Cayambe-Coca

Estoy muy muy cansado. It has been a long and busy week. Only one more week of 9 to 5 class and our whirlwind of extended adventures begins. I tried some new things in Quito this week, the first one occured on Wednesday night.

Six of us (Me, Christa, Colleen, Steve, Steph and Jean) met up Wednesday night at Frangola, a bar in La Mariscal. It was a Hookah bar. Thanks to many good times living in the Lakeshore dorms, smoking Hookah isn´t a new thing for me, but the peach flavor sure was. My real new experience was the Salsateca we went to afterwards. The place was decently sized, but packed with people. There were quite a few really good salsa dancers to watch and even more mediocre ones to blend in with. I gave salsa dancing a shot, but I have a long way to go. I can´t shake it quite right, but I think I did improve a little over the course of the evening.

Thursday night, after some suggestions from my Spanish instructor, a bunch of us hit the town again. We met up at El Pobre Diablo, a bar/restaurante just outside La Mariscal. It´s known to have great live music, which it definitlely did. There was a blues band playing, who I´m sorry to say I never got the name of. Anyway, despie the expensive cocktails it was another fun night shared with good people.

Finally to today. We met bright and early at 7 AM and drove to Cayambe-Coca Ecological Reserve. It´s a protected area, about an hour and a half east of Quito. Along the way we stopped and hiked through a Polylepis woodland. It´s an unusual forest system found only at high elevations in the Andes. Polylepis is the genus of these strange trees in the Rosaceae family. They are kind of crooked and spindly looking things and when you´re inside the forest you feel like a gnome could hop out at any moment. The bark on the trees is some of the most ornamental bark I´ve ever seen. (and that´s after taking woody ornamental plants last semester). It is exfoliating, but it hangs on in huge clumps and looks rather eerie. We hiked through the Polylepis woods for about 40 minutes and then got back on the bus to chug to higher elevations.

The Cayambe Coca resere is dominated by the Páramo ecosystem. It´s a tropical alpine system, analogous to the alpine tundra in the temperate zone. There are many interesting plants and animals that inhabit the páramo. For instance, huge masses of green cushion plants cover large areas and are soft spots for animals such as llama, alpacas and vicuña to bed down on. We weren´t lucky enough to see any wild llamas or the like, but the palnt life was pretty incredible. There are pretty demandign environmental conditions that make life in the páramo difficult. For example, the páramo is anywhere from 2500 to 5000 meters and therefore has frost every night but up to nearly 70 degrees Farhenheit during the day. We drove up to about 4200 meteres (13,680 feet) and did a field exercise where we inventoried species diversity. The altitude was certainly noticeable when just a few meters on an uphill climb could wind me, but everyone seemed to be huffing and pugging pretty equally. There were some gorgeous views of the Andes while we were up that high as well.

Cayambe-Coca has been protected for sometime and remains a relatively untouched area. Páramo ecosystems play a large role in water filtration and catchment so their protection and sustainable use is very important. Not to mention they are gorgeous areas to see.

After we finished our activity we hopped back on our trusty green Turismo bus and drove to Papallacta. Papallacta is a tiny town that attract many people due to its thermal baths which are filled with hot volcanic water. We soaked in the baths for about an hour and a half and then drove back to Quito arriving just after seven. Another adventure began when we got back to town.

Jason, a former Peace Corps Volunteer who now works for Ceiba on the coast had joined us for the day. After dropping Joe and Cath off at their home in Cumbaya, Jason was put in charge of calling us cabs to get home. I´m not sure why everyone was so worried that we couldn´t get cabs ourselves, but anyway, Jason hit the curb attemping to flag down cabs. I don´t know what else to say except that he gave it a good try. Most of the trafic was going the other direction but instead of crossing the street and asking cabs to go around the round-about to pick us up on th other side, Jason stayed on the slow traffic side. He failed and failed again to get cabs. Then, the bus drive, probably ready to be home himself, decided enough was enough so he got off the bus, crossed the street and in less then five minutes had three cabs coming around the round-about destined to pick us up. The first one was snatched up by two Ecuadorian women while Jason tried and failed to get us into it. Two more cabs came, we filled them up and drove off with a defeated looking Jason still standing on the curb. Valient effort Jason, valient effort.