Mindo, Ecuador

Kyla's sister, Gena, and her partner, Nancy, came to Ecuador to help celebrate Kyla's birthday--it was wonderful to see some familiar Canadian faces!

We met in Quito and headed straight to Mindo, which is a few hours northwest of Quito through curvy mountainous roads. We had two lovely days in and around Mindo. We stayed at a sweet place (Las Terrazas de Dana) about 10 minutes from the town, where butterflies and hummingbirds kept us company over breakfast. On the first day, we walked to a butterfly garden, had lunch in the little town of Mindo and then we walked through town to a spot where we could hand-feed hummingbirds. It was a little staged, but pretty amazing to spend an hour with a huge variety of hummingbirds zooming around our heads and landing on our fingers. Despite my legitimate fears, no humming birds got stuck in my hair.

On our second day, Gena and Kyla woke up early to do some birdwatching with our guide, Andres, while Nancy, Talia and I slept in. Talia had a pretty sweet set up on our porch for her hour of “travel school,” and we had a nice morning filled with small amounts of schoolwork and lots of chatting with Nancy between our porches.

When the birdwatchers returned, Andres drove us to a volcanic crater (Pululahua), which was entirely covered by clouds (a bit of an unexpected theme in Ecuador). After staring at the clouds for a bit, we headed down the volcano and stopped at Mitad de Mundo (the center of the world/equator). We opted for the legit museum instead of the somewhat cheesey tour that we did last time, and we captured the desired shots of each of us with one foot in each hemisphere.

We had a quick pizza dinner and spent the night in quito so that we could make our early flight to Coca for our Amazon trip.Read more