ECORUTA del QUINDE and TAMBOQUINDE – PACHAMAMA AT LARGE!

The view from Tamboquinde

An unforgettable weekend! Drenched to the skin, mud-covered and shivering! Vehicles up to their axles in the dirt and sliding backwards down hills which normal human beings would not want to even walk up! Sheer climbs on the bicycles, on horrid, rocky tracks! Punctures! Mosquitoes and ‘no-see-um’s’ feasting happily an every piece of nice warm skin they could find! The children using all their changes of clothes within the first two hours after we left Quito! But ...... Stunning forest and mountain views (when we had them!); an unmatched, unspoiled, natural environment; tranquillity only interrupted by toucans and raging rivers; wonderful integration and interaction between Pachamama mum’s and dad’s and children – and not a few hangers-on, including a black dog which appeared from somewhere; and knowing that we were privileged to be part of some enlightened conservation efforts close to Quito.

A group of parents of the two parallel groups of 3° de Básico in Pachamama (Robbie’s group, Lobos marinos, and its parallel, Pingüinos) decided to set up an adventure for the families, perhaps not expecting so much enthusiasm. In the end we were 27 boys and girls (those were the parents!) and 28 children. Gabriel Carrión, father of Camilo, and Karla Espinosa, mother of Julián, were the prime movers. Gabriel, who is a keen cyclist and who organises cycling trips in Ecuador, offered his van and trailer for transport, and brought along his assistants, Roberto and Juan Carlos; Karla was i/c food. Karla did not get her sums right at all – there were sufficient rations for at least 100! This was the famous Pachamama pot-luck feast, the Pambamesa, at its best!

(I have given a link here to Lord Guau, which is Gabriel’s business. He looks after pets of all sorts, mostly dogs, in many different ways. Perhaps the best pet ‘service’ in this part of Ecuador. Gabriel, in the guise of Very Important Bikers (V.I.B.) also organises cycling trips and races – one of which was the famous Puembo to Papallacta ascent which John successfully did last year on his road bike.) LORD GUAU  and V.I.B. - Gabriel's bike touring link

The destination for this adventure was Tamboquinde, one of the remarkable conservation projects in the páramo and cloud forests along the Ecoruta del Quinde. The Ecoruta is the result of very determined efforts by some of the landowners to turn this wild area between Quito and Mindo into the special thing it should be. They are close now to being designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. Ecuador boasts 4 World Heritage sites, including the Galápagos Islands and the Historic Centre of Quito. Here is the link to the UNESCO World Heritage Sites: UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The Ecoruta has very good web pages, with maps and descriptions. Well worth a read! ECORUTA DEL QUINDE.

Juan Manuel Carrión

Tamboquinde is owned by Gabriel’s family and is used by his brother, Juan Manuel. Here’s another link which is a 'must' read: JUAN MANUEL CARRIÓN'S Web pages. Juan Manuel Carrión is a very special man – artist, ornithologist, conservationist and much more. Here in Ecuador we all know his lovely identification guides for the Birds of Quito and The Birds of Ecuador, but he has illustrated many other books and posters, and staged exhibitions of his work.


John, Robbie and Maia, all their kit and John’s bicycle were collected by Gabriel early Saturday morning. Astonishingly, when Gabriel arrived we saw he was carrying a bed on top of the van. Now, that is the style way to go camping! After collecting other families and filling the trailer with bikes of all sizes and states of well-being, we drove on to Condado Shopping in the north of Quito, to meet up with most of the other families. The filling station for this gathering is also popular with the off-road motor-cycling gang, for whom ear-shattering noise seems to be as important an obligation of their pastime as does their robot-look-alike protective clothing. It was with apprehension that we saw several of these motorcyclists rampaging off towards our own destination. In actual fact we neither saw nor heard them again. Our convoy then headed for the mountains, the clouds and the Ecoruta.

Maia is on top, ready to go - flying it seems!

Maia on her way down.

We stopped at what looked to be the top of the climb on the dirt road to unload the mountain-bikes of the 4 hardiest (most foolish?) cyclists. There was John of course. While the convoy, with Robbie and Maia in the care of friends, carried onwards and downwards to the Reserva Yanacocha, the cyclists chose the ‘easy’ way – they rode up a wall! A wall of quite some length! Yes, Ecuador has its mountains and its hard core cyclists but this was insane! And once at the top, it started raining! And it was cold! Gabriel, on his super-duper, carbon-fibre, rocket bike disappeared into the mist in the distance, flagging the route for us to follow. Follow we did – as best we could, taking into account crashes and punctures. We also had to collect up Gabriel’s flags. 30 km later we descended perilously to meet up with the road party who were fishing for trout in a pond, or abseiling down a rock wall (Maia), or playing in a river (Robbie, of course!). We then completed the cycling route, joined by many others - some of the youngsters and their mum’s and dad’s – free-wheeling 7 km down a filthy, muddy track to Tamboquinde. The children rode into all the deepest and most dangerous mud-holes, while the parents rode daintily around them.In the pouring rain! What great fun! Really, it was!

