Travel Adventures in Ecuador

As we enter the final week of our study portion of the term, it is amazing to reflect on all of the sights and experiences Ecuador has offered us so far: from hummingbird sanctuaries in the cloud forest to participating in artisan crafts with a Kichwa community in the Amazon.

Mindo opened our eyes to the wide variety of hummingbird species in Ecuador. In the Alambi hummingbird sanctuary, the delicate birds feed straight from your hand, flitting from feeder to feeder and person to person, showing off their variety of shapes, sizes, and colors.

We also learned about the process of making chocolate at Mindo Maya Chocolate, from drying and roasting the beans to filling the molds with liquid chocolate to set. In total, it takes 23 days to make one bar of chocolate! We also experienced firsthand the moisturizing benefits of a chocolate face mask.

Ecuador derives its name from its position on the equator. At Mitad del Mundo (“middle of the world”), we stood on the exact equator line, 0° latitude, with half the group in the northern hemisphere and half in the southern. Our guide explained how old stone calendars revealed the seasons and engaged us in activities to demonstrate the Coriolis effect in each hemisphere and the absence of it on the equator.

Our trip to Riobamba and Guaranda, with visits to the surrounding pueblos of San Simon and Salinas, allowed us to interact with an elderly Kichwa community and young school-aged children. The foundation Su Cambio por el Cambio in San Simon hosts a program for elderly adults in the community to engage in social interaction, receive medical care, and eat lunch each day. It also offers an after-school program to young children in the afternoons. We were fortunate to meet and engage with both groups. 

The children at the San Luis school in Riobamba prepared a delightful presentation for us to showcase the cultural highlights of Ecuador in all regions of the country: Galapagos, coast, sierra, and Amazon. We were moved by their welcome and enjoyed dancing with them to end our time together.

Our trip to the Otavalo area was rich with indigenous cultural practices and artisanship. We began at Cuicocha Lake, a crater lake which translates to “guinea pig lake” or “rainbow lake,” based on differing Kichwa interpretations. From there, we enjoyed lunch and a conversation with Marta, a Kichwa midwife who continues to practice ancestral midwifery in her community and the surrounding area. Though Ecuador’s constitution recognizes it as a plurinational country, there is still work to remove discrimination against ancestral Andean medicinal practices and invite Western and Andean medicine to coincide.

At the Ñanda Manachide music workshop, Don Luis gave a demonstration of traditional Andean instruments. After making bamboo flutes, Don Luis taught us how to play. Lusmilla demonstrated how she makes and dyes yarn from sheep and alpaca wool at her textile shop. We learned how to identify real alpaca wool from synthetic material and watched Lusmilla weave a wall covering on a belt loom. It is painstaking work that can take up to 15 days, 5 hours a day to complete one piece.

We ended our excursions in the Amazon, where we traveled by canoe on the Napo River. The Ally Shamushka Kichwa community welcomed us with headbands and face paint and taught us their many crafts, including how to use palm leaves to create baskets, mold ceramic bowls by hand, and how to prepare chicha, a traditional fermented yuka drink.  We also visited an etnobotanic park in Puyo that works to preserve and educate on native medicinal plants.

Our final adventure took us to a waterfall outside of Baños, Pailon del Diablo, named for a rock formation behind the waterfall that resembles a devil’s face. We enjoyed the hike up the mountain and through the side of the rock. The stunning view and mighty water was well worth the effort to get there.