Me gusta Mindo

As Kelly described, we had a bit of a long, crazy day of traveling to get back to Mindo. If you remember, on our trip to Atacames I got hit in the face with a branch travelling fairly fast, sitting on the top of a bus. Well, this last time, right as we were leaving Estero, I somehow sliced a large chunk of skin off of my big toe...it´s pretty much healed now. However now I have crazy stomach problems and have been shitting like crazy for like three days now...besides my bad luck with injuries and illnesses, Mindo has been mui divertido (very fun).

On Saturday we had a free day, we slept in till 7 and then had a breakfast of...yep...veggies and plantains. Kelly and I wanted to get the Mindo experience since we are here for just a bit longer. Mindo offers many things, but the river was a bit cold for innertubing and while birds are cool and all, we aren´t interested in paying ridiculous amounts of money to look at them. So that left us with the coolest option, ziplining. We took about a 45 minute hike up to the higher part of the canopy in Mindo valley to a zipline company that Milton knows. Two young excited Ecuadorians (I think we were the first group of the day) strapped us into our harnesses, popped old school helmets on our domes (no hairnets!), and gave us heavily preused gloves. They then led us up to the first zipline and explained the rules in spanish. Hmmm...I get most of the rules, missed a couple words, eh, its cool. I fly down the zipline, canopy glowing, vibrant, verde below, Juan stops me at the end. I think to myself, well, that wasn´t very long...or really that exciting, not really worth ten bucks. Then he leads us to another one, oh okay, two for ten bucks thats a good deal. Turns out we take ten total leading us over and back and across and down, all over the canopy, with little trails in between. Along the way they point out numerous tiny orchids and convince us to ride the zipline in less conventional ways and if you see the pictures some of them are a bit suggestive. Very fun.

We then keep on hiking up the road for another half hour or so and come to a cable car that takes you across the canopy to a series of waterfalls. Which I am sure are amazing to swim in...if it wasn´t fairly cold out. We hike around for awhile and check out some waterfalls but by this time we are all starving and a bit tired of walking, so we head back.

Yesterday we spent most of the day working. Kelly and I built some garden beds and transplanted some tomates, pumpkins, garlic and a mystery plant while Steffen and Milton got the stove working and modified a bamboo frame to fit it. In the afternoon we made a map of the trail we built in Estero de Platano and fleshed out ideas we had for making the trail into an interpretive trail. After that Kelly and I looked over a document that Milton was writing for his bird watching programs and edited the english parts. By this time it was dinner and we headed back to the casa to eat and have a beer.