Doesn't look like it, but it was ... pouring with rain!

A dry place at last, for lunch

Late night table games for Robbie

Well, that was the start of the adventure! What followed was more fun! We had now to get the cars and the bikes and ourselves up the 400 metres to the house at Tamboquinde. In the pouring rain! Up a winding, rocky, muddy, rutted track along the side of a mountain!  That we almost all made it is testament not to 4-wheel-drive trucks but to human ingenuity and the ability to take ridiculous risks while not looking down over precipices. Many bits were left behind in the mud, including some trout, the 1st Aid box, the bike trailer and several bikes and various pieces of clothing. So we got up to the house – in the pouring rain! – and packed ourselves into what would become our base room, for lunch. A big box with John’s 
homemade, sourdough bread and sandwiches had somehow disappeared along the way, but the food shared by the 55 of us would anyway have comfortably fed 500 hungry Maia’s – don’t forget that she eats a bit!  Now it was time to think about putting up tents. In the pouring rain! The children were not too 
worried about this – most were anyway happily outside in the pouring rain and mud and dirt. Somehow we all found space under the roof of a veranda or inside a moss-covered BBQ cabin to cram our assembled tents.  Was it 13 tents in all? I  suspect though that some cheats slept in their cars or fought for the two available sofas. By now it was evening and we gathered together the 
remaining bits and pieces from along the track and, when it stopped raining, enjoyed a roaring fire, which had much more to do with kerosene than it did wood. Yucky marsh mallows, stickily melted in the flames of a fire are a children’s ‘must’ around a bonfire, as is a sing-along to guitars. Gabriel put up another huge tent in which originally we intended the children to sleep together but it soon became a kid’s fiesta tent with a floor 1 metre deep in mud. Supper followed and from quite where, nobody knows, a huge and very welcome vat of hot mulled wine was produced. Some of the very tired mum’s and dad’s tried now to get their heads down  in their tents. No chance! It was very late before the kids decided that their parents could go to bed, and they followed. A very sleepless night – obviously – despite the tranquilising roar of a flooded stream and the symphony of a million crickets and frogs!

Tenting on the veranda. Maia is in front of our tent, at the back

John was up early on Sunday and, with Juan Carlos for company, cycled the steep 8 km up the Ecoruta from Tamboquinde to Bella Vista. Bella Vista!!! Bella Vista!!! Another 'must read' link. BELLAVISTA CLOUD FOREST RESERVE and LODGE. If you ever visit or live in Ecuador, you do not go home until you visit this place. The project has been some 15 years in its making and now enjoys great success. Richard Parsons bought several hundred hectares here and has turned it into a remarkable conservation area, a reserve, which supports its conservation efforts with tourists from all over the world. Many of them are ornithologists, who have come to search out the 350 or so recorded bird species, some of which are very rare indeed. Mammals are never easy to locate in Ecuador but Bella Vista sees Spectacled Bears and Mountain Lions, as well as more common animals.

When the two cyclists got back to Tamboquinde for a late breakfast, they found silence. No-one! Two screaming grey toucans watching from a tree, countless humming birds on the three feeders and a couple of recuperating (that’s a polite word, isn’t it?), sleeping dad’s were discovered. The rest?? All had gone up the mountain on foot, to visit a gigantic, old tree, about which there are various legends spoken. It takes 10 adults to hold hands and cover the diameter of that tree. Eventually everyone slid down the bank back into camp in twos and threes, tired out but obviously happy with life. The sun had been shining, so it had been a good moment for John to dry things a little, before packing up the tent, bed rolls and sleeping bags. While a huge lunch was being prepared on the BBQ, the children went into play mode - racing on their bicycles, digging in the mud, wading in the fish ponds, sliding down the banks, whatever it was that entertained them and used up their last remaining change of clothes. And as lunch got under way, so again came the rain. Families departed in their own cars as soon as they could, to try and get onto the main roads back to Quito before the Ecoruta dirt road became impassable. The van was loaded up and was the last to leave, of course. In the pouring rain! The bike trailer had been left down the mountain the day before, so all the bikes were carried and pushed back down to be secured on. In the pouring rain! The van then slid down the track to collect the trailer. After a pause to change into dry clothes, we were back in the van and on our way. Poor Roberto drove us home, with Juan Carlos for company. The rest slept! Like Maia in the photo below.

  

What a wonderful adventure with a wonderful group of people! Let's hope this first is a starting point for many more of these 'paseos'.

You will guess that this was not a trip in which to bring out the camera often. Good photos were hard to take - while in the pouring rain, on a bicycle, climbing a wall, or man-handling cars up muddy slopes. The camera stayed mostly in a dry bag during this trip.