Parque Nacional Cajas

I´ve just got back from four days of hiking in Parque Nacional Cajas which I´ll talk about in a bit. First of all, I thought you may enjoy seeing a picture of the Peru-Ecuador border which I travelled over last Tuesday



and a couple of pictures of Cuenca, the town I´ve been based in for the last week. It´s a beautiful city!





On Saturday morning I got on a bus bound for Guayaquil, Ecuador´s largest city and got off after about an hour at Laguna Toreadora, the ranger station for Cajas. Here I bought a tourist permit for $10 and hiked up the road to the start of the trek at Tres Cruces. I was following the trek plan described in the Lonely Planet book that I used for my treks in Peru, but I decided I´d like to spend 4 days instead of 3 in the park so my plan was to explore the area around one of the central lakes for a day or so, in between the described second and third days of hiking.

I mentioned before that Cajas looks like the Scottish highlands. It does (in fact it looks quite like parts of Snowdonia and the Lakes as well) until the point where you find the following three things: llamas, puya and cloudforest!



The puya is a plant related to the pineapple that is characteristic of the Andes. The picture below shows a typical puya, although I found much bigger versions of this plant. Generally they live for about 30 years and flower just once, when they send a massive shoot up 10m into the air.



Cloudforest is home to a huge diversity of wildlife, including bespectacled bears (the species that Paddington was based on). Unfortunately I didn´t see any such bears, I was more interested in trying to work out how to clamber over and under the branches with my large rucksac! The mist that flows through these forests adds a mystical element to the atmosphere.



This was the view from my first camp spot, on the morning of the second day:



On the second day I climbed over two mountain passes to reach another lakeside camp spot, here:





On the third day I decided to explore a side valley, climb up a small peak and then head down to the final campsite near some Incan ruins and surrounded by waterfalls.





This morning was the last part of my trek, I walked passed this impressive looking lake:



and on to the road that would take me back to Cuenca. I was waiting for a bus by the road, when a policeman offered me a free lift! I´m not one to turn down a free lift, but I was rather disappointed that he didn´t involve me in an exciting police chase. Still, I saved $2 so I can´t complain.

I´m quite tired now and I´m going to chill out here for a couple of nights, before moving on to Quito, perhaps via Baños. I´ve heard that there´s an excellent bike ride to be done from Baños down to Puyo - it´s about 60km along and 1000m down, and takes you pretty much from the Andes to the Amazon basin. I´m keen to get to Quito quite soon though, so I can try to sort out some volunteering. In the mean time, I´m waiting for my tent to dry (perched up on its end in my cheap hotel room) and my clothes to wash themselves (I´m going to leave it till I get back to my room in ten minutes to see if this has happened; if not I´ll resign myself to the fact that a laundrette trip may be in order).