Ecuador-bound: Into the Wild

6-25-11

Today was the day for the hike up the mountain! For breakfast, I ate a bowl of fruit (bananas, apples, papaya), a cheese empanada, and a warm drink (I think oatmeal somethin’ or other). It was Zack, Danielle (a guy) and I who went into the wild. We took a bus to Tumbaco and from there explored the area, trying to find paths leading to this mountain. After several minutes of walking on roads and mis-leading trails (which were really just people’s driveways leading up to their houses with intimidating gates), we finally called our “tía” to find out where exactly these so-called trails are. We ended up taking another bus further up to where look-alike trails might be. Several attempts later, hiking up rocky and other small dirt paths, we eventually came to a house and asked if we could pass through his gate to hike up the mountain. Although, it looked pretty difficult. He told us to venture down where we’d come to a “small trail”, pass through some brush, and hike up the rest of the mountain. Our adventurous spirits met their desires as we hiked down unknown paths, stepping into overgrown grass/weeds where who knows what snakes or spiders might be under our feet. The trails truly were small, and not many people have traveled on them recently. Sooner or later we came to an open area, where it was mostly brush, wildflowers, and thorn bushes. Snakes were no longer on our minds, as we had more things to worry about: massive, colorful spiders in their webs and thorns/prickers to dodge. As we looked higher up the mountain, it looked like the brush cleared; it didn’t. We laughed because this was a bad idea to keep hiking up. By now, my legs were torn up (I was wearing capris—not a good idea), so we decided to hop a barbed wire fence where it looked like mostly tall grass and maybe we could hike to a different mountainside. The traverse over the barbed wire fence was the easy part. However, the grass on the other side was infested with thousands of small spiders, scattering in the grass at every step we took. It was my worse nightmare! The idea here was to just run fast, wherever we were going, which we didn’t really have a plan of action, because we didn’t want these small spiders to cover our bodies if they had the chance. The spiders didn’t seem to go away the further we hiked. So, to the other side of the barbed wire fence we went! We were happy with how far we went today, but we never did get to the peak because of various reasons. It was still a great adventure and satisfied our desire of hiking up a mountain. We headed back down the way we came up, ending up on a one-way road. That was the best spot to nourish our bodies, which included peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (thanks Zack! I have actually been craving this…especially on whole wheat bread), a pear, apple, some sour gummy worms and potato chips. In time we reached civilization; back to the three busses we took to get back to Lumbisí. A good nap and 2 cups of coffee finished off a great afternoon.