Stacey’s 30th Birthday Extravaganza

El Cajas National Park, Ecuador (between Cuenca and Guayaquil)

After spending a few days in the fine city of Cuenca, it was time to get back to nature.  When in Cuenca and seeking nature…one heads to Cajas National Park.  Cajas is a beautiful, high altitude park with lots of flora…a little bit of fauna…and roughly 270 lakes and ponds.  Cajas is interesting in that it has quite a lot of life (both animal and plant) for having an altitude that tops 4600 meters (or 15,000 feet for my American readers).

Through the forest in Cajas NP

I was joined on my hike through Cajas by a local guide and two other travelers…a woman named Karen from Norway and a man-whose-name-escapes-me from the Netherlands.  Since Cajas is so high it is almost always in a cloud…read:  it is rainy pretty much all of the time.  No matter, the scenery is beautiful and quite interesting so we barely noticed the mud…though we did notice the lack of oxygen as we climbed. 

While not native to the area, the many lakes in Cajas are filled with trout as the conditions for their existence are ideal.  As in the rest of the world, trout (trucha) are a popular fish so the lakes are stocked with them and many trucha farms exist around the city of Cuenca.  After the hike we headed to a local trucha farm/restaurant for lunch where I had a really yummy fried trout.  After lunch it was off to a different section of the park for some bird watching and more hiking.  We saw some bird that was rare but I missed its name and since my little old digital camera has mimimal zoom capabilities I have no photo.  I do however, have quite a few more photos of the scenery than I have things to type about so this post will mostly be pictures.  Naturally, I do have some random trivia to share with you all and here it is:

Useless Trivia About Both Ecuador and the World’s National Park Systems 

1. There are 38 national parks in Ecuador…run both by the government and private foundations.  The first to be created was the Galapagos in 1959 and while Ecuador has been zealous in the initiation of the national park system they haven´t been so great at keeping them up and maintaining them.
2. With its relatively small territory (109.483 square miles), 0.17% of the planet’s land surface, Ecuador was ranked among one of the 17 most biodiverse countries in the world.  Ecuador holds more than 11% of all the land vertebrates in the world (mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles), 16.087 vascular plant species and approximately 600 species of marine fish. And there is still a lot to learn about Ecuador’s diversity, especially about invertebrates and microoganims. Among the “mega diverse” countries, Ecuador holds the biggest biodiversity of land vertebrates per area.
3. The first effort by any government to set aside such protected lands was in the United States, on April 20, 1832, when President Andrew Jackson signed legislation to set aside four sections of land around what is now Hot Springs, Arkansas to protect the natural, thermal springs and adjoining mountainsides for the future disposal of the US government. It was known as the Hot Springs Reservation. However no legal authority was established and federal control of the area was not clearly established until 1877.  The world’s first “official” national park was Yellowstone NP established in 1872 in the United States.
4. The number of areas now managed by the National Park Service in the United States consists of 391 different sites, of which only 58 carry the designation of National Park.
5. Following the idea established in Yellowstone there soon followed parks in other nations. In Australia, the Royal National Park was established just south of Sydney in 1879. In Canada, Banff National Park (then known as Rocky Mountain National Park) became its first national park in 1885. New Zealand had its first national park in 1887. In Europe the first national parks were a set of nine parks in Sweden in 1909. Europe has 370 national parks at the moment.[2] In 1926, the British administration in South Africa designated Kruger National Park as the nation’s first national park.  After World War II, national parks were founded all over the world. The Vanoise National Park in the Alps was the first French national park, created in 1963 after public mobilization against a touristic project.

Some fauna…llamas

OK, so I’m a little light on content today but what more can you say really?  We went hiking and it was nice.  Never fear though…I’m not going to leave you all blogless while I’m off gallivanting through the Galapagos Islands.  I’ve discovered a feature in my blog software whereas I can type up a couple of posts but have them released sometime in the future.  We’re going to give this a try…I make no promises, but this week while I’m sailing the Pacific on the catamaran Nemo II my faithful readers should still get their Extravaganza fix.  And if it doesn´t work…well, I guess you’ll all have a lot to catch up on when I return.  Type to you next week!

PS. I didn’t get the delayed post function working for Ecuador 11 so two posts on the same day…lucky you!  I think I did get it working for Ecuador 12 so if all goes well it should turn up on Friday.  I’m off the boat on Sunday December 2 so until then…

The Main Square in Otavalo

North of Quito about two hours by bus (and $2 each way) exists a huge market of food, weavings, hats, jewelry and much more in the little village of Otavalo. The biggest market day of the week is Saturday though the market takes place every day of the week. I decided to go on Saturday and true enough…the market is huge. Overwhelming even and for someone who now has to carry everything she purchases with her for the next 6 months…Otavalo is merely a place to “window shop.” It was fun to wander through stall after stall of everything under the sun…here are some pictures so you can get an idea of what´s for sale.

On Sunday it was time for me to leave Quito and frankly, I´m not going to miss it. Quito has a pretty significant pollution problem and merely walking down the street one finds themselves in a cloud of diesel exhaust quite often. It´s also a bit damp and chilly in Quito though the surrounding scenery of the lush green countryside high in the mountains is very beautiful…and a stark contrast to the dry and brown grass found in the mountains of Montana. Most of the sights in Quito can be seen in two days or less…though Quito does make for an excellent base of operations for the many other side trips (like Otavalo). While Quito itself lacked charm there are some very excellent things about Ecuador worth mentioning.

4 Excellent Things You Did Not Know About Ecuador

1. The people are really, really helpful and friendly. Everyone I´ve met so far has been very friendly and helpful…which is a bit of a contrast to some places in Europe where people are not especially friendly to foreigners. Most people are very curious about my life in the States…typically I am asked about things in the following order: my family, my job, George Bush and the war in Iraq…and frequently about the cost of things in the U.S. as compared to Ecuador. More on this later.
2. Ecuador´s official currency is the U.S. dollar. I totally don´t get how this works but it is true…all transactions are in U.S. dollars and while there are some special Ecuadorian coins, the majority of the cash being tendered is exactly what you´re all using at home. I´m not going to lie to you…this is extremeley convenient. Not having to change money and figure out new coins makes my life much easier. Still I don´t get it. Does the U.S. treasury just print extra money for Ecuador? Anyone with some insight…please clue me in.
3. The food is so yummy and so fresh. I think I´ve had more fresh fruit in the last week than I´ve had in the last two months. We have fresh squeezed juice of many different types (including some fruit only grown here in Ecudor) with every meal and soup (which I love) comes with every lunch. As in Spain, the last meal of the day is rather light and not as substantial as the midday meal. Typically for lunch there is soup, some type of meat, rice and some type of fruit (and juice of course). For dinner…a small sandwich is typical.
4. The people speak a very clear and reasonably paced version of Spanish that is easy to understand. Thankfully I´m able to understand more here than in Spain and certainly more than the average Mexican speaker…both of whom speak very quickly.

On Sunday it was off to Manta…a smallish city on the coast of about 250,000 inhabitants. I chose this city because it is not at all touristy and with few English speakers I will be forced to practice my Spanish. Instead of flying, I decided to take the 10 hour bus trip from Quito down through the Andes and into the tropical zone of Manta. While the trip was beautiful…it was also brutal and included some roads that could barely be called roads. And went past some houses that could barely be called houses. I arrived tired and grimy on Sunday night to a beautiful room in my host family´s house. More on this next time.