18 Dec, Quilatoa Loop

I slept, but not the greatest as Chugchilán is pretty high in elevation. I got up and got ready. Soon after I got up I heard the air horn of the bus letting everyone know that it was there. As I headed toward the bus, Mama Hilda had made bags of popcorn for us to take as a snack on the bus. She is such a sweet old, indigenous lady.

We all got on the bus and headed toward Quilatoa. The thing about Quilatoa, not only is it a beautiful area, but there is a crater there. That´s the big deal. I didn´t think we were going to be able to see it because during the whole bus ride, it was cloudy.

We arrived in Quilatoa, walked through the quiet village and went to the crater. When we got to the edge I could hardly believe it. There wasn´t one cloud in the crater. I was a magnificient view. A blue lake in the middle of this steep walled crater in the middle of nowhere. It was great. We took some pictures and headed down to the lake. Once at the bottom, we were greeted by indigenous man who promptly offered to rent kayaks to us. We told him that we were planning on doing to the hike Chugchilán from there. There insisted that instead of hiking back out of the crater and then along the rim to get to the trail, we paddle across the lake and head up the other side of the crater to the lake.

I thought it sounded like a great idea, so we did. The had a raft that everybody paddled in, and Erin and I took a two man kayak. Bummer thing was, he ran out of paddles so I used this paddles carved out of a log. It probably weighed close to 15 or 20 lbs. I didn´t get far and I was struggling. It was part of the fun though. More fun included having to tow the raft. He didn´t want us going to far ahead so he tied us to the raft. We ended up pulling them.

We arrived on the other side and $2 later, we were free. Tamara didn´t go on the hike becuase she wasn´t feeling well. She decided to go back with the man, walk out of the crater and take the bus back to Chugchilán.

There wasn´t anything in that crater except the one man with the rafts and a potatoe field on where we where hiking. I´m not sure why anyone would put potatoes in a crater miles away from anything, but someone did.

We started up the side of the crater, through the field of potatoes and the girls were getting a little scared. I was loving it, but they thought there was actually going to be a trail. There was a little one, from whoever was growing the spuds, but it was very steep and they didn´t like it.

We got to the top and what do you know, we couldn´t see anything because the clouds were so thick. Just as we started down, however, it was like someone knew we were coming and moved them out of the way for us. We could see for miles and more importantly, where we were going.

We hiked down along a line of eucaliptus trees and through some farms. We came to the small village of Guayaba. Some little kids ran over to us and wanted us to take their picture. After we took them, one said, "paga, paga" which means pay, pay. We didn´t, and we moved along. We stopped to eat some lunch around the corner in a shady area and took a break.

Thirty minutes or so later, and we came to a cayon that we had to cross. This was really cool becuase there was this tiny little trail that went into the cayon. Down, down, down we went along the windy trail along the side of the cayon. We crossed a little stream and then back up. Up, up, up and about a hour later and we arrived back in Chugchilán. It was a great hike of about eight hours and probably no more than six miles. We all had a great time thought and didn´t get attacked by any dogs or anything.

A got cleaned and rested up and hung out before dinner. I met a cool guy and a work partner of his in the common room. His went by "Dups", with parents from Sri Lanka, he was from St. Johns, New Foundland and lived lived in Montreal. He was there for work. The woman he was working for, well, I don´t remember her name. But she was Dutch and worked for the school in Chugchilán.

They over heard me talking about how I had to leave the next morning to get to the highway to meet with Natura and Michael and we were heading north or Quito the next day to a little place called Mindo. They said that instead of taking the bus, they would drive me to the highway in the morning as they had to pickup some supplies in Ambato anyway.

I gladdly accepted the offer, if not for the sake of being able to get two more hours of sleep, to have someone to talk to. They said, "you can go with us, but you can´t be out at the Jeep any later than 06:15." I didn´t mind.