Mindo - altitude 1500m - Cloudy with showers
(Blog excerpt from Day 10 in South America 2012) - After a few days in Equador's capital city Quito I really wanted to get out and into the wild, the main reason I came here! German Stephan from the hostel and I teamed up to go to Mindo, one the last standing cloud forest’s in Northern Ecuador. We just took essentials in our daypacks, got two buses, stopped at Mitidad del Mundo to snap a photo on the Equator line, took coffee out of the dreary rain (not called cloud forests for nothing!) and arrived late afternoon after a couple of hours.
A sloth was high in a tree right where we all got off the bus and even the locals were goo-and-garring saying in Spanish ‘how cute’. The bus service included a pick up truck ride (in the back!) 6 kms to the little town. It was a bit wet but the view was fabulous and the ride exciting! Casa bamboo, is the sister hostel in Mindo to the place I'd loved in Quito, and was a kilometre walk from the town on a dirt road and I loved being surrounded by forest. The place had a pool and hammocks on a viewing platform over the garden, very nice!
Tuesday 27 Nov in Mindo - We booked a local Bird Guide named Marcelo who was afro-equ, and shorter than me like many of the locals. At 6am, he came strolling down the hill with his giant telescopic monocular tripod over his shoulder, handed us a pair of binoculars and off we went. Five hours of magic!
We saw from the forest trails 4 different toucans, 2 different parrots, 3 types of raptors, 1 vulture variety, 1 common potoo (like a tawny frogmouth), a whole bunch of colourful dashing little things with names like tanager, saltator (jumper) euphonius, motmot, barbette, and less colourful but just as entertaining wood creeper and foliage gleaner – you just got to love the names.
I love my new camera it performed very well. The 18-250mm sigma lenses was worth it’s weight today (about 0.5kg). A great bushwalk, tree bromeliads with bright flowers like red cobs of corn, palms, tree ferns, bracken fern, lichen-covered branches, occasional views of the lush valley. We even saw several cheeky squirrels feeding.
above: Marcel our local birding guide with all the good gear
above: female swallow tanager (I think)
above: Crimson rump toucanet
above: choco toucan (brown mandible toucan)
above: pale mandible toucan
Back to the hostel for a refresh, checked out and went for lunch. Not much time left til the 3pm departing bus so we wandered the little mountain town, had a cuppa, people watched, and back to Quito we go. 10 days done of a four-month solo backpack around four South American countries. (Excerpt from my original 2012/13 blogspot 'Kat in South America: 5 countries, 4 months, 2 languages, 1 backpack').