CofC Ecuador Travel Blog

I didnt have time to complete the tour from this past weekend. So hopefully I will have time right now. I have updated the Schools page. you can access it from the Home page. I will get to more of those information pages later this week. I am also using an Ecuadorean keyboard and it is difficult to find or use certain characters. When you get online here, Google and Facebook are in Spanish. Most of the controls and Windows XP items are in Spanish. This truly is immersion learning.

Now, Sunday…Why was it fun? It was adventurous. For 5 of us, we woke up to music blaring from a band that had played all night at the indigenous festival. We didn{t get a restful sleep either night. We the met up with our others members of the group and drove to La Laguna de Quicocha.

Group at Laguna Quicocha

It is a lagoon formed by an eruption many years ago and formed at the base of the current volcano. Cotochachi is in a valley between two volcanoes. As the story goes, the male and female volcanoes were separated many years ago due to a violent eruption and plate spreading. As a result a valley formed, but the volcanoes were so sad that they cired. Their tears fell down the sides and formed into pools. One of which we visited. The lagoon had two islands. We were able to walk or hike around part of the rim and view the lagoon and also the Otavalo valley. Our guide was a naturalist and was able to tell us many different things about the plants and animals in the area. The picture you see is a flower called, Passion of Jesus Flower, becuase it has a corona or decoration at the top of the tube. It also has three stemens that represent the three nails in Jesus, and it has 5 pistels to represent the five holes in the body of Jesus from being on the cross. Very beautiful flower.

After a brief stop at the lagoon we ventured on to Cotochaci where we did some damage in the stores buying gifts of leather. It is a small town and it has the only high school devoted to tanning. 

We then headed to Puerto Lago, a lake that is near Otavalo, for lunch. It was a nice place to rest and see some llamas.

Puerto LagoComo se llama, llama?

Como se llama, llama?

Bus Fire

We were able to get off the bus, and the driver extinguished the flames with no problem. We waited on the side of the road for an hour before another bus picked us up. No problem, just some tourism fun.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.