So this past weekend I spent Saturday in a quiet town called Mindo which is pretty close to the Equator.  It was a midnight-planned trip the night before with me and a friend so very last minute and pretty much winging the whole thing.  But out main objective was to zipline in Cloud Forest, and if there was time:  go tubing, check out the butterfly museum/garden thingy, and take a chocolate tour.  However none of these other things happened.  As you can imagine, since Mindo is in Cloud Forest, that it is cloudy and rained while we were there, but it wasn't too heavy.  Anyways we hopped off the bus as it passed through the town and conveniently jumped off next to the zipline company where we then proceeded to buy our tickets and hail a taxi out to the zipline base station.  We ended up timing it so that we got the whole mountain to ourselves in that we were the only ones who bought tickets.  We had 2 guys our age who were the guides, which translates to:  them intensely trying to persuade us to stay the night and go salsa dancing with them.  When you're out in the middle of a forest, you must pick your words carefully, even the spanish ones.  So after we finished up with that, we strolled the small town with handfuls of melting ice cream.  The town's not too exciting, but there are these small insects that like to hand around your calves and suck your blood.  You can't feel them at all, but they leave tiny blood spots.

Sunday I took a bus out to Papallacta for some hot springs and more.  The more being a good long butt kicking uphill oxygen deprived hike straight up a mountain.  The town of Papallacta itself is hardly really a town, just a couple of buildings.  But the hot springs up the mountain have varying temps but mostly pretty warm, which was awesome after hiking.  So we spent a couple of hours lounging around, before trekking back.  Since this place is kinda out in the middle of nowhere, we had to wait some time before another bus rolled by.  We snagged the last few seats and made it back before it got too late.

 

 Papallacta

Spending the past week along the Ecuadorian coastline has been a welcoming change from the cooler and rainy Cumbaya.  The first five days were exploring the rambunctious and salsa loving town of Puerto Lopez.  Here I got my 1st dive of the year in at a spot called La Plata, a blue-footed booby's island of paradise.  As I learned from my classmate, this island is lined with white circles of guano, aka poop, that encircle a blue-footed booby's nest.  I also learned that only about 1 in 3 babies live because the oldest/biggest chick will push the other ones out of the nest and off a ledge or something like that when the parents are out searching for food.  But the dive around this island was incredible despite the shallow depth.  Because this place is legally protected, the marine species are massive & fearless of divers compared to their relatives in the Virgin Islands.  But since I didn't expect this, during my 1st dive I set the zoom on my camera when I shouldn't have since I could get so close to all the fishies.  The next couple of days in Puerto Lopez involved intertidal madness, and my 1st observation is that one of my professors is part mountain goat, creaming us in adventuring on the algae-covered, slipper rocks, while the rest of us are falling on our asses & stained with green algae.  So the intertidal field work contained 3 components:  quadrants, whelks, & biomass.  In the .5 x .5 m quadrants students estimated percent coverage of sessile organism and algae types, counted the number of mobile invertebrates, and a couple of other things.  Biomass students scraped off algae & other organisms to save for later investigation.  And saving the best group for last... WHELKALICOUSNESS!  Me and my partner tramped through high, mid, and low tides to collect, measure, & record the length of 3 different types of whelks.  In total, I probably caught circa 300 whelks!  Other creatures I scrounged for were a gazillion types of slugs, polychaete worms, 'hieroglyphic' crabs, urchins, and hermit crabs.  These tasks were pretty simple but done at multiple sites and tidal levels for us to do comparisons when we return.  Some of the things we'll be looking for is if there's any correlation between whelk size and tidal zone & whelk abundance with respect to north/south position of site along the Ecuadorian coastline.  In addition to spatial differences, we also have past years of data to see what changes occur temporally at each site.  We continued to do this intertidal work in Las Esmeraldas, and I also installed sediment plates all over a colossal rock to set up a new experiment.  During this part, the ITCZ winds and rain were pounding me as I tried to work in my bathing suit and handy dandy reef booties.  The sediment plates were either black or white, and the experimenter's objective is to test algal growth.

Panamac Green Moray

Yellowtail Surgeonfish

Trumpetfish

Tiger Snake Eel

ps.  The late response was due to my 1st Ecuadorian parasite, keepin me laying low.  I'll die another die.

It's been a long day, well so really like two continuous days with two hours of sleep in between.  So I set up and planned a trip for me and some chicas to Otavalo, a small town 2 hours north of Quito famous in South America for their handmade goods and also named after the indigenous indians who strike it rich making these alpaca goods and driving around shiny 4WD cars with their old skool traditional clothes.  While I was able to snag us a reservation for a room for a night, I was winging it on transportation.  I got so far as to definitely take a bus to Quito and find a bus that travels north along the Panamerican Highway which would drop me off on the outskirts of Otavalo.  Also not getting pick pocketed was something I was trying to make happen too.

