Day 19: 10 May – Last day of Spanish lessons.

Today I wake up a little later than usually, because my last Spanish lesson is in the afternoon. I have the whole morning for bringing away my laundry to the lavanderia, have breakfast and buy some bread, water and other things I need. Rest of the day I will probably be having classes and visiting the café

Day 18: 9 May – Waterfalls of Mindo

This day we want to visit the waterfalls, to take a swim and to dive into them. After lunch, we walk up towards the cable cart which will take us to the waterfalls. While we are walking, the other French group passes us in a camionetta, sissies. When we reach the other side with the cable cart, a guide points us in the direction of one waterfall. (The other direction has six). Where we walk 2 hours to and back again to view one waterfall, where we can’t even swim or dive.
Back again, another guide apologises for his colleague and points us in the right direction. However, we find no waterfall where it is possible to really dive into the water. One of them has a ladder, but it is not possible to get all the way up. The next one is too shallow and L. hurts himself pretty bad on a cable where he went down a level. Luckily, this time I brought my medpack.
When we get back to the cable cart, we all are quite wet. We get a free ride down to Mindo from a family from Quito and we lunch/dine in a Italian-style restaurant. We get our stuff from the hostel and head for the bus back to Quito. It takes about 2 and a half hour. When we get back to town, we need to take a bus to the centre. A fully packed bus (like a can of people, because it’s the last one, absolutely crazy) takes us, but we get out far too late and have to take a taxi to go further.

Back at the hostel, I need my room key, but there seems to be no-one. I call Bernardo and he calls his wife who is at the hostel to give me the room key. Although that one is missing at the moment. But I get my room and I can sleep.

Day 17: 8 May – Canopying in Mindo

This morning I’m waiting early again in front of Kallari. This time to go with Sarah and Riwal to Mindo. After about 10 minutes I see them in front of their house with A. and L. We try to catch a bus on the corner directly to La mitad del mundo, but we see none, so we take another and have to switch somewhere in between. When we get to Ofelia station our bus to Mindo has just left and the next one goes at 4 o’clock. A taxi-driver knows that the busses towards Mindo leave very often from La mitad del mundo, so we let him take us there. When it takes some time for these busses to pass, Sarah tries to hitchhike, without success. But finally a bus arrives, loaded with people. We have to stand for about 2 hours. When we arrive at the edge of Mindo, it’s raining hard and we have to take a camionetta down.
Our hostel (Rubby) is a wooden house without sound isolation, but it’s cute and serves its purpose. We go almost right away downstairs for our lunch, where Norma is cooking us a fine meal. Her husband Marcelo wants to take us and 4 other French to go bird watching in the early morning next day for $40, but when later appears that the other group isn’t going, this amount is a bit too much for us.
When our bellies are full again, we head out to a travel agency (the rain has ceased) and decide to do some canopying. Meaning we hung individually in a harness on a zip line, racing fast above the canopy. I didn’t expect myself to do something adventurous like this, but I actually liked the adrenaline. Towards the end it started to rain again, which made the zip lines more smooth and the ride faster. But it also made it harder to see the signals of the guides. Everything went well, luckily, thanks to our experienced guides.

When we returned, it was already quite late to do anything else. So we relaxed a little in the hammocks at the hostel and went for dinner at a nice restaurant later. I got a nice vegetable stew with lentils, which reminded me a little of India and Audrey’s cooking at the same time. Some home-made coffee ice cream later, brought by a Dutch guy who was visiting the girls working there.