Mindo

Outside of Quito we took a two day trip to nearby Mindo.  The community of Mindo, with its outstanding "Waterfall Blue Lagoon" (Cascada Laguna Azul) nearby, is a favorite resort area for people from Quito.  Following are a few shots of the two-day trip to Mindo and the falls.  Cascada Laguna Azul was most beautiful.  To access it, we drove the bus (with permission) through a mud road on private property, through a banana plantation, where it got stuck... and then hiked (crawled) down a real "Romancing the Stone" Cartagena Colombia-style mud-jungle hill (if you saw the film, you'll know what I'm talking about)... then worked our way up one-half mile through the river bed to the 150 foot waterfall into the 100 foot diameter lagoon.  No camera made it that far, so there are no photos.  For a hint as to how magnificent this was, here is a picture of a similar waterfall in nearby Colombia... from a stamp. waterfall_stamp018.gif (80682 bytes) courtesy of Old Beeg's Waterfall Stamps of the World site at  http://hometown.aol.com/oldbeeg/H2Ofalls.html

This is the waterfall I wish I had visited in Ecuador big-falls_ecuador.jpg (185827 bytes) from San Rafael, http://ftp.sunet.se/ftp/pub/pictures/views/Ecuador/big-falls.jpg , on Rio Coca - by Pete Carmichael.

Here are some photos from that "Mindo" weekend.

bus_to_mindo_2day_trip.JPG (38573 bytes) mindo_valley_view_on_hike.JPG (59884 bytes) fording_river_taken_from_roof_of_bus.JPG (57639 bytes) river_in_mindo_by_hostel.JPG (89021 bytes) hostel_in_mindo_by_river.JPG (61569 bytes)
jim_baird_etal_on_bus_roof_on_way_to_mindo.JPG (34323 bytes) road_to_mindo_from_roof_of_bus.JPG (62949 bytes) obligatory_stuck_bus_nr_laguna_azul_nr_mindo.JPG (116549 bytes) jim_baird_nr_laguna_azul_nr_mindo.JPG (113480 bytes) shela_and_others_on_mindo_hike.JPG (95964 bytes)
llama_in_mindo_behind_clouds_over_volcano.JPG (27122 bytes) llama_in_mindo_central_park.JPG (61755 bytes) traffic_in_mindo_not_many_horses_in_ecuador.JPG (39110 bytes) Go back to Ecuador trip

Go back to Ecuador trip