Mindo - Hike to La Reina

One of our family´s favorite things to do is go on hikes, especially jungle hikes. One day we set out to go on a hike to a bunch of waterfalls. We had to ride across a deep jungle gorge on this semi-rickety cable car (side note: I think by now I am so accustomed to developing world attractions that I couldn´t really tell if it was safe or not, but since Joan and Dave got in for the ride, I assumed we would be fine). On the other side, we could choose to go one of two ways. One way had a few decent sized waterfalls. The other was a much longer hike to a (in the operator´s opinion) much cooler waterfall. Of course we chose the latter. 














You can why we love jungle hikes so much. The intensity and density of the green is almost overwhelming. It is just plain awesome. You can see Amy in the background, leaning over to take a picture of some intriguing plant or animal. This is how she spent much of the hike, and was able to capture a lot of really cool pictures.



















Here was a really random, odd looking thing. If this weren´t a family blog, I would say it looks something like a miniature dog weiner. But it is, so I won´t. We were not actually sure what it was; maybe it was a new stem growth, maybe it was some kind of invasive fungus or maybe it was some kind of weird animal (or part thereof).



















Every ten minutes or so along the path we would run into small streams and miniature waterfalls that we would need to cross. As usual, we tried to help the kids over a couple of them, but mostly they would just cross it themselves before we could catch up to them. Bentz in particular really came into his own on this hike. I think he spent most of the hike 100 meters ahead of everyone else, skipping along and wacking branches and flowers with his walking stick.