Month: November 2024

Today, Saturday, is my final day in Ecuador. I start heading home very early tomorrow from the Quito airport. The power was out overnight from 12 to 3 a.m. again. It has been a relaxed day with breakfast at 6:30, then some time watching birds and talking with other guests at the breakfast table. Then at 9 a.m., just when the power was due to go out again, we left for a tour of a frog research center called Wikiri. Mercedes had arranged the tour for us and a taxi to take us there. It was a 45 minute ride to a smaller town outside Quito.

Our guide, Pedro, was a young Ecuadorian who spoke very good English. He took us on a 2-hour tour of the facility which was quite impressive. Most of the terrariums with frogs were housed in nice used shipping containers placed in a circuit around the campus. We learned lots about the native frogs of Ecuador, of which there are somewhere around 400 species, and the work being done to conserve and study them. we even ,earned about the food that’s grown for them, from little flies to cockroaches. And we sampled some baked meal worms, which were not bad at all, and flour made from crickets and spiced with various spices.

When the tour finished, the taxi driver who had brought us was waiting outside to pick us up. We also brought along some crickets that Mercedes had ordered from Wikiri to feed her 7 frogs.

We arrived back at Puembo Birding Garden hotel about 12:45 and the power was still out, even though it should have come on at 12. Mercedes and her daughter warmed up our lunch somehow, which the other guests had eaten a little earlier. It was chicken tamales and salad, with blueberry sherbet for dessert, all very good.

We spent the afternoon relaxing in the dining area, watching the birds and talking with a couple from Houston who were about to start a birding tour on Monday. It was about 75 degrees and sunny, and so much more comfortable than the heat and humidity of the Amazon. The power finally came back on about 2:45 p.m.

Tonight I’ll pack and try to get to sleep early after dinner at the hotel. A taxi is coming to take Nathan and I to the airport by 5 a.m. tomorrow morning for my 7 a.m. flight to Miami and then Dallas, then Seattle. Nathan will stay another night at an airport hotel and then return to Cuenca on Monday.

We woke up this morning, Friday, at 5:30 during a power outage. But Mercedes had warned us last night so we were ready. I got dressed by the light of my headlamp. Today was the day for a birding tour of Antisana National Park. Mercedes put out breakfast food for us to serve ourselves, including croissants, granola, yogurt, juice and fresh fruit. The power returned at 6:00 and we ate breakfast outside, near the bird feeders. The weather was clear and the temperature was in the low 50s, very refreshing after the heat and humidity at Yachana. Driver and birding guide Luis, the same one who brought us to Quito yesterday, picked us up at 6:30.

We drove through a few towns on the way to the park, climbing all the time. The park is above the tree line, and is classified as páramo. There’s a dam reservoir named Mica Lake at the highest point you can drive to and that was our ultimate destination. But we stopped many times along the way to find various birds, climbing in altitude all the time.

At the lake, we walked along a path to a point where we overlooked the lake and had a good view of the birds in the water. There were several types of ducks. We could also see a mama and baby llama, several alpacas, many deer and several horses from that point. The lake is the source of some of Quito’s water.

After returning to the car, we drove back down out of the park, stopping to see more birds. Not far outside, we stopped at the Tambo Condor restaurant, famous among birders for its view of Andean Condors as they soar above a cliff on the other side of the valley. We ate a good lunch there among many other birding groups while looking out their large windows at a few condors and three or four species of hummingbirds at the restaurant’s feeders, including the aptly named Shining Sunbeam that’s mostly orange and has rainbow colors on its back.

It was a good day not only for birds and sightseeing, but also for my Spanish practice because Luis understood some English but didn’t really speak any, so I talked with him only in Spanish. The drive back to Puembo Birding Garden took about 90 minutes and we arrived about 3:30. We thanked and said goodbye to Luis. I’m still tallying up all the birds we saw, but it was a lot.

