Cloud Forest Adventures in Mindo

I like it here in Mindo.. we are eating lots of Quinoa soup and chocolate brownies! we went on a chocolate tour seeing how chocolate beans are grown, then fermented and roasted and gound to make chocolate. At the end of the tour we got to try lots of chocolate, and as you may have seen jessie ray almost gagged on a sample taster of chocolate BBQ sauce!! it was really really funny and we all laughed a lot! Just as well we had chocolate brownie to eat afterwards.

Oooohhh yeah, and we had a river by our hostel, one day it rained so much, all day and all night, and it nearly overflowed! it was a bit scary and my trainers got washed down the river in the night... but it went down the next day.

There were lots of birds in Mindo and we saw our first toucan, parrots, lots of humming birds, and a black bird with a bright yellow back called a lemon Rumped Tanager.

One day we took an open cable car to some waterfalls, it was really high. it felt nice with the air blowing in my face.. we walked for an hour and we saw 5 different waterfalls, 2 of them we swam in. It was really cold! we had to jump over bullet ants on the way, they were really big with pincers!

A cloud forest is somewhere that it rains almost every day for a bit, but when its not raining its a good temperature.. its a jungle on a mountain. You have to go around lots of winding roads to get there.

Its nearly carnaval here and we saw kids squirting each other with carnival foam! its like sweet scented shaving foam in a massive can,... almost everytime we saw kids, they had water balloons and foam in their hands. No one wore coats in the rain! they just got got wet and dried off after because the rain is warm.

The guest house did really nice breakfast and the people were really lovely, they made herbal teas from the garden for dad who had a poorly tummy and they had swing beds next to the river.

We got to know Gonzales who made and sold jewellery. One day he helped us make a bracelet for my mum out of coconut palm wood, turquiose and copper. I have bought some bits of palm wood so I can make some at Nailsworth community workshop when I get back.