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| dusk |
This post will begin and end with views from our main window... the cloud formations are impressive and change by the minute.
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| The Fam |
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| w/Jett, a free-spirited friend from Colorado |
Girón is a favorite destination for expats, locals, and visitors alike; the town itself is unremarkable, but only a few miles from the village there is an amazing waterfall that provides plenty of photographic moments.
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| Jett & Mike, a friend who has since moved to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico |
The waterfalls are also known as "El Chorro de Girón;" in Spanish, according to Google Translate, 'el churro' means 'the jet.'
There is an area called 'the middle falls,' which is a short hike away; depending on your level of fitness, it's from 1 1/4 hrs. to 3 hours away, along a trail offering beautiful views of the mountainsides. The hike along the trail is much more interesting than the destination itself.
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| Mike & Jett at 'the middle falls' |
When you arrive at the middle falls, there really isn't much to see. You don't see the falls; everything is covered in green, and very peaceful, but when you're expecting to see a pair of huge waterfalls cascading down from the mountain, and you don't, it's a little disappointing.
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Playing with time-lapse
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I visited the waterfalls a second time with a group of Ecuadorians, two of whom worked for us at the time at our café (the guy taking the picture and the guy in the checkered jacket, standing to my right), and a third (the guy dressed in black standing to my left) who now is a security guard in my condominium building. We arrived in Girón after two weeks of heavy, heavy rains, causing massive landslides including this chunk of land that separated from the mountainside and came to rest smack dab in the middle of the road.
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| piece of the mountain separated |
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| me and my Ecuadorian buddies |
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| one last shot of El Chorro |
I spent a Sunday hiking in The Cajas with three friends, on a spectacularly unique day in that in an area renown for clouds hugging the landscape and shrouding the land in a mystical fog, not a single cloud appeared in the sky that day. By the end of the 7 1/2 hr. hike I had received the worst sunburn of my time spent in Ecuador.
The cliffs are beautiful, some covered in shrubbery while others are completely bare. Not much grows at this altitude (approx. 13,000ft); long grass, bushes, but certainly no trees.
Only 10 mins. into our hike we saw a rare sight indeed: a red fox! Very few people have seen these in The Cajas, and I was very fortunate to see one on my first hike, only after a few minutes. He didn't stick around long... as soon as he noticed my taking pictures of him, he took off.
The trail we were walking led to a village way out in the middle of nowhere. We passed many villagers on the trail riding horses to/from the roadway; on our trek to the village they were heading towards the highway with empty sacks. On the way back from the village the horses were loaded down with supplies and provisions, heading to their village.
Several of them stopped and asked us where we were going... we gave them the name of the village and they mostly just smiled and nodded.
The two horses in this shot are very small, appearing in the middle of the photograph.
Where the trail meets the highway we saw many horses tethered to the ground, boulders, or large shrubs... the villagers had 'parked' their horses and caught a ride into town on one of the buses that passes by with empty sacks, to return with their sacks filled with wheat, flour, sugar...
The trail extends along the side of the mountain, in the right side of the photo; way off in the distance, in the middle of the photograph, you can see a tiny cluster of buildings. The village was just that: a small cluster of buildings with farmhouses scattered around the valley. We did not see a pond, creek, or river nearby, and hardly any cattle. I could not figure out what the people out here do to sustain a living.
This is typical of the landscape in the Cajas: tall grass in sloping hills, low-lying area that holds water, and rocky cliffs in the background.
That's Rick, not too far from the highway. The lake behind him is a popular destination for hikers; the Cajas visitors center is just above its banks.
Another view of a sunset in Cuenca, taken from street level.
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