The Quilatoa Loop - Week 44

12th - 14th July

From Baños, we decided to take a detour on the way to Quito to 'do' the Quilotoa Loop which everyone told us was beautiful but a bit painful on the old transport front. It is a 200km circuit off the main highway through the mountains and back again.

We got up early to take the 7am bus to Latacunga and then took the next bus out at 10am to Quilatoa to the gorgeous crater lake:


Apparently there is a 5 hour hike from here to our ultimate destination for that day but we wimped out on that (using the heaviness of backpacks as a good excuse) and waited for the next bus at 2pm!

We arrived in Chugchilan 24