Mindo
So Saturday morning woke up at around 7:30 and was in a van by 8:am with 6 other people from GVI on my way to Mindo (which is a little town located within the cloud forest of Ecuador).
It took us about 4 hours to get there. It´s a pretty small town, basically one street of stores and bars and stuff like that. But it´s known for outdoor activities and relaxtion. Our hostal was super cute with all these hammocks to just chill out in and it had these flowers that grew from the beams of the porches and dangled down and hummingbirds would come and eat out of the flowers.
Annnnnyway. Saturday we went out for lunch then got ready and went over to this river where one of the guys I was with described perfectly what we did as ¨a poor mans white water rafting.¨ The 7 of us sat on these like HUGE intertubes (about 8 of them) attched together with rope. We were given helmets and life perservers with about one of the three buckles actually working. We were then sent down the river with two guides (who were amazing at what they did). Now this river legitimetly has like calss 2 or class 3 rapids - and we were on larger versions of the intertubes you buy at walmart. BUt the guides did an amazing job of jumping off the tubes and into the water and pushing our tube out of the way of big rocks or bracing us to go over minor little cliff things, not really cliffs at all like 3 foot drops.
After that adventure we all strolled through town, bought lots of big beers and had a cocktail hour until dinner. Delious Pizza. Then it was out to a karoke bar and a dance bar and then back to the hostal where there were a bunch of guys with guitars who were living on the bottom floor of our hostal. We spent the next 2 hours listening to them play and singing along to the english songs (mostly the beatles) that they knew how to play.
Needless to say I was quite tired the next day, but we were off to go zip-lining! It was really cool. 10 different zip lines spread across a portion of the forest. Some were really high up! which made me a little nervous but I enjoyed it. Really good views. Pretty much shortly after returning from zip-lining we got back into the van and headed back to Otavalo.
On the way back we stopped at this huge mall outside of Quito to eat lunch in the food court (which has about 25 different food places). It was really weird to be in a mall again, especially to know that places like the schools we teach at were within 2.5 hours of this crazy huge and modern mall. But I did get to enjoy a delicious turkey sub and we ALL know how much I love a good turkey sub.
