Quilotoa- I think i said in my last post that i was heading to quilotoa. i read in my travel book (and heard from my friend anita from belgium) that quilotoa was an incredible place to visit. ill get to why. the only thing is that quilotoa is really far from everything (four hours from quito and 8 hours from guayaquil). so saturday may the 24th we woke up at 7 to get to the bus station by 9. i was traveling with pepe and aniko, evelyn decided that she should go back to guayaquil solo that day. we arrived at the terminal a little earlier than normal and caught a bus easy to latacunga. two and a half hours later we were in latacunga waiting for another bus. latacunga is a large town if not small city that is famous for being a market town for the countless andian villages that suround it. saturday was market day and thus public transportation was clogged with not only people but gooods. after about 45 minutes we caught a bus to some town up the hills that the bus driver and his mate assured us was the right place to go. the bus was packed with people and goods (chickens, green plantains and some other stuff) were stacked on the roof. i ended up sitting on some stairs in the door. all the ladies on the bus wore boler hats and everyone spoke quechua. on the map quilotoa is only about 30 km from latacunga but because we mostly climbed all these kilometers it took forever(or about 2 hours). finally we arrived in this other town that will go unamed. there public transportation was non existant so we hitched a ride for the remaining 30 minutes of the trip. the entire ride was really bumpy but we road first through an incredible valley that runs alongside cotopaxi which one of ecuadors largest volcanoes. finally in quilotoa we arrived to find the village clogged with more fog than a depressed san francisco and it was really cold (5'C or in the 40s). we bartered for a cheap hotel room- $5 for two meals, a room and most importantly a wood stove. bundled up we headed to find a meal. i was suprised to find that everyone spoke quechua and everyone dressed like a typical serrana. we were lucky to find that most people spoke spanish. after lunch we set out to find the quilotoa laguna-which is why we came. the quilotoa laguana is a lake in the middle of a crater, an immense crater. the photos i saw before i went were simply incredible so i had to go. as we were walking down the trail i didnt think we would see anything because of all the fog but as we walked down a little more the clouds roughly disapeared only to reapear in another 30 seconds. at first sight i was awstruck. the steep clifs lead dirrectly into the aquamarine water. we went down some more and in an hour we had gone down 200 meters to the lake. next to the lake everything was sillent. we could only hear ourselves and the serrana (people from the ecuadorian andes) shepards. after two hours of just enjoying the beauty of the crater we went back to our hotel hungry and tired. our hotel turned out to be completely full mostly with americans but there were also a lot of people austria. at dinner i talked to a dude who went to uc berkley and was in a program similar to the peace corps. he had been in ecuador for two years but it seemed that we had had completely different experiences. he had no idea of what it meant to be ecuadorian or even latino. all he knew were social statistics on ecuador. i think my life is a lot more happier than his. after dinner we tried to thaw out our room which was by now really cold. starting a fire at 4000 meters up was impossible, we had to ask for help from our hosts. the next day after breakfast we set out for the crater yet again. we spent the morning there. pepe and i explored everything we could from the smallest pebbles on he beach to the best lookout poin up top. returning to our hostle we got our things and headed for the bus again. this time we got a bus directly to latacunga. in latacunga we took another bus to ambato. in ambato pepe and i said good bye to aniko as she was heading in the opposite direction as us. 6 and a half hours later we arrived in the dead of morning in guayaquil-it was even late for pepe. that capped off one of the best side trips of my life. this tuesday i am heading to the galapagos islands. pepe and i have been working on a visa for him to come to the states for the summer. i hope it works out there are a lot of holes that we have to go through at the consulate.
-mark