Mindo: Cloud forest, Carbon onset, Cascadas, and Chocolate

By Hillary Harder

As we reached the end of our second full week in Ecuador, we embarked on our first group trip to the beautiful town of Mindo, located in a cloud forest about two hours northwest of Quito. On the way there we stopped at Museo Tulipe, an archaeological site where Incan and pre-Incan ruins were discovered as recently as 1979. We enjoyed an excellent tour through the site where we learned about the Yumbo indigenous people who once lived there as hunter-gatherers and traders.

In Mindo, we stayed at La Casa de Cecilia, a peaceful and cozy hotel located on the banks of the Rio Canchupi. Our group spent many hours sitting on the covered patio, whether playing game at night or enjoying a hot drink and watching the river rush by in the morning.

The primary purpose of our trip to Mindo was to continue a long-standing partnership between Goshen College and the municipal government of Mindo. Over the years, GC students and staff have offered their time and energy to support community initiatives in Mindo linked to carbon onset, which helps mitigate the carbon that SST travel inevitably emits into the atmosphere. Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor, carbon onset initiatives are now consistently incorporated into SST courses, including the Ecuador semester program.

In Mindo, carbon onset initiatives are carried our in collaboration with Klever Tello, an official with the municipal government in Mindo. Klever spoke eloquently to our group about la minga, an Ecuadorian ideology rooted in indigenous practices in which people come together for communal work projects that better their community. Klever explained that we would be painting murals in Mindo’s central park. These murals are part of a larger community education project whose goal is to bring awareness to endangered species of birds that are endemic to this particular region of Ecuador. Each of us, Klever declared, has a role to play in combating the effects of climate change.

While in Mindo, we also enjoyed the stunning beauty and natural resources in the area. We took a cablecar across a deep river gorge to a series of hiking trails leading to several beautiful waterfalls. The rain didn’t bother us since we got wet in the river anyway!

Mindo is known for chocolate-making, so we took part in a “chocolate tour” that walked us through the entire process of making chocolate, from the raw cacao plant to cacao tea to chocolate bars of various flavors and even a delicious brownie. The tour also included the chance to apply a “chocolate mask” to our faces or hands, which left our skin silky smooth.

On our final morning in Mindo, those who wanted to woke up before dawn for a birding tour in a nearby ecological reserve. Thanks to our expert guide, Julia, we saw over 40 species of birds, including several toucans, many varieties of tanagers, and a dozen hummingbird species that flocked to the cups of sugar water we held out to feed them. The feeling of reverence that comes over you when a tiny, iridescent hummingbird perches on your hand and blinks up at you with its feathers shimmering is impossible to describe.

We left Mindo feeling refreshed and ready for a new week ahead. On the way back to Quito we stopped by one of several monuments marking the geographic center of the world – an apt metaphor for the feeling of being between worlds that often occurs on SST.