So maybe I was a little nervous the night before hoping that everything would work itself out, but it was also time for me to take my weekly malaria pill.... du du duhhhh.   My personal side effects from this thing include no sleep, psycho dreams, dizziness, and loss of equilibrium in my ears leading to not the most enjoyable experience on crowded suffocating bus rides up, down, and around cliffs.  Unfortunately these symptoms last for about 12-14 hours and the only aid, water, I can't take because there's no bathrooms on the bus so once I'm on, I'm on.  But alas these symptoms receded in the afternoon.  Ok so back to transportation.  Taking a taxi from my house to the bus stop and then taking the bus to Quito bam ok no hay problema.  Pero unfortunately I need to travel to the very northern tip of Quito where there lies an international terminal.  While my trusty guidebooks have made me a brainiac about Ecuador and the Galapagos, they lack details on Quito's bus system only telling me the international terminal I need but not how to get there.  I don't think I've mentioned how big Quito is, but you really notice this when your face is pressed against the window of the bus while you're trying to keep your balance on a rickity ride meanwhile not getting pickpocketed.  Well we ended up having to get on three different bus lines for an hour to reach this international terminal to take the bus to Otavalo, naturally getting on all the buses that are not highly recommended.  On one of these buses I had a total pickpocketer standing next me being super obvious like checking out my pockets where my backpack and hands were and constantly glancing over to see where I was looking.  I pretended to look out the window behind him but was really keeping eyes on his greasy paws.   Estoy gringita pero no estoy stupida!  Eventually the crowd cleared a little and I could push my way to a less hazard zone.  

Finally reaching Otavalo, we trekked into town to practice our haggling skills.  This famous market is called Plaza del Ponchos and is a city in itself of tents and stands.  Vendors are coming up to you all the time trying to get you to buy anything, people are pushing past you, and you feel like you're being swallowed by alpalca blankets.  Nonetheless this is a great experience and you might be surprised with what kinds of steals you can make or rather goaded into buying overpriced goods.  A little of both happens, but don't forget you're in a crowded marketplace.  Know where your money goes and that it doesn't wander off by itself.  After getting presents for the fam, I got the biggest slice of pie in my life, a slice of passion fruit pie about the size of my head.  Since I couldn't eat or drink anything that morning to make it through the buses, I easily ate the whole thing.  I ended my shopping with buying an alpaca blanket.  I think I surprised some with my haggling tricks, but I surprised myself most by not getting pickpocketed, a huge accomplishment for a gringita.

Oh and on the bus ride back, they were fancy and playing the movie Taken, typical.  

 A piece of the alpaca blanket I bought.

I think I'm going to go hike a volcano tomorrow....or visit the Equator.....  

Sooo.... I HAVE ANOTHER NIECE NAMED AMELIA PEARL NORRIS!  I can't wait to meet this new little soon-to-be water bug.  This lil bundle of sunshine is a perfect addition to the Norris-Lowcher clan, and we couldn't be more blessed.

On the other note I am finally in Quito, rather just outside in a suburb called Cumbaya, stumbling my way around with my horrendous Spanish but it's getting a little bit better each day.  It's been cloudy and raining a-lot now that it's transitioning to their winter.  I'm still settling in and have yet to really visit Quito.  I am living with a mother and her two daughters (15 and 11), their grandmother, and their golden retriever pooh, pronounced as poo, like Winnie the Pooh.

Since the area around Quito has a good amount of crime, the town house I am in has a locked security gate and alarm system in and around the house.  So anyone trying to get into any windows or doors will send the alarm off.  This also includes going downstairs to the kitchen in the morning before the alarm system is shut off.  The instant one steps off the stairs and onto the first floor triggers a siren that can be heard from down the street... So as you can see where I'm going with this, yea it happened the first morning (only hours after I landed at midnight), but I was not the culprit.... this time.  Instead my roommate who is also a student happened to accidentally set it off.  And as these things go, the security company calls to see what happened etc.  However, while there's a phone in my room (or was, someone removed it now), I figured that the other phones in the house would go off too.  Wrong about that, so after the 20th ring I dug out from under the covers and answered the phone.  But I don't think I need to describe what happened next, I'm sure you can imagine how that went seeing as I don't have a phone in my room anymore.

Snapshot from the view in my neighborhood.