Baños de Agua Santa and Tungurahua Volcano

Here is an exciting little video that I just made while I was in the town of Baños de Agua Santa. The town is a real tourist draw and on weekends, dozens of colourful buses bring "local" tourists from other parts of Ecuador. There are natural hot springs there just below the Volcano Tungurahua which are said to have miraculous healing properties. The scenery is absolutely terrific. Many waterfalls are in the area. The town itself sits on a thick shelf of basalt and the Rio Pastaza has cut a deep canyon through there. It reminded me somewhat of the Iskut canyon, with the lava flows along the river. A very lovely little zoo is built right into the shelves of basalt just upstream of the town. One of the town's specialties is the taffy candy made from sugar cane. Numerous small shops make and sell the taffy and the taffy-pulling is done in the open doorways. There are also many small shops selling jugo de caña, or fresh squeezed sugar cane juice, bags of pieces of cane for munching on, as well as bundles of cane stalks to take home. There are many "outfitters" who will take you canyoning (rapelling down waterfalls), zip-lining, mountain-biking, white-water rafting, horseback riding, or ATV riding. All for a price, of course. I did a lot of hiking while there, first ascending the shoulder of the volcano itself (up to about 8,500 feet a.s.l.-- on the photo below, I was in the cloud on the left-hand side of the big ravine), then across the river and up another mountain for a better view, where I took this photo. The top of the volcano is over 15,000 feet a.s.l. and is usually hidden in the clouds. I got some pictures one day when the clouds parted for a while.

Leaf-cutting Ants in Ecuador

Here is a brief video that I just put together a few days ago. If you check my video channel (My videos on Youtube, you will find this one and several others that I have uploaded recently.  After Vilcabamba and Neverland farm, I spent nine days and nights in the big city of Cuenca (pop.500,000), which had favorably impressed me back in January, shortly after I arrived in the country. I had some illness there this time, first, two nights of nasty diarhea, and then a week later, I had such severe abdominal pain that I went to the emergency ward of the local hospital and spent a night there. OK now, and after I left Cuenca, I took a seven-hour bus ride to Macas, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest.  The bus ride cost $8 and took me (twice) up above 10,000 feet above sea level, before decending to the Amazon basin. My ears were popping and it was cold and damp at that altitude, even in the middle of the day. I spent three days in Macas, a city of 20,000 and found it to be smelly, hot and humid. Then I took a three hour bus ride further north to another small city on the edge of the jungle, Puyo, which is where I am now. Still hot and humid here in Puyo, but it doesn't smell as bad as Macas did.  I am now in a "luxury type resort" which costs me only $28 per night! Cheap hotels are $6 to $12 per night but, as they say, 'You get what you pay for'.

Tumianuma, Quinara, & Neverland

This screen shot from Google Earth shows where I have been spending my time for the last month. Vilcabamba is north of Tumianuma, and all of these places are in the very southern part of Ecuador (Loja Province) not far from the border with Peru. The blue line shows the horse and burro trail that connects the Neverland farm (elevation 5,300 feet) with the small village of Tumianuma (elevation 5,000 feet). It is about three miles long. The orange line is the main road. The red line is a very rough four-wheel drive road from Quinara (another small village) to Neverland. The pale blue-green line shows the route that I took from the Neverland Farm to the Inca Ruins (elevation 8,800 feet) on a mountain top nearby. The photos below were taken when I was up on the mountain with the ruins.

This photo was taken in Cuenca, where I spent two days on my way to the Neverland Organic Farm near Tumianuma. I flew from Vancouver on the 16th of January, arriving in Dallas-Fort Worth airport in the early evening. My flight to Miami was not until the early morning of the 17th, so I tried to sleep in the airport, but my throat was  getting itchy and I knew that a cold was coming on. I watched the movie, "Avatar" on my computer, but really didn't get any sleep at all. Already, here in Dallas, I heard a lot of Spanish spoken. At 7:30 a.m. I left Dallas, arriving in Miami before noon. I had plenty of time to get to the International departures where the LAN Ecuador flight would take me to Quito.Two nights in Quito, which I found to be a big, dirty, scary looking city, then I flew to Cuenca and spent two nights there. These next two photos were taken in Cuenca, one on Saturday evening, not long after I arrived in the city, where some locals were performing traditional dances. The next morning there was a big parade and I followed it for a long time, taking pictures and videos along the way. The third photo shows one of the parade floats.Early in the morning, I got on a bus for the four and a half hour ride to Loja in the southern part of the country. At times the bus disappeared into the clouds as our altitude went up to 10,000 feet above sea level. Once in Loja, I got into a shared taxi for the ride to Vilcabamba, which took less than an hour. I arrived in Vilcabamba in plenty of time to get the noon bus to Tumianuma, but I was at the wrong bus stop and missed the one that I should have taken. Next bus wasn't until 4:30 p.m., so I had a beer at a local open air cafe and watched the people go by. Also bought a couple of fresh mangoes to satisfy my hunger. I had left Cuenca without breakfast.

