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At several occasions proven-to-be-unreliable-or-out-of-date Footprints and Lonely Planets made us go on a quest for the bus station ...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