Quilotoa

Hola,

Here we are in week three of our journey and all is well. We just started our last week of school which has been by all acounts an excellent experience. We have both improved our Spanish speaking skills but we have also had access to cultural, political and local information through our respective teachers that otherwise might have passed us right by. Here is a picture of us with our teachers; Luis and Alexandra on one of the museum tours they have taken us on. No idea who that kid on the right is... I guess he just really wanted to be in the picture, he didn't even make a goofy face or anything. Go figure.

After a long week of class we have been inclined to take advantage of the very central location of Quito by going on weekend excurions. Last weekend, as you can read in our previous blog post, we went to the cloud forrest of Mindo where we rode a zip line, went down a waterslide into a river and saw a whole mess of butterflies. This past weekend we decided to go to Quilotoa.

Quilotoa is a lake inside the crater of a volcano located in the mountains at about 13,000 feet. To get there we rode two separate buses and a pick-up truck; the first bus went from Quito due south to Latacunga on the Panamericana Highway for two hours. Then in Latacunga we caught a bus that went way up in the mountains for two and a half hours to the small indigenous populated town of Zumbajua. We stayed the night in Zumbahua so that we could check out the Saturday market in the morning which was a pretty crazy happenning but also your one stop shopping for fruits, veggies, meats, baby pigs, lamas, or sheep. You could get your pants sewed up and have a snack of fried potatoes and hot-dogs while you're waiting! By 1:00 we had tracked down the pick-up and we were on our way up the road to Quilotoa.

The drive took 30 minutes through beautiful highland farms, flocks of sheep and their indigenous shepherds who were mostly children. We put our stuff down at the Cabañas Quilotoa and went to check out the crater. This place was incredible. At 13,000 feet we could see into the far distance and we were above many of the clouds while the rest passed closely over our heads so closely that we could watch them break apart and pass by with incredible speed and grace even though the air was relatively calm. The lake itself is huge and the crater even more so. Here are some pictures of the crater itself and the peaks nearby.

Big Crater, Lil' Em

At the bottom

More Crater

Standoff with a chicken on the edge of the crater!

Awesome sunset between the clouds

On Sunday we hiked down into the crater until we got to the lake at the bottom. It took an hour to get down and two and a half to get back up. The trail was steep and composed of loose rock and silt plus it is harder to breathe so high up but the views were awesome and we made it out of the crater before the volcano erupted and in time to catch the bus back to Quito. We will miss Quilotoa.