How much has happened this week! Lots of firsts and an unexpected twist that makes me wonder if we’re going to be able to actually volunteer two solid weeks in a row while we’re here. My first week was spent almost entirely at home, and now Tyler is on enforced rest, orders of our “abuelo doctor”, with a (hopefully just) sprained wrist. But more on that later.
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| Celebrating Mary's 27th birthday! |
This past Wednesday, the 21st, was my birthday. Because it was a Wednesday and we had the markets to go to, I didn’t expect we would do much, just go out for ice cream on the night of, and then go to Mindo for the weekend, both of which we did. We also had TMNT cake, compliments of the other volunteers, and our host family bought me a birthday present, of a BEAUTIFUL scarf and set of tagua-nut earrings. If you don’t know what tagua is, look it up. Super pretty stuff, and they do all kinds of crafty things with it. It was a very happy birthday, the ice cream was DELICIOUS, and all in all it was a very good day.
Then we went to Mindo over the weekend. We left early Saturday morning, and came back Sunday afternoon.
Funny story insert: When we arrived at the bus station, the bus was about to leave, so they told us to just get on. We didn’t realize there was assigned seating, and they apparently didn’t count tickets, because our seats were already assigned, so the bus manager, Francois, brought us up to the jump seats next to the bus driver, so instead of a sleepy two-hour bus ride to MIndo, we had front-row seats and a super fun conversation with Luis, the bus driver, and Francois the manager. Buses are a lot more exciting when you’re there watching the driver swerve in and out of traffic…
Anyway.
Mindo is a quiet little tourist trap town, surrounded by cloud forest. It’s also, incidentally, the birdwatching capital of the world, for people who do that kind of thing. It’s also the headquarters of Mindo Chocolates, a little artisanal chocolate making company which offers tours to see the production process.
It’s also one step short of paradise.
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| Living in paradise in Mindo. |
We stayed in a cozy little ‘matrimonial room’ in the hostel Casa de Cecilia, right next to the chocolate place. (I hesitate to call it a factory, because most of the building is also a hostel, and a restaurant, and a shop). The Mindo river flows just a hundred feet or so away from one of the windows. Birds and hummingbirds come throughout the day to munch from the hummingbird feeders and banana trays, just outside the small breakfast area. Our room had a private bathroom, with hot water, water pressure, and a flushing toilet. (You miss these things when a shower feels more like a light rain, and you have to use a bucket of water to flush the toilet, which sometimes misses and gets the ground wet, which is SUPER gross when you’re wearing Fivefinger shoes. FYI.)
The air is moist, but not unpleasantly so, and the temperature is mild. Friendly locals were happy to direct us to our hostel, and Manchas (which means Spots), the hostel dog, was happy to greet us on our arrival. The receptionist, who is also the owner, gave us a map of town, explained where everything was, and offered to sell us tickets to any attractions we wanted to visit. We decided, after breakfast, that we would see the hummingbird exhibit, the orchids, and the chocolate tour before dinner, and in the morning we would hike out to see the waterfalls.
The hummingbirds were beautiful, the orchids were tiny, and Tyler and I were very excited for the chocolate tour…until the American came to join us.
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| From start to finish, how to make chocolate. |
I call her the American because she represents everything I feel like people hate about traveling Americans. She asked to have the tour in English, interrupted our guide to correct him at least once, and generally made a nuisance of herself. I know it’s terrible to dislike someone without getting to know them. I also know that I’m human. Hopefully you’ll forgive me, and hopefully before I forgive her, because that will take a while.
Other than the American, the tour was very interesting. Our guide, Jorge, explained the entire process from cacao pod to finished chocolate or separated cocoa butter and powder, and showed us the entire thing. We even got to taste the cacao fruit, which tastes nothing like chocolate but is very good. At the end, we sampled the different products, from 100% pure chocolate, to 85%, to 77, with and without ginger or chili, to the chocolate syrup, brownie, chocolate tea, and, strangest of all, the chocolate barbecue sauce. It was so good we came back for chocolate BBQ wings the next day.
Dinner was amazing, and we got to try canelazo, a warm drink served with or without alcohol. According to the other girls, it’s much better without alcohol. I also got to try house made ginger ale, wth fresh ginger and lemon and without alcohol. It tastes amazing, but wow, that stuff BURNS going down. Tyler was not a fan.
