Latacunga and Quilotoa
The bus from Puerto Lopez to Latacunga took longer than expected, after leaving at about 5am we finally arrived in the evening and went to the first hostel we saw. Then we explored the very limited choices of places to eat and ended up back at the Chinese across the road from the hostel. As everything in the town seemed to be shut by 8pm we had an early night to get ready for another early start the next day as we had decide to spend a few days travelling between small villages in the surrounding countryside.
We got another bus to a small town in the middle of nowhere and then got a lift in the back of a truck to the village of Quilatoa. The village actually only consists of a couple of basic hostels, a shop and a small market where locals sell handmade crafts. But the village is in a good location right at the top of a volcano crater. We spent the afternoon walking down into the crater where we hired a kayak and paddled round the crater lake until as usual in Ecuador, it started raining and we walked back up to the top.
Early the following day the weather had improved a bit and we had better views from the top of the crater, across the surrounding countryside to the volcano Cotopaxi on the horizon. We spent the morning doing a nice walk to the village of Chugchilan. It was a good walk that went half way round the crater, down the other side and then into a canyon, which we had to cross. In the afternoon we decided to go horseriding into the cloud forest. Unsurprisingly being the cloud forest in Ecuador we ended up in the clouds yet again, but it was still a good afternoon.
The following day we decided to walk to the village of Isinlivi. The evening before we had met a French guy who had done the walk in the opposite direction and gave us a set of instructions that he had been give. The walk was supposed to take 4-5 hours and he said he had got a bit lost so it had taken him 6. Once we read the instructions we could see why he had got a bit confused, but we thought there would be enough locals to ask if we got lost.
All went well for about the first 45 minutes until we reached a village that was mentioned mentioned in the directions, but on their map it was shown so we carried on. Just to check we asked a girl that we passed, turns out the map was wrong and we shouldn´t have gone as far as the village so turned round. In the village we asked around and found an alternative way to get on to the path we had previously missed. Things went well again for a while, we found the path, went down to the river and followed that for a while and it seemed to fit with the directions (except we didn´t see the small dog that they mentioned). However once we crossed the river the directions got even worse. we were stood in a small field surround by trees and bushes and the instructions said something like walk through the bushes, turn left at a tree, take 2 steps, walk past a bush etc. After wandering round for a bit and find nothing useful we went back to ask another group of people, who told us we should walk back along the river and cross at a different bridge, the bridge that it siad not to use in the directions. We thought we should try it anyway, crossed the bridge and found ourselves surrounded by a barbed wire fence. We spent a while looking for paths in the area and found a few tracks which soon just disappeared. Having already taken us about 5 hours to get what we assumed was less than half way to the village (the walk was suppossed to take 4-5 hours) we admitted defeat and decided to turn back. When we reached the main road someone offered us a lift in the back of a truck to the next town. We spent most of the journy trying to see where the village was or find any route up from the river, but to us it looked virtually impossible, whichever way we could have gone we would have ended up at the bottom of cliffs. After a very dusty and uncomfortable journey we made it to Sigchos where we waited for the evening bus back to Latacunga.
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