Mindo

Escaping the city yet again, Phil and I took a 2 hour bus northwest to a little town called Míndo, in the lower elevation cloud forest. The area is famous among birders (yes, we are that dorky) and so we just HAD to check it out.

My previous assistant Adrián had given us the tip to stay at hostel colibrí (hummingbird hotel), which is located outside of the downtown area in a garden full of orange, papaya, and banana trees and plenty of beautiful flowers. They touted that they also had “primary” forest trails, which ended up being old farmland—but pretty nonetheless and there was a big rushing river nearby.

We were super excited about our secluded room on the top floor of a large wooden house—until later that evening when about 15 others showed up to also stay the night there. Oh well, their noise still beat that of the city. Phil and I took a night walk with our headlamps to try to find frogs and cool insects and spiders (it had been raining most all of the afternoon). We found a few, but less than I would have liked.

In the morning we got some good birding in (in total Phil added 29 species to his life list). It also turned out that the restaurant near our hostel put out some hummingbird feeders—and so we got close-up views of 8 brilliantly colorful species, as we sipped our coffee and scarfed down free eggs and crepes (yes, I’m not getting any thinner here yet…)

In the afternoon we walked 3 miles to the mariposaria (butterfly house) at the other end of town. It turned out to be cool to see all the eggs, caterpillars, chrysalises, and hatching butterflies—but the rest was sub-par. There were tons of butterflies in various stages of death (ok, Phil says we’re all dying anyway. He likes to look at the cup as half full, and I, half empty). Anyway, they had only common species, which from a conservation standpoint I suppose is good. We walked home in the rain and slept very well that night, despite several loud women coming in at 12:30a.m. The next day after another leisurely breakfast watching hummers (NOT the truck), we caught a cab to the main highway and flagged down a bus headed for Quito.