Katy Murtaugh’s Next Big Adventure!

Ecuador: Other Hikes/Trips

Volcano Cotacachi
Cotacachi was a nice, straightforward one-night hike. It’s the mountain (volcano) that Justin lived near the base of. He had climbed it many times before and so knew the route very well. The only bummer was that we didn’t have the best weather and most of the fun of sitting at a top of a mountain (as far I can tell) is looking down at the world below, which is hard to do when you’re surrounded by clouds!

The hike up wasn’t too bad; it was pretty cloudy and pretty chilly as we got higher, but there was no repeat of the jungle pathetic-ness (phew!). It was all just climbing up on rocky terrain surrounded by long grass. By the time we were done though I was quite wiped and a little headache-y from the altitude. At the higher altitudes, the vegetation was fascinating, there was less of the tall grass and more scrub close to the ground and a lot of it looked exactly like different types of coral — it was amazing! Where we camped that night was covered in these green, flat tufts that looked just like astro-turf and it even felt fairly plastic…made for a good solid ground for camping. After a nice dinner of potato flakes with Maggi and a very chilly, restless night, the clouds had only gotten worse and so we weren’t able to summit as planned (we were only 100-200 meters down from it).

The way home was not as much fun as the way up. First, we didn’t get to summit. Then, we didn’t get to take the route back that we had hoped to take back (directly into Justin’s site) and so had to return the same way we came. Then, it was raining. THEN, there was this big party going on in the town below Morlan, so we couldn’t get a ride to his house, which meant that not only did we not get to walk directly down into his site, but we had to get back into town and then to another town and then walk back up to his site!

But, all in all, it was a pleasant trip that was a good introduction for me to normal backpacking. (My first first introduction to backpacking — the jungle — apparently wasn’t a good barometer for what normal backpacking is like.)
Pinan Lakes
Our next backpacking trip was up into the mountains across the valley from Justin’s house. This was meant to be another normal backpacking trip (2 nights), and it would’ve been if hadn’t been for the rain (or maybe it was precisely because of the rain).

We were going up in the mountains to see these lakes that are up there (part of the way up we ran into two little girls who were very curious about us and, in the end, they put my big pack on their donkey’s back for over an hour and for most of the steepest part of the day!). This time I think we were ascending more quickly than on Cotacachi and the altitude definitely got to me more than last time and I needed to just lay low for a while during our lunch break and then it just hurt to keep on going, but bottomline was that we had to keep going until we got to a water source. Which we did and by the time we did the awfulness had passed and it was lovely. I didn’t feel nearly as wiped as at the end of the first day on Cotacachi and so I got take a look at things and walk over to the lake, etc. Buckley found a cow bone and a dead rat, so he was pretty happy too! Also on our way we saw two condors — which we thought at the time were the largest birds in the world (since there’s a big sign near the reserve that says they are), but I looked it up on-line and condors have the 3rd largest wingspan in the world (the African Ostrich is the biggest and the Wandering Albatross and the Marabou Stork have longer wingspans) — but it was still very cool to see these birds flying in the distance and even in the distance they looked huge! Just soaring above us…

Our first night was very bizarre. There was this strange sound coming on the wind that we couldn’t even figure out if it was organic or not — prevailing theories: speckled bear or pteradactyl. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard strange noises again, and then it kept happening and then it was getting louder and more frequent and I could not figure it out (well, unless I was right about almost getting mauled by a bear). Finally it was close enough that I could hear that it was just the wind! Where we were camped was pretty flat, but with peaks all around; it made a pretty crazy effect! (I think what heard the night before was actually just a weird sounding cow through the wind.)

The next day was when the rain hit, well, in the afternoon really (we spent the morning lounging around, which it turns out wasn’t the best idea). We had to scramble to find a place to camp, and ended up searching down in a valley in a cow pasture, which was even more difficult because of all the cow poo everywhere! Eventually we found something that was semi-okay, scrambled to get out of the rain and hunkered down for an early night hoping that it would stop by morning. It dumped on us all night long and into the morning, but finally let up enough for us to make an escape — best part: once we made it to the road and were just headed down trying to get home (on this awful cobblestone road), a TRUCK came and rescued us!! We were troopers though and I still had a really fun time. It was certainly nice to get home though!!
Banos
As my time in Ecuador was coming to a close and I was getting…a little tired of the way life worked, we decided that a little trip away from Morlan was in order! So, we got on the bus and headed for Banos, a small tourist-y town south of Quito.

While the food was generally disappointing (and sometimes horrible), we did find a nice little cafe we liked a lot (run by a very wordly, European-y couple — I forget what it was called, I think it was “cherry” in Spanish). And, we rented a scooter for a little while, which was much more fun than I ever would have expected, and we went on a horse-back riding trip for a few hours in the mountains (and Justin’s horse almost bucked him off!) and that was lovely and mainly just a nice time away from normal life!
I guess that’s it!! That’s my time in Ecuador in a nutshell. There are a bunch of things I’ve left out which might seem important, but they just were (like I took Spanish classes for a few weeks, we had to go to Quito a lot and there were always things going on there, how friggin’ cold it was in Justin’s site, blah, blah, blah)…I guess they just don’t make the cut!

NEXT STOP: FIJI! (by way of Los Angeles and Auckland!)

January 18, 2004 in South America