Here I am in Tumianuma, only three or four miles from the Neverland farm. This last few miles must be traversed over a narrow burrow trail.

From Kinaskan Lake to Whistler, B.C.

Hello everyone. Two more days and I'll be on my way at last, on the final leg of my trip to Ecuador, S.A. Right now, I am sitting in a MacDonald's in Whistler, British Columbia, taking advantage of the free wifi. I left the north on January 1, riding down to Terrace with a friend from the Kinaskan Lake area, way up highway 37N, almost 75 miles north of the Bell 2 lodge. That part of the trip took almost eight hours.
I spent four  nights in Terrace, then took a Greyhound  (three and a half hours) to Smithers, B.C. and spent three nights there. On Tuesday, January 8th, I got on the Greyhound again for the drive to Prince George in the center of B.C. That was a five hour ride and my son Kyle met me at the bus station about 8:30 p.m. He is working in Prince George and so we could only visit in the evenings. On Wednesday night, he and I went out for Chinese food. That was a mistake for it loosened up my bowels before  breakfast time. Luckily the affliction did not last long.
I had wanted to rent a car in PG to drive down through Pemberton to see my daugher, Natalia, before leaving the rental car at the airport in Vancouver, but the cost was prohibitive since the rental agency wanted an extra $1100 just to return the car to PG! So, back on the Greyhound again at 4:30 p.m. for an overnight trip to Vancouver.

The bus left slightly behind schedule, at around five pm rather than four-thirty, and then made short stops at Quesnel, Williams Lake, 100 Mile House, Cache Creek, and then pulled into Kamloops at around midnight. Between stops I was trying to sleep but was largely unsucessful. In Kamloops we had to get out of the bus for a half hour while they “serviced” it. Here I made the mistake of buying a coke and the caffeine in it prevented me from sleeping for the remainder of the night. The Coquihalla highway had been closed the day before because of heavy snow. Almost one meter of fresh snow had fallen over just a few days and the highway crews had been unable to keep up the plowing, but the road was open now, and we headed out for Vancouver at about 1a.m.

By two a.m. the bus was hurtling us down from the high point of the pass where the snow had recently been plowed and was, in places, as high as the bottom of the bus windows. I tried to catch some of the scene on video.

The bus pulled into Vancouver ahead of schedule (5a.m.) and so I found myself with a couple of hours to kill. My bus to Pemberton was scheduled for 8 a.m. To kill time, I again studied my Spanish for a while, and then after an hour or so, I pulled out my harmonica and began to play. I played a lot of old American folk tunes and ballads. The acoustics of the old, high-ceilinged building were great. After about an hour, I started in on "Silent Night", since it was the season after all. I was playing softly with my eyes closed when I heard a voice say, “You can’t do that here.” I opened my eyes to see a security guard who was obviously a Sihk. I guessed this by the cloth wrapped around his head. I said what can’t I do? I am just waiting for my bus and practicing my music. He said that I couldn’t play that music in the terminal because it was a federal building. No argument from me. I left the building and went out toward the small park across the street where some rumpled blankets indicated that a homeless person was sleeping there on the sidewalk. He stirred and woke as I passed and soon came over and asked for 25 cents for a cup of coffee. I told him that the coffee was going to be more than that and I would like to get a photo of him back in his bed on the sidewalk. He obliged me and I gave him a toonie ($2 coin). We had a short conversation and he steered me toward a McDonald's where I found free wifi to have with my breakfast biscuit and coffee.

At eight a.m., groggy from lack of sleep, I got back on the bus and we headed north through down-town Vancouver. I couldn’t sleep now, for I had to see all I could of this city. It had been over forty years since Csilla and I had “honeymooned” here, driving our little VW bug. The city had of course grown much in this time and there seemed to be hundreds of new glass-sided high rise buidlings. Soon we were driving through Stanley Park.  As the bus drove further north I started to nod off, despite the beauty of the scenery. The sky was almost entirely devoid of clouds and as the sun came up and illuminated the gulf islands, I tried to get a few scenes on video. The mountain tops were covered with snow, but the highway was bare of snow until we got north of Squamish. Then the snow was getting deeper along the roadway and by the time the bus reached Whistler village, there was almost as much snow as at Bell 2 last month. Nearly a meter of snow.

At Whistler village everyone got off the bus and I was the only one who reboarded ten minutes later for the drive to Pemberton, which is the end of the line. I sat up front near the driver and we had a conversation as we drove the remaining half hour or so to Pemberton. The driver dropped me off in front of the Mile One lodge, which had a restaurant that Natalia had recommended. It was here that she was to meet me when she got off of work after 2 p.m. in Whistler. I had a burger and chips and a couple bottles of snapple and then made use of the free wifi while I waited for my daughter to find me. When Natalia did arrive, I was sitting at a picnic table on the outside deck of the lodge, practicing my Spanish.

This little event happened on the 9th of April. It was a perfectly cloudless day with the temperature rising into the low teens (C). I didn't do any skiing, but I did take a couple of runs with the big blue plastic saucer.