Laguna Cuicocha

Technorati Tags: Ecuador,South America,Crater Lake,Crater,Lake,Hike,Travel

Our ever-enterprising 7th grade Science teacher, Diann, got a bunch of us together at the end of November to do a hike she’d had her eye on: Laguna Cuicocha (Guinea Pig Lake).  A couple of hours north of Quito, near the famous market town of Otavalo, here we have yet another gorgeous crater lake, except that this one has two islands in the middle, separated by the thinnest of reed-filled channels.  On a previous occasion we’d taken the boat around one island and through the little slip between them, which was really nice.  This time we were determined to walk the rim.

Fourteen years ago on our honeymoon we’d been to this lake and started hiking counterclockwise, so I had a vision based on that half-hour walk that the whole 5 hour trail would be a naked, baking-in-the-sun ridge hike.  Nothing could have been further from the truth.  We started out walking through sun-dappled pine forest with gorgeous views of the lake.  Yet my favorite part was that the trail didn’t offer constant, satiating views of the lake, but ducked away from the crater rim for a time, through scrub, cloud forest, and paramo, then swung back to offer a fresh but equally gorgeous perspective. 

Quilotoa Loop & Blacksheep Inn

Technorati Tags: Ecuador,Quilotoa,Blacksheep Inn,Crater,Crater Lake,South America,Travel,Hiking,Planeta.com

We’re backin’ up now… to November of 2008.  We’re dying to show you our Winter Break pics (hint – there’s a canal there), but we should probably catch up on fall trips first, before we forget. 

Our friend Beth Rogers and her boyfriend Shawn invited us to go with them for a long weekend to a remote part of highland Ecuador.  We’d been hearing about the Blacksheep Inn, an award-winning sustainable ecolodge, ever since arriving in Ecuador.  Ron Mader, who runs Planeta.com and specializes in eco-tourism, told me that it’s one of the best in the world.  This trip is a giant counterclockwise driving loop that’s positively spectacular. The mountains are tremendous, and covered top to bottom with patchwork quilts of farmland. The mostly dirt and cobblestone road snakes from ridge to valley along precipitous drop-offs, leading to a serious conundrum: should Joy drive and scare herself to death going 15 miles an hour (turning the 6-hour drive into a 12-hour drive), or let Luke drive and scare everyone to death going 50 miles an hour (turning the 6 hour drive into a 4 ½-hour drive)?  The creative compromise? Joy took herbal tranquilizers to survive Luke’s driving; Shawn and Beth just held on tight.

Blacksheep Inn consists of an assortment of beautiful buildings all up and down a steep hillside (the driveway is four-wheel-drive only), with commanding views across a giant valley. Toilets are of the composting variety (but don’t stink at all), some of the water is harvested rainwater, and each room has a great little woodstove that heats up the room in minutes.  Dinner and breakfast are delectable, vegetarian.

The scenic highlight of the loop is the namesake crater lake, Laguna Quilotoa.  Amazingly, this lake was formed by a giant eruption relatively recently (February 4, 1797 to be precise!).  One day we hiked for about seven hours from the edge of the crater back to Blacksheep Inn: the first thirty minutes were along the rim of the crater. Five and a half hours were various angles of downhill; the last hour was straight up.  There’s no describing the views and the immense scale of the Andean landscape.  It was simply spectacular.