mom readily volunteered and without hesitating hopped right into one of the pens with a shovel. 

After our chores and breakfast, we made coffee from scratch:

The beans

Roasting the beans

A little burned...

Grinding the beans

Cooking the grounds

Final product! I had never tasted coffee to rich and earthy. We told the owner of the farm that we are from Seattle where Starbucks originated, and he asked us if the coffee we had just made was as good as the coffee at Starbucks. We assured him it didn’t even compare – the fresh coffee was simply incredible.

I was blown away by the coffee, but then that night we made chocolate sauce from cocoa beans:

The cocoa pods

The seeds inside. The seeds are covered with a sourish tasting pulp that can be used to make an alcoholic beverage.

Roasting the seeds

Panela - raw sugar

Taking the skins off the seeds

Grinding together the cocoa beans and the panela

Cooking the ground panela and beans with milk

mmm my friend with her chocolate sauce and pineapple!

Our first activity of the afternoon was a hike to “arbol grande” (english translation: huge tree), a very old matapalo, the same kind of tree I climbed inside of in the Amazon. The matapalo tree lives off of an existed tree and essentially hugs it to death.

We also made rings out of a seed of a tree (I now forget which kind of tree) that is commonly used to make jewelry. We shaved and carved and sanded and ended up with pretty cool rings!

Starting with the seed

Final product!

Rio Muchacho practices permaculture, which is a way of farming that works with the land, instead of exploiting it like most of industrial agriculture. A large part of permaculture is working the plant life cycles and reusing all organic material. The plants, farm animals, and people are all part of this cycle of energy. For example at Rio Muchacho, the people eat the food grown on the farm, the food scraps are used to feed the animals, and the animal waste is used as fertilizer for the plants. In this way everything is reused and there isn’t a break in the flow of energy.

 

Even the waste water from doing laundry is reused.

Farming on the coast Ecuador is very interesting because of the country's location in the world. Yes, it is on the equator, but it is also located at the intersection of two currents: the Humboldt and el Niño. These two currents are one of the reasons for the extremely high level of biodiversity in Ecuador. The Humboldt is cold and comes from the South, and the warm el Niño current the comes the North. They collide on the coast of Ecuador and flow out to the Galapagos. This is why it was very easy for early explorers to sail the Galapagos and it is also why while swimming in the Galapagos during the spring you can frequently feel it shifting back and forth between warm and cold. These currents greatly affect the climate on the continent: the driest place on Earth, the desert of Atacama, is located to the South of Ecaudor in Peru, and to the North of Ecuador is the most humid place on Earth, the Chocó rainforest in Colombia. Ecuador is located right in the middle, which means that the plants and animals have adapted to the alternating dry and wet climates. Plants can be planted and harvested all year round and a huge variety of tropical and arid plants are produced at the farm. At Rio Muchacho they grow passion fruit AND potatoes on the same farm!

Above is a picture of a little banana tree. Another important part of permaculture is growing plants together that help each other grow by providing extra/the right nutrients. For example, in permaculture corn is always planted with legumes. Here banana trees are planted next to coffee plants because their large leaves give the coffee plants the shade they need.

After the farm my mom and I went to the Galapagos. I feel extremely privileged to have gone to the Galapagos twice, even more so because most Ecuadorians can’t afford to go there. I loved that even though we did some of the same things I did with my program everything was different this time: I got to see the owl outside the lava tunnel preen itself, there were baby iguanas on the nesting grounds we had gone to, I saw a fish market at the port we had stayed at, I saw a white tipped shark while snorkeling, it was sunny for our hike to the Sierra Negra crater, I found little blue jellyfish on the beach on Isabella, and this time around I got to go scuba diving!

 

The above message from the Galapagos says: "We can construct a better world if we work together and if we are wrong less often" - that last part a little tough to translate so that it sounds good in English.

Greetings and much love from Ecuador to all of our family and friends!