Resumen de Mindo

Mindo fue bien chevere y divertido...

This past weekend me and seven other friends traveled to Mindo, Ecuador. It was a very very touristy town full of everybody on the street as soon as you get off the bus, trying to sell you this package and that package for a ¨descuento¨. We walked through town a little bit before finding a hostel that was listed in one of our guidebooks and took it for $5 a night. It even included a very nice breakfast for $2 more...everything cost money, there were even waterfalls that you could see....for a price, I´ll pass, there are some free ones back home on the Cahaba River...

Once we got there we went out on the town....nothing exciting as you can see. We found a restaraunt that found it extremely crazy that my pickyself wanted nothing on my hotdog, they returned the favor with a lukewarm weiner inside a toasted bun, cost 1.50, so i´m not complaining. That nite we just stayed up playing CatchPhrase, while others played jumprope with kids in the town.

We woke up rather early off of our brick beds at 9, ate, and went to go ziplining, through the dueño of the hostel. She had the hookup with all her costa rican buddies since there was now competition from an ecuadorian group. It cost 13 per person, but apparently 30 usually and it was worth every dime. There were 13 cables to go on, and almost all offered up awesome views of the countryside. They even let us do two trucos(or tricks).

One called the superman as shown below

And one called the mariposa(butterfly) as shown to the side.

After that we went into town, got some pizza of course and headed back to the hostel. The owner then called a taxi(truck) to pick us up for tubing, down white water rapids. Definitely couldn´t have done this in the states which is what makes it so awesome. It only cost 5 but was pretty dangerous and fun and freezing cold.

After that it started to rain so we just chilled at a restaraunt to wait for the rain to let up so we could go get some marshmellows for some smores later on that nite. It took us about 2hrs but my Eagle Scout skills finally came in handy getting a fire started with damp wood. There we played cards, ate smores and talked in English, which I now see now was a mistake as changing over to spanish was a little rough this morning with my host mom.

We were discussing my plans to go to Machu Picchu, which included 3 nites in Lima which she said was bastante and that I should get more than just one day at Machu Picchu. So I´m going to talk to the travel agent this week and try and see if I can´t get anything changed.

Till next time, stay fresh.....chao