Quilotoa Bike Trip!

I'm going to go baaack in tiiiime... before finals were over... and tell y'all about my awesome bike trip May 1st through 3rd (Friday, Saturday, Sunday):

My friend Steph took the liberty of looking up some trips online to go to Quilotoa, a big volcano crater-lake not too far outside Quito (about 3 hours). She found a great 3-day bike trip, and so 5 of us from the program went together: Me, Steph, Eva, Pierce, and Zack.

We left Friday morning and were picked up by our awesome tour guide, Lincoln, in a jeep with our bikes on the roof. I got picked up in Cumbayá, but apparently in Lumbisí while he was waiting for half the group, some Lumbiseño (gente from Lumbisí?) asked if he was stealing those bikes… He said no, he was waiting for some people, and why would he put the bikes on top of the roof if he were stealing them? It sounded like a strange story, but Lumbisí is just such a close-knit community that a strange guy with bikes is very out of place.

Anyways, we had a nice ride in the car to the first part of our trip, Cotopaxi! We drove in through the National Park up to the volcano (farthest away from the center of the earth thank-you-very-much) and half-wayish up to the parking lot. We climbed from there up to the refugio, which was quite a hike… mainly because it was super steep and there was very little oxygen for me to breathe…but we made it, and then trudged back down through the volcanic ash that had been really hard to climb up through.

When we got back down to the parking lot, we put our knee pads, elbow pads, helmets, and biking gloves on, and prepared to bike down the volcano (!). We took a few pictures of us in our hardcore outfits, and then went gliiiding down on the dirt road. I decided later that this was my favorite part of the trip, but not by much, because there were so many other amazing parts too. We went back and forth a bunch of times until we got to the bottom, and then we biked through the national park all the way to a restaurant where we stopped and had a picnic lunch while it was raining of awesome sandwiches, with the only ají I’ve ever liked in Ecuador (I’m not big on the spicy stuff). Luckily it stopped raining and we kept biking all the way to a river just before the entrance to the park. Lincoln had followed us in the car the whole way with our stuff, so we packed up our bikes and drove to Quilotoa that night.

We got to our hostel and had a nice big family-style dinner with everyone else staying there. We had some tea and made a fire in our room, and we listened to music and hung out for a while before going to bed.

The next morning, we got up and went to the Quilotoa crater. You walk through a little cavern in the side of the crater, and all of a sudden you come out and see the huge lake and mountains around it. It was sooo beautiful. We climbed down to the lake, and Pierce, being Pierce, went right ahead and jumped in the cooold lake. When we saw him shivering as he rushed to get out, we all decided against it, but we did go kayaking around the lake (trying to avoid the loch ness monster that popped up occasionally…)

The hike down was really, really steep… and so I wasn’t about to hike back up it when we still had a whole day of biking ahead of us, and we had heard many suggestions that we should take horses/mules back up the crater. So Eva and I shelled out the $5, me for a horse and her for a mule, and we rode back up while Zack, Pierce, and Steph hiked up. They ended up beating us (they got a head start… we had to wait for the aminals to come), but I was really glad I did it, my first horse ride since I was 8 or so! And I only sneezed 7 times, and then took a Zyrtec from Pierce when we got back up.

Then we started our bike ride to the next town on the loop (about 2-and-a-half hours away). This was only about 60% downhill, as opposed to the previous day, which was probably 90% downhill. In the beginning, we all went up a hill and thought that Steph was behind us, but it turns out she had gone the wrong way and Lincoln had to drive back and find her.

We were warned about dogs that might attack us on this stretch of the trip, so Zack went prepared with a stick in his belt loop. Lincoln also told us a strategy to either, if you’re going downhill, just keep going because the dogs are just protecting their territory, so they probably will just bark at you as you pass by, or, if you’re going uphill and can’t go fast, you should get off your bike on the opposite side of the dog and use the bike to protect yourself. Luckily, I didn’t have any run-ins with dogs that day, but Eva had a pretty traumatizing time when 3 dogs tried to attack her. I came up behind her just after she had escaped them. Thankfully they didn’t bite or anything, but it seemed like it was a scary experience.

We got to the next town, Chugchilán, and took our stuff into the very nice hostel right before it started raining a lot. We took some nice hot showers, and after a while we found another group from USFQ (mostly gringos, some friends of ours and a few people we didn’t know) that was staying at the same place, and we all hung out (some, literally so, in the hammocks) for a while listening to music and talking, and then we had dinner (with mashed potatoes?! hardly ever exist in the Ecuador) and sat around for a while more talking to Lincoln about how he wants to start his own business, because the one he works for now is owned by this guy from Holland who makes the tours kind of expensive and geared towards tourists rather than students.

On Sunday, we woke up and set out on one more bike ride (again, about 2 ½ hours) to Sigcho, the next town over. On this one it was about the same uphill/downhill deal as the last time, and the same warning about dogs. I got chased a little this time, but I stopped and used my bike to shoo the puppy away, and a few other times I just got barked at.Eva, Steph, and I stuck together for a good chunk of the time, so we were all fine… and we were all equally tired and incapable of biking up hills, so we walked together up some of them as Lincoln followed us in the jeep.

The boys reached the town way ahead of us, and we all ate lunch there before heading back to Quito.

As one last hurrah, Lincoln told us that there was one stretch right after the town that was all downhill and it was, guess what, asphalt! (as opposed to the dirt roads we had been on the whole trip… playing the pothole avoidance game…) This was my very close second favorite part of the trip. It was a really smooth ride all the way down the side of a hill to a river, and then we just packed up the bikes and went on home. Really, this was one of the best trips I had been on in Ecuador… and I had really missed biking! (and kayaking for that matter)