After departing the Galapagos we arrived back in Quito and made our way to Mindo, a cloud forest a couple of hours away. It promised hikes and lush green forests and cooler temperatures again.
Mindo is meant to be quite a tourist destination so we weren’t entirely sure what to expect, but it turned out to be fairly rustic rather than the brash vibe of a couple of the Galapagos destinations, and as a bonus with plenty of cheap places to eat and have an all important coffee.
As an aside, with our coffee one morning we decided to try something from the menu called Quimbolitos, with know idea what it was. Thankfully it turned out to be a delicious steamed cake. Mmmm….
We had a few days in Mindo with one of them featuring a hike up through the Cloud Forest in search of exotic birds and beasts. In reality, the forest is so dense that spotting many critters was always going to be a challenge, however, we managed to see an Agouti before we even got into the forest proper, along with some monkeys (unknown brown ones!).
We also heard lots of birds and saw several of them (although almost always flying away too fast for us to get a good look) and Richard spotted the first ‘real’ spider of our trip. Eek!!!
Ok so it was no tarantula, but he assured me it was still the biggest spider he’s ever seen – I decided not to go into the little ramshackle toilet in the woods where he shouted that I should have a look for myself!!
(Admin – imagine a spider twice the size of the biggest house spider you have ever seen! Richard assures me he was very brave in taking this picture!?)
The other main activity we did was to ride the ‘Tarabita’ – best described as a high-rise window cleaners trolley attached to a cable, pulled across a ravine at significant height using a car engine for propulsion! There were a couple of bench seats at either end of said trolley, but if you weren’t one of the first four on you just had to stand up in the middle – for someone who decidedly does not have a head for heights, I definitely preferred the initial journey where I got a seat, to the return where I had to stand up with a clear view of the precipitous drop below me!
All that said though, it whizzed across, so the terror was over quickly and it did provide some great views of the cloud forest before and after our hike through along the river taking in five separate waterfalls.
Sloth Journeys 