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| Hiking through the jungle to visit the waterfalls was an amazing journey. |
Sunday morning, we had breakfast and headed out to the waterfalls. It’s either a 6 dollar ‘taxi’ or a two-hour hike to get to the cable car, so we elected to share the cost of the taxi. We rode standing up in the back of a truck along a bumpy road, passing people, cars, and a small sugarcane juice stand on a road that should rightfully only be a one-lane road. Then it was another 5 dollars for the cable car out to where the hike through the cloud forest starts.
When I first looked at Mindo, the term ‘cloud forest’ made me think of tall trees, misty fog, and birds chirping everywhere.
This is almost exactly nothing like that.
The sword ferns are the size of small palm trees. There’s a constant drip-drip as water from the rain the night before falls from leaf to leaf on its way down. The path is more of a mat of dead and decomposing leaves than dirt, and everything is slick and wet to the touch. The only noise was a distant sort of hum or buzz from insects. Occasionally you get a view of the rest of the valley, covered in trees, but the rest of the time it’s a mix of giant, human-sized leaves and tiny flowers of tiny plants that grow from the tiny moss on the long tree roots. It’s like trying to keep your footing on a long, rock-filled slip-and-slide, with a nearly sheer cliff face on one side, and dripping leaves on the other. Part of me was in super-EWWW mode, part of me was fascinated by the crazy variety of plants, and most of me was just trying to move forward while staying upright. Tyler, of course, bounded along with the ease and grace of a monkey.
But the waterfalls…Oh, my. I’ve never seen anything like them. They’re like the jungle: beautiful, mysterious, slippery, commonplace (it’s just water flowing over rocks, right?) and yet it’s so much MORE that you linger to stare at it, trying to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes it so special. You know that there’s more to it than meets the eye, and yet…how to explain it?
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| The gorgeous path through the jungle to get to the waterfalls. |
Does that make any sense at all? I can’t describe it accurately. This is not the forest of the fairy tales I grew up with, where the elves and sprites and fairies might dance in the woods when no one is around. This is the jungle, where a magic as deep and old as time lurks just below the surface. It’s green and lush, and at the same time dying and decaying all around you. It almost feels like a living, breathing organism, inhaling life and growth, exhaling death and decay, conscious you trespass, yet curious to see what you will do.
Not anything like the mosquitos, who found our ankles quite juicy and tender. I’m still not sure how we forgot to put bug spray on our ankles. I guess that’s the price of visiting such otherworldly territory, and we were both happy to pay it. We’re planning to go back to see more butterflies after we finish volunteering.
Back to the relatively mundane world of southern Quito and the markets. We got new volunteers this week, from Canada, the US, Wales, and two from Ireland. I’m counting that as one of the many ways we were blessed on Tuesday.
Tyler signed up this week to work with the older kids, while I stayed with the 1-6 year olds. That means I play with a lot of Legos and blocks, and he plays ball with the 7-17 year olds, until it’s time for the age-specific activities. After lunch on Tuesday, as they played something between volleyball, soccer, and Tyler-ball, one of the kids accidentally threw the ball onto the top of the wall, among the rose bushes at the top. Tyler, mountain goat that he is, easily jumped up to the top of the 12-foot wall, threw the ball back, and came back down. Twice. The third time, there was a grate directly underneath him, so in order to avoid a sprained ankle, he did a sort of jump-and-run-down-the-wall maneuver, which would have been fine if the top layer of bricks had not decided that it was their time to go.
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| Tyler being attended to by the "Abuelo Doctor", Enrique, after his fall. |
This is where we start counting blessings.
1)None of the bricks fell on him; they instead fell around him as he fell. He also didn’t land on any.
2)Despite the fact that he was at least 12 feet up, he managed to fall in such a way that he didn’t hit his head, his spine, or any other super-critical body parts.
3)One of the new girls from Ireland is a nurse and was able to check him out, make sure it was just his wrist that was injured, and splint him up using his jacket, his belt, and an ace bandage from the first aid kit, as well as cleaning up his elbow which got scraped up a bit in the fall.
4)He didn't break anything, as far as we can tell, and his only injury seems to be a sprained wrist.
5)Enrique, our house grandpa, had training as a chiropractor and in general medicine. He checked out Tyler’s wrist, rubbed menthol cream (apparently it’s the Ecuadorian version of IcyHot) all over his wrist, asked him a bunch of questions, did a bunch of exercises with his hand, and pronounced it nothing more than a ‘golpe’, a hit, which should heal fairly quickly. He has been very careful to make sure Tyler is ok and has taken very good care of him.
I’m not sure if Tyler is more concerned that this might prevent him from going canyoning in Baños, or that this will prevent him from using his nice camera. Either way, this week should be interesting!
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