Justin McCandless

Last Saturday (25/07/09) I went hiking at Podocarpus, this time at the entrance located on the way to Vilcabamba. I had already been to the San Francisco entrance and the Bombuscaro entrance in Zamora, so this was entrance 3/3 for me. I went with Ángel and Paola from Arcoiris, as well as the other intern at Arcoiris Audrey and her boyfriend.

On the way up to the refuge there in one of the Arcoiris trucks, a landslide had blocked the road completely about three-fourths of the way up, so we had to get out and walk the rest. The refuge was really nice, and Arcoiris helped build it I was told, but it wasn't open since the road was blocked.

This hawk was perched on the roof of a palm leave hut thing outside of the refuge, just sitting there the whole time we were there. Pretty cool, I just wish I would have gotten bit more clear of a picture.

We then headed up from the refuge on our trail until we actually got above the cloud forest. This picture is looking down just before we got fully into the clouds. In Spanish this type of terrain is called páramo, which might be translated to moor but I don't know how accurate that is. It is too high up and too cold for the typical cloud forest trees to grow, so it's dominated by thick, low shrubs instead. This is where llamas live, though I don't know how many actual wild llamas there are left anymore.

Now we're in the clouds. It was incredibly windy up there, which was kind of scary with that huge cliff in the picture. And looking over the cliff is just all white, it's crazy. Every once in awhile I get all fired up and want to climb Cotopaxi or one of the other massive volcanoes near Quito on my way out of Ecuador, but I can't even imagine how brutal those hikes must be. The highest point we reached on this hike was 3100 meters, and I don't even want to guess how high Cotopaxi is, but it's a lot higher than that. If there's snow and you're on the equator, it's high up.

Here's a close up of some of the plants up there, which are really different. They're all really thick and tough, like it would not be fun to walk around up there if you weren't on a trail or weren't wearing boots. You can also see the fade to white looking background that was all around us.

Now we're heading back into the cloud forest, though we still haven't come out of the clouds. That combined with how the trees are all covered by thick moss and other plants like that make it look pretty eerie.

Near the same area as the last picture, I just thought this one was cool. I was messing around with the macro mode on my camera.

Here we have fully come back down into the cloud forest, below the clouds. This is looking out away from Loja, so the road goes to Vilcabamba and Malacatos, which must be some of those valleys out there. You can also see how people are farming straight on the side of a mountain, which happens a lot in Ecuador where there's not much flat land.

We wound up back at the refuge (the hawk was gone), which was now opening up since the landslide had been cleared. I was fully soaked, frozen, and covered in mud by then, and had destroyed my shoes for at least the third time since I got to Ecuador. But that's mostly my fault since my hiking gear consisted of jeans, a sweatshirt, and tennis shoes. As usual. The whole hike was only about 3 hours long, but felt kind of brutal due to the wind and mud and cold. The Lagunas del Compadre hike, which I had read a lot about while translating all of the Arcoiris website, is at least twice as long. I'd like to do that one before I leave, but I'm definitely getting some boots and maybe a jacket first if I do.

On our way back into Loja, we stopped for lunch at some little restaurant on the outskirts of town. I don't know if I've mentioned how the Ecuadorians are much closer to their food sources here (less prepackaged meat, more dead animal carcass), but they had a dead pig hanging from a hook right outside the restaurant. Then they'd just go chop off some meat and cook it whenever anybody wanted anything. It was actually really good, not the same as US barbeque but similar.

After hanging out there for awhile we headed into town, dropping Audrey and her boyfriend off and saying bye for good, since that Friday was her last day at work. They were now going to go travel South America a bit before heading back to France. I got dropped off after that and went straight for the shower and a nap.

So it's back to me being the only intern at Arcoiris again. Speaking of that, I've finally gotten the news items I needed from Arcoiris (and improvised everything else myself), so I'm just about ready to launch the new website now. I still am working on making my update system more robust and user friendly, but it'll be nice to get my hard, hard work up on the internet and doing something.