Sins! ... and our first visit to the White City

On the weekend of the 15^th and 16^th of March, Will, Veerle (our new recently-moved-in interested-in-caving Belgian house-mate) and I went to Ibarra, a city just three hours by bus away from Quito.

After a first reconnaissance trip through town (and what a town ... with a very pleasant atmosphere, beautiful squares and churches and of course a volcano nearby!), we had almuerzo in a small place in the company of an elderly woman who - just like my grandmother - kept on telling us we had to eat well! In the afternoon, we planned to visit a museum, but all of Ibarra’s museums as well as its tourist office appear to be closed in the weekends ... (so much for being a tourist destination for your compatriots! :-s) So, we couldn’t do much else to do than go for an ice cream in Ecuador’s oldest and most renowned ice salon ;-), take a nap, explore Ibarra’s outskirts on foot, witness a wedding at night and then go for pizza!

On Sunday, we saw everyone in town running around with small bouquets made out of strips of stem of a type of palm tree. We correctly supposed that people took these “palms” to church to be blessed, because - after all - it was Palm Sunday. Their bouquets did look a bit funny, but hey, in Belgium we even use buxus buxus to replace palm leaves ...

It was only after we had read some posters in church that we found out that with the usual type of palm (wanted for its wax and the manufacture of jewelry, but especially to be used on Palm Sunday, when their leaves decorate churches and bless people’s houses) going extinct, the parrots that live and nest only in this type of tree go extinct as well (read more and more, in Spanish though!).

Read here for a cool article on the new 7 deadly sins. These were frequently mentioned (and interpreted to the advantage of both palm and parrot) on El noticiero (the news) that week preceding Palm Sunday. Probably just in case people needed extra arguments to replace their palm leaves by an alternative ...

That Sunday, Will and I actually wanted to visit Cayambe (famous for it’s cheese and biscuits), but stranded in Otavalo, where I (oops, deadly sin??) went shopping and where we had a delicious fruit salad (greed!)!

Some pictures

Of butterflies, orchids and Hummingbirds ...

Will and I finally made it to Mindo on the weekend of March 8-9th. Mindo is a small, cute village in a subtropical cloudforested area (just on the other side of the Pichincha volcano, but yet a two hour drive ...).

At several occasions proven-to-be-unreliable-or-out-of-date Footprints and Lonely Planets made us go on a quest for the bus station ... Finally arrived there, we bumped into Marion, the Austrian girl we met at the language school during our first weeks in Quito. She had been working as a volunteer with children in Mindo and that weekend, she took her mum, sister and aunt - who came over for a holiday - to visit her scheme.

After settling into a pretty wooden and yet inexpensive cabin / guesthouse with shared bathroom, we visited one of the mariposarios, a butterfly garden where they breed different types of butterflies to - later - release again in nature; went to the orquideario, a private garden full of orchids of a guy who collected at least 200 different species and saw a lot of hummingbirds (quinde in Quichua).

On the Sunday, we went for a long walk in a nearby protected forest. A so-called tarabita - a metal carriage moving over a steel tyrolienne - took us to the other side of the valley where several routes led us to a multitude of waterfalls (santuario de las cascades it was called!). We saw at least six of them and eventually cooled our feet in one of the streams (brrr). Will went for a run in the jungle and before returning back to Quito, we concluded a nice, relaxed weekend with mango and a piza at the local bakery!

Check out our Mindo Picasa webalbum