Adventure: Mindo and Carnaval

This past weekend was a long weekend for us because of the holiday Carnaval. Carnaval is officially Monday and Fat Tuesday. Here people celebrate the whole weekend long. The main things to do are to throw water (water balloons or just bottles of water), spray foam from cans and throw flour. Its basically a giant mess. On Saturday night we went down to La Ronda street and saw first hand how crazy things can get. People didn´t care who or what they sprayed. To stay out of the real action we went to a roof top  restaurant and drank the traditional Ecuadorian hot drink, Canelazo. Imagine warm orange juice, cinnamon and some strong liquor made from sugar cane...actually pretty good.
  To celebrate the actual Carnaval we ventured to a town about 2.5 hours from Quito called Mindo. It is in a cloud forest. We had to take three different busses to get there. We stayed at a local hostel on the river called ¨Casa de Cecelia¨. After wandering around and finding some almuerzos we stopped by the park to watch some traditional dancers do their thing. (There are pictures on my [Amber´s] facebook page). We wandered out to Lake Mindo when it got dark to attend the frog concert. It was basically a tour around a small pond to view all sorts of aniamals in the dark.  Since everyone in the city seemed to make pizza we had that for dinner. The next day we took a truck 4 km outside of town to ride the Tarabita. It is a metal basket that spans a valley 530 meters wide and very high up. It was a fun ride across...only about two minutes though. Once across we hiked an hour to a waterfall called Cascada Reina.  We saw many different plants, insects and birds along the way.  It was beautiful. The Cascada Reina was really two waterfalls.  The lower fall was about 10 feet high and then up the steps lead to the higer fall, which was probably 30 or more feet high.  Johnny had to take of his shoes to get to the taller one, because the water was very deep between the two.  We took the cable car back and walked the 4km back to Mindo and caught the bus back to Quito.   We´re really glad we´ve sort of figured out the bus system, otherwise this would have been the 4th weekend in a row where we stayed in the same place, which is pretty unusual for us.

Fact about Carnaval:  It the past few years the city has been trying to control the crazyness of throwing water baloons and water at inoccent people.  In Quito, it is illegal to thow water ballons in public spaces.  According to the local newspaper, if you are caught, the penalty is a day in jail and a 4-7 dollar fine.  They also shut down all outdoor water features like fountains and also I think hydrants to prevent people from playing in them.  This may explain why everybody left Quito for the holiday.  The city was a ghost town this past weekend.  I think most people go to the beach.