End of Semester, Tiny Adventures

As the semester comes to a close (in fact we just had our goodbye dinner and a ride on a party bus called a Chiva), the weekends became a little more homework and hanging out with friends/family oriented rather than travel oriented. After the earthquake there was a period where no one really wanted to travel or do much at all, which is very reasonable. After bleeding my funds all semester it is probably good that I will have some money left for my upcoming trip to Peru. BUT I still managed to get some camping and hiking in! 

The photos from camping and hiking with my friends Aran and Phoebe are from a night we spent at Pasachoa. It is pretty close to Quito, only an hour or two by bus, and has a whole set up at the bottom for campers with shelters and picnic tables and apparently sometimes they have pre-cut dry wood, which is what we were hoping for. There was no wood, so we had to improvise and use a tiny candle that I brought to heat up our pre-cooked hot dogs, it was quite a struggle, but a funny struggle. The next morning we hiked for about 4 hours up a trail that went through the woods for a while and then let out to a more open space. We made it as far up as we could go, until we reached a vertical rock wall that would have been fun to climb up if it was not soaking wet. The views underneath the majestic clouds were pretty great!

I also included a picture of my walk home on an average day to show how the clouds in Ecuador are always that huge and puffy and overall incredible!

There is also a single photo of when I went to the tourist hub about 40 minutes from Quito called Mitad del Mundo. This is where the equator runs through Ecuador at 0 degrees latitude and longitude! Literally the middle of the world! But unfortantely due to the moving poles, the actual middle is not where the statue lies anymore, I heard it moved about 200 meters in one direction. Still, it was a pleasant sunny afternoon to indulge in the feeling of being a tourist rather than students in Quito.

Lastly, there are pictures from a cloudy day at Cotopaxi National Park, supposedly, if it wasn't so cloudy, we were supposed to have great views of Ecuador's giant cone-shaped volcano. We didn't see that, but we had a nice little walk around this "lake" and got to bike back down the road to the park entrance.