Equatorial travelogue

I just got back yesterday from my expedition to Ecuador with the phenomenal birding tour company Wings, an outfit which I cannot recommend highly enough.  As I mentioned in my previous post, I love Ecuador, but with the planning and leadership of a Wings guide, this was a really special trip.

We spent most of the time near the charming town of Mindo, in a lodge called Séptimo Paraiso (Seventh Heaven).   The name is apt.  The lodge was comfortable, the food was great, and the hikes and birding were stupendous.  In nine days I saw 273 species of birds.  (If you want to get an idea of the phenomenal biodiversity of this tiny country, you should know that 37 of the species I saw were different kinds of tanager, and 43 were hummingbirds.  For comparison purposes, here in upstate New York, we have two tanagers -- one of them quite rare -- and only one kind of hummingbird.)

Of course, the birds aren't the whole reason I love Ecuador.  The scenery is amazing, largely due to the steep-sided ridges and rushing rivers of the Andes.  The weather (where I was, at least) was refreshingly mild -- 80 F during the day, down to maybe 55 F at night.

Rio Mindo [all photographs, unless otherwise marked, were taken by me]

Séptimo Paraiso sits at 0 degrees, 0 minutes, 2 seconds south latitude.  That means the front door was, give or take, 200 feet from the Equator.  We used a GPS on one of our outings to find the exact spot -- within appropriate error bars, of course -- and I took a picture of our entire group straddling it.

The four people on the left are in the Northern Hemisphere, the four on the right in the Southern Hemisphere.

Besides the avifauna, the plant life is fantastic as well.  (And the two are intimately connected; the flora are usually specialized to be pollinated by one particular bird, butterfly, moth, or bat, so high diversity in fauna usually implies high diversity in flora.)  I consider myself a fairly competent field botanist, but I was seldom able to identify plants beyond family, and sometimes not even that.  That, of course, didn't stop me from appreciating them.

"Something in the amaryllis family" is the best I could do with this one.  But it sure is pretty, isn't it?

We did have more than a few truly stunning birds, of course.  Three of them that stand out in my mind are the rare Scarlet-bellied Dacnis, which our guide said we were really amazingly lucky to see:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The Torrent Duck, which is somehow able to swim upstream in rivers that would easily knock a grown man off his feet:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And a Crimson-mantled Woodpecker that positively modeled for the camera:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

One of the difficulties of birding as a hobby, however, is that it does not cater to late risers.  I consider myself something of a lark, but after six days of getting up at four in the morning, it was beginning to wear on me a little:

Me in the lounge at Séptimo Paraiso, waiting for some kind soul to bring me a glass of wine and rub my aching feet

The altitude was also a bit tricky.  On day trips into the highlands, all of us became breathless after even brief walks uphill.  The highest we went was 14,400 feet, at Papallacta Pass, but it was foggy and spitting rain (and windy and about 35 F), so I didn't get any pictures.  I did get a few nice shots of Yanacocha, at 13,200 feet:

I'm hoping that all of this hiking around up in the mountains will translate to better endurance for running here at home.  We'll see how that goes.

Anyhow, all in all it was a fantastic trip.  To end this, here are a few things I learned about Ecuador on this trip:

• The Ecuadorian people are, by and large, some of the nicest, most generous people on Earth.  Despite my toddler-level Spanish (more on that in a moment), I was greeted everywhere by smiles and waves. 
• That said, if you put your typical Ecuadorian behind the wheel of a car, watch out.  Passing zones, lanes, speed limits, and even stop signs are considered gentle suggestions at best.  Horns are used to communicate a variety of things, such as, "Hi," "Get the hell out of my way," and "My car has a horn."  The last full day of birding, I was with a guide named Jorge, who is a friendly young man who laughs a lot and has an encyclopedic knowledge of South American birds, and who turns into a complete lunatic when he turns the key in the ignition of his truck.  (He crossed himself every time he got into the driver's seat.  I'm not sure if I was supposed to consider this a good sign or a bad sign.)  He was the one who drove us up to the aforementioned Papallacta Pass.  He gave me a big grin as he turned off the highway onto something that barely qualified as a road.  I can say honestly that of the ten scariest things that have happened to me in my life, seven of them happened in the next half-hour.  We drove steadily uphill on narrow dirt roads with potholes the size of lunar craters, large stretches of which had a rock wall on one side and a hundred-foot drop (sans guard rails, of course) on the other.  I think I left permanent finger dents in the door handle of Jorge's truck.
• If you are going to travel in a country with 250 different species of hummingbirds, don't wear a red shirt.  Hummingbirds consider humans in red shirts to be enormous flowers.  You will spend the entire day dodging small, brightly-colored, feathery projectiles, and trying not to scream like a little girl.
• Bring enough cash along.  Neither my credit card nor my bank access card worked in the Ecuadorian ATM machines, for reasons I still have yet to figure out.  (I had called and notified my bank about my trip prior to leaving, so it wasn't that they thought my card(s) had been hacked and put a stop on them.)  This put me in the uncomfortable position of having to purchase things only at places that accepted credit cards, which was about 5% of the places we went.
• The food is amazing.  They have fresh fruits whose names I could barely pronounce, but which are beyond delicious.  I also had ceviche that has my mouth watering just remembering it.
• My one big regret about this trip is that I didn't put some time into learning more Spanish.  I don't ever want to be That Guy -- the American who goes abroad and expects everyone to speak English and do things the way they're done back home.  The Ecuadorians were remarkably gracious about my pathetic mangling of their language, however; my last day in Quito, I got a grinning thumbs-up from a waiter after ordering a surf & turf, a glass of red wine, and a bottle of mineral water at a restaurant, all in Spanish.  I'm sure he was on some level humoring me, but still, it was nice.  So if you go to another country, spend the six months before you go learning some of the language.  It goes a long way.

Anyhow, there you are -- a brief travelogue of a wonderful country.  I know I'll be back.  You can't do justice to a place like this in just one or two short visits.

I'm thinking a few years would do the trick.