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