Quilotoa

Last week was a “feriado” in Quito, meaning a holiday break! Wednesday was Día de los Muertos and Thursday was Cuenca Independence Day (which I’m pretty sure is just used as an excuse to not have school/work for the rest of the week after Day of the Dead). Anyways, pretty much everyone in Ecuador takes the 5-day weekend to travel, and of course we did as well! Instead of going away for the whole 5 days though, a group of us opted to avoid the mass crowds and traffic and instead just head for a couple of days to the highly-recommended Quilotoa Volcano/Crater Lake, about 4 hours from the outskirts of Quito. The trip ended up being so fun and Quilotoa was even more beautiful than I could have imagined, and it was the perfect amount of time to be gone.

The Quilotoa lake is inside a volcanic crater, and the locals claim that the lake is “bottomless” (though geologists say that it is actually about 820 ft. deep…either way, not jumping in there!) We were up even higher than Quito in elevation (it’s about 12,800 ft. at the top of the crater) and it’s extremely cold and windy – but the incredible view was well worth it!

On Friday morning we woke up bright and early to begin our venture on what we thought was a 6-hour hike around the lake. However, we naively assumed that the “Quilotoa loop” that everyone talks about was at the BASE of the lake, and it was not until we had hiked all the way down the crazy-steep crater to the edge of the water that we realized the “loop” is not in fact at the bottom but rather at the EDGE of the crater, back at the top. Well, whoops! As we looked fearfully up at the ominous hill we had just come down, I joked, “Well, what goes down must come back up!” (Can’t say I’ve ever said that on a hike before…a bit counter-intuitive!) But, in the end, we all made it up just fine and felt very accomplished and fit when we reached the top!

Naturally though, once we got back to the top of the crater we had little desire to start all over on a new 6-hour trek, so we decided to hike instead for a couple hours along the REAL loop, eat lunch at a scenic spot somewhere along the way, and then turn back around. A few hours later we hopped on a bus back to Quito, and arrived back at our homes around dinnertime.

(Back at the top!)

This coming weekend, our whole group is heading to Playa de Oro in the coastal Esmeraldas region for a program excursion. The unit we are currently studying in our core course is “the Afro-Andean Diaspora,” so we will be visiting a native community on the coast and learning more about the history and rights movements of the Afro-Ecuadorian communities (as well as hitting the beach for a few hours!) Check back for a summary of the trip next week!