Thursday was our day to travel from Yachana Lodge to Quito. The power had been out for 3 hours overnight plus there was a thunderstorm with rain overhead sometime in the very early morning. I didn’t get quite enough sleep. But we packed up and brought our backpacks to the dining area before our 7 a.m. breakfast, and spotted a few birds from the deck with Jefferson and Guillermo again. Breakfast was pancakes and fried eggs, toast, pineapple, watermelon and tamarindo juice, all very good.

At 8 a.m. we got into the Yachana truck for the last time and drove about 40 minutes to a river bridge that had collapsed a couple of months ago. It appeared like the steel had just given up and collapsed. The day’s driver, Luis, was waiting on the other side of the river. Nathan, Robert and I got into a canoe on our side and then Robert and another man used poles to push the boat to the other side. Voila, problem solved the Ecuadorian way! We said goodbye to Robert and loaded our backpacks into Luis’ Kia.

Luis is a birding guide who had been arranged by Mercedes, the owner of our Quito hotel. We set out on the road to Quito, stopping a few times along the way to look for birds. We also stopped for lunch at a restaurant in the city of Baeza. I had trout a la plancha and some fried plantains (patacones) for lunch. At the highest point of the drive, we saw the volcano Antisana which was snow-covered and beautiful.

We arrived at our hotel at 4:30. It’s in a wealthy-looking neighborhood of Quito and is called Puembo Birding Garden. It’s popular among birders arriving in Quito.

Our dinner at the hotel is scheduled for 7 p.m. and it will be interesting to see if it measures up to the good food we’ve had so far. I’ll be too tired afterwards to write more and we’ll be losing power later, so I’m signing off on this post early.

Each night before going to bed here at Yachana, I’ve been purposefully taking a cold shower. It’s the most refreshing part of the day and allows me to get going much faster in the morning. I woke up before the 6 a.m. sunrise again this morning (Wednesday), quickly got dressed and walked up to the dining and river overlook area to see birds. Jefferson and Guillermo were already there and invited me out on a short bird walk before breakfast. Actually it was more of a ride in the Yachana truck to a birding area a ways down the gravel road. Again we saw quite a few birds and some new ones for me. More than 400 species of birds have been seen in the Yachana area. Amazing!

We returned for a 7:30 breakfast, with Nathan passing time in the dining area by talking to Hilary, the American volunteer. At the end of breakfast, Robert described the day’s three activities: visiting a local farmer, seeing the health clinic being built by the Yachana Foundation, and then visiting a local Kichwa healer in the afternoon.

The Yachana truck took Robert, Nathan and I at about 9 a.m. to the farm, where the farmer, Fabian, told us about the native stingless bees he has that pollinate and make special medicinal honey. He also showed and talked about the cacao and other fruit he grows and we were able to sample them all. Native Ecuadorian oranges have green peels, which is interesting.

About 10:30 we were driven to the Yachana health clinic that is still being built, and Douglas McMeekin was there to explain the funding, staff and volunteers they’re looking for to get it running. We also saw the Foundation’s permaculture projects. Douglas has invested 30 years of his life to this endeavor and it’s impressive.

We returned to the lodge for a lunch of tilapia fish, a staple of their diet because it’s easy to raise in ponds. Before lunch was served Nathan helped Robert with some audio recording equipment that will be used to record Yachana’s bird songs. Then about 3:30 Robert, Hilary, Katty (an Ecuadorian staff member), Nathan and I were driven to the Napo River. There, a motorized boat awaited to take us to the Kichwa village that was about 10 minutes away down the river. So we climbed aboard.

In the village Jose, the 84-year-old healer, performed a cleansing ceremony for each of us, meant to restore a healthy balance. The ceremony involved smoke from a traditional Kichwa cigar and a small bunch of leaves brushed over us. Robert provided a description of the background before Jose started.

After the cleansing, we went up into the home of her and his wife, where Rosa, his wife, showed us how boiled yuca root was pounded into chicha, a fermented liquid that’s a staple of the Kichwa diet. As the last demonstration in the village, we were shown how to use a blow gun and spear, important tools the Kichwa use still to kill local wild animals for food.

Then we returned in the motorized boat, stopping to drift down the river a bit while watching a beautiful sunset at 6 p.m. Dinner was at 7:30 and was another delicious meal with tiramisu as dessert.

Although it was very hot and humid again today, it was easier to take because our activities were less strenuous. But it reached 94 degrees again. We’re just more used to sweating constantly.

It’s 9 p.m. now and the power just went out. I probably won’t be able to publish this until Thursday morning.

Thursday update: the power came back on at midnight but the internet never became available before we left Yachana Thursday morning, so that’s why this post was delayed.

Yesterday we checked out of Hostel Limoncocha after good breakfast and having our laundry done for us. It was a holiday for Ecuadorians, the Independence of Cuenca, and the people in Tena were also celebrating their centennial with some food booths set up.

We had requested a private driver to take us from the hostel to our next destination, Yachana Lodge, about two and a half hours away. Arturo, an employee of the lodge, showed up right on time at 12 p.m. in his one-month-old Chevy club cab truck that was beautiful. A bridge had failed on the main road between the two places, so he had to take another route that included many miles on gravel. He was a careful driver but the gravel didn’t slow him down.

What did slow us was the fact that a ferry crossing the Napo River couldn’t take on its normal payload of two cars because overnight the gravel ramp was covered with mud from a high river flow. (Remember all the rain during the previous evening in Tena?) As we watched and while Nathan took pictures, a man with a high pressure water hose washed the mud away from the gravel ramp. At 2 p.m., we were the first to use the ferry to cross the river that day. But we only had to wait about 15 minutes while the clearing was done. It took maybe five minutes to cross once we were on.

We arrived at Yachana Lodge about 2:30 p.m. and were welcomed by Robert, the manager of operations. He is Ecuadorian and has great English. We were given refrigerated wet hand towels to freshen up, juice and a wonderful lunch right away. Robert explained a few things about the lodge and nonprofit foundation that it supports, then he showed us to our cabin. It’s elevated on a hillside overlooking the Napo River. Spectacular!

He invited us to the deck next to the open air dining area at 4:30, where he had set up a bird spotting scope. The deck also had a view of the river. Jefferson, a 17-year-old Kichwa birding guide, joined us. We saw quite a few birds from the deck. Dinner was another delicious meal at 7 p.m. and then we went on a night walk for a ways down the gravel drive and back, spotting lots of grasshoppers, katydids, and spiders including two different types of tarantulas.

We returned about an hour later. It had been hot and humid, so I took a refreshing cold shower (even though there was lots of hot water) and went to sleep early to be ready for more birding on Tuesday morning at 5:30 a.m.

Today, Robert, Jefferson and his father Guillermo (who is the real birding expert), Hilary, an American volunteer here, and I left in a utility truck in which the bed was fitted with several bench seats. The driver brought us to a partially cleared area where we birded for about 3 hours while walking along a gravel road.

We returned in the truck to the lodge for breakfast and Nathan joined us. Then after lunch and 30 minutes to prepare, we left again to go to a trail that led to three bird blinds. It was quite a hike in the heat and humidity, up and down hills, but we saw four species of manakins and many other birds. It lasted about 2.5 hours and tired me out.

Returning again to the lodge, we were greeted by the owner, Douglas McMeekin, who has lived in Ecuador for more than 30 years and started the Yachana nonprofit to provide a local health clinic, plus the lodge. Over lunch he told us his interesting history and that of Yachana. He’s 82 years old now.

Now we’re taking a break before going on a shorter bird walk to see other species at dusk. And when I arrived in the cabin to write this, at 2:30 p.m., my phone said that it’s 94 degrees but feels like 103 due to the humidity. It’s hot but beautiful here!