On the morning of January 24th, we met the guide who would take us on our road trip down to Cuenca. He was called Lincoln (his father named his sons after US Presidents; pity his brother Wilson), he spoke excellent English, and he was an amazing source of information on all things Ecuadorian. While we had been expecting a bus trip shared with at least a few other travelers, it turned out we were his only clients, and so we got to pick his brain at length.
Mount Cotopaxi is the second highest peak in Ecuador, at 19,347 feet. It's also an active volcano and was at code yellow on the day of our visit (later that week it would start producing ash.) While it remained well-behaved for our visit, the weather did not. As we ascended into the lower reaches of the park, clouds rolled in, obscuring the magnificent heights, and it started to drizzle. Temps also started dropping, and by the time we reached the upper parking lot at about fifteen thousand feet, it was in the high thirties with a strong breeze on the Beaufort scale, two hundred foot visibility and driving ice. Raine and I had our puffy coats on under rain gear, but we were both chilled within minutes of getting out and couldn't see anything anyway (except other vans containing huddled German tourists and three possibly insane mountain bikers.) We reluctantly called it a day.
On the way back down, however, we stopped at a mountain lake. The ice had returned to drizzle, the high winds had abated, and conditions were now survivable if not optimal. Hoping for the best, we started what turned out to be a five mile hike around the lake, and boy, were we rewarded. Birds of all kinds, wild horses, amazing alpine vegetation (Lincoln knew all the plants and their medicinal uses, which were fascinating. The reeds were full of Andean teal ducks; the shallows echoes to the cries of local frogs, and we took a ridiculous number of pics (see below.) Cold and tired but very happy, we got dropped off at the first of what turned out to be a series of excellent hotels for the night and crashed. The hotel fed us enormous breakfasts (also excellent) the following morning-- and then we hit the road again.
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