entre santos, no peregrinos

I have a silly Mexican Christmas carol stuck in my head because I glimpsed a DVD in one of those illegal pirata stores that used one of the lyrics.

Yesterday around 8am Corey shook me awake out of a drowsy only-been-back-in-Quito-for-about-ten-hours slumber and asked me if I wanted to go to Mindo with Brian and Jess (I kind of want to refer to them collectively as PB&J, PB standing for Brian Pace reversed and J for Jess). One of the hotels canceled at the last minute and so it was imperative to scope out a new one. So the four of us hopped on a bus and took off for Mindo, a little town famous for its birdwatching and community-based tourism.

In one of those random turn of events that always seems to happen to us, the gentleman we were paying to drive us from hotel to hotel offered to take us to meet his brother, who had some private land with trails that were open only to researchers, not to tourists. His brother turned out to be one of the first individuals who campaigned for Mindo to transform their primary industry into tourism as opposed to hunting and agriculture (which involves clearing a lot of forests). He was a very interesting person: long hair, married to a German woman, excellent English (and German too from the little we heard!). He showed us the trail and it will be a great afternoon activity for the tour. We found some mushrooms along the trail, not too many but then again we were walking very quickly--some oysters, agaricus, shiny red ones, little white ones, a big black one that was either oreja de mico or oreja de cerdo, I can´t remember which. The trail goes all the way up one of Mindo´s highest peaks, where there is stil some ´primary´ cloud forest left (not really primary, since one of the concessions Mindo made to the government when switching over to tourism is that they cut down all the cedar trees. Lose the cedars, but save the forest--an okay exchange, I guess). One of the couples attending the tour is getting along in the years (late 70´s and early 80´s respectively) but even if we don´t hike the whole trail it´s still a great opportunity to hike a relatively unexplored area--the trail isn´t even completely built yet.

Something else that´s awesome is that Milton (brother of driver) is coordinating a taxonomy project of all the wildlife in Mindo--all of it. Daaaaayyymmmn. Don´t ask me how long that would take, since all the scientists I know always nod knowingly at comments at how complicated it is the classify the wildlife is in just a 2-meter space. For Corey, it´s a good contact to have in terms of a future volunteer opportunity... he´ll have to write about the details later, but apparently PSU has this crazy detailed moss and lichen (and-or maybe fern?) catalog... plus he´s, you know, good at all that mushroom stuff--Jess half-joked that for the tour she intends on making him a little nametag that reads ¨taxonomist.¨

So we booked the hotel in Mindo, right by the mariposeria that I visited with Laura when I was there, two years ago. Let me tell you, it was strange rattling down the same dusty unpaved road that I rode with Laura in a random pickup truck, to see the river and cloud forest that I took a picture of two years because I thought it was pretty, and yes, it still looked pretty, amazingly, awesomely so. This is likely reiterated enough to the point of stale cliche in Ecuadorian blogging, but it´s ridiculous how much the landscape changes in Ecuador, in as little as an hour and half long bus ride! I haven´t traveled enough over the land in Colombia to say the same, due to safety issues with the roads there and stuff. But that´s definitely been one of the cooler parts of our time here, just watching the landscape roll by the rattling windows of the bus, listening to either a scratchy 80´s music mix CDs or the dubbed grunts of Jean Claude Van Damme as he hacks and kicks away at the bad guys on the screen.

In terms of Quito-town going-ons, Corey and I officially have a room now in PB&J´s house as opposed to just a mattress on the floor, after one of their housemates moved out to go live in the jungle (yes, literally). So far today we´ve successfully bought all the snacks for the hike in Cuyabeno, where we´ll have three big (and likely very delicious) meals a day. Hikers will eat anything, especially TONGOS! Yummy chocolate covered mora flavored Tongo cookies, with such a special place in my heart! Oh, and we may or may not have gotten a fake $10 bill out of the ATM machine. Sin verguenzas, sin verguenzas (shameless, shameless).

Corey just saïd ¨I don´t know if I´ve been bit by bugs or if I have some kind of disease.¨ Hopefully it´s the former, since we haven´t even made it out to the Oriente yet. Mycoutour in T-3 days.