Megan says Hola!: Our ‘Relaxing’ Weekend Away in Mindo:

This weekend we visited the town of Mindo, and not to sound like a broken record, it was AMAZING! Mindo is a small, quiet, jungle town that is a two hour /$2.50 bus ride away. We arrived in Mindo on Saturday morning checked into our lovely cabin-hostel in the jungle (that cost only $10 a night, hearty breakfast included) spent some relaxing time in the hammocks and then began our adventures!

Ynez and I went zip-lining and it was exhilarating, breathtaking and incredible! The zip-line course is located right in the foot-hills of the jungle, the course is 13 lines, takes an hour to complete and costs only $15! The zip-lines are super-high up across lush, tree-covered valleys and the views are just spectacular. I did two of the zip-lines up-side down and one super-man styles. We found out too late that you could bring your camera on the zip-lines, so we have no action shots, but we plan to go again-so next time we shall get some sweet snaps!

We went to a frog lagoon in the evening and went for a night walk to look at some really neat (really tiny) frogs, the tour is called a frog concert because you can hear so many frogs ribbitting. We were in our cabin in bed under our mosquito nets reading National Geographics from the 1970’s by 10pm and were awoken only briefly twice during the night, first by the Spaniards staying on the floor below us playing guitar and second by the damned noisy rooster outside.

In the morning we went for a hike to a beautiful waterfall and I jumped off a 20 meter cliff! As Blair Hunter will attest to, I am not brave at all when it comes to cliff jumping, at the cabin it takes me 20 minutes to psych myself up to jump off the 4 meter cliff and I often chicken out entirely when it comes to the 9 meter cliff. But I did the 20 meter jump today after only one brief hesitation and it was hella scary, amazing but scary.

All in all another amazing weekend travelling in Ecuador (although it was probably pretty easy to tell this from my excessive use of exclamation points)!