Ziplining and Volcanoes

Yesterday we had the opportunity to drive from our tree top oasis to a small eco-tourism based town called Mindo. It was a really cool town with rafting which they describe as rigging multiple float tubes together and given' er hell. But we had our sights set on another adventure, zip-lining through the Andes. It was crazy cool and the biggest zipline I've ever done. We did 10 cables and the highest was over 300m off the ground. I'll put together a short video to capture the size of the mountains we cruised over. After that we went to an artisan chocolate shop which made chocolate from scratch. We were given a tour through the processes and then sat town to test it out. In truth chocolate, pure 100% chocolate tastes like crap...hardly able to swallow. However once you mix it with sugar, in our case pure cane sugar it tastes phenomenal, almost just adding a flavor to the sugar itself. We also tried a spiced chocolate which burnt my tongue and then a chocolate barbeque sauce which I purchased in the gift shop, its delicious! I also got some different varieties of bars each with a different darkness :) and some passion fruit jam! From there we were back off to our treetop resort to check out and each our last meal which was pork ribs and salad. I just re-read all this and wow it was a big day, because we also drove back into Quito and checked back into Hotel Plaza for the night! I was able to buy some skype credit and get ahold of my dad and Rachel which ended a busy day perfectly :)

Our driver, Johnny mentioned he would take us up to the local volcano, Antisana, that is capped with glaciers...we agreed and decided to wake up at 5am to get on the road by 6am. Woofta another early day but the drive was great. We drove through small Quechua towns that are the indigenous peoples remaning from the days of the Spanish invasion. The condor bird is Equadors national bird and the locals informed us that we had the chance to see 3 of them right up the road. They are HUGE birds even from the distance that we saw them from. The drive started to turn into rolling hills of grasslands with massive incised valleys cutting them apart. It started to rain but as the weather got better this volcano rose out of the air. It was a cone volcano bowl in shape capped with snow and glaciers. First off I worked near Glacier National Park last summer and didn't see one so I was giddy with excitement and took plenty of pictures.


The drive took some time to get up to this area which by the way is at 11,000ft and the top of Antisana reached a mighty ~18,000ft. The air was thin and was apparent after a short jog in which I almost threw up and quickly got a headache. my b. From here we were all super tired from such jam packed days so we headed back to Quito early and arrived at about 3:00pm. It's nice to relax, chat it up online with rach, catch up on what we've been doing, upload photos, and grab some grub down the road.



Tomorrow we're off to the Galapagos with a 9:30 flight to a small town to pick up others and then straight to Baltra Isle. We should be moving into what we think is the station duplex at about 12:30pm. Since we've been in the same time zone we'll be changing an hour back from WI because we'll be hundreds of miles into the Pacific Ocean. Off to dinner and to grab some dollar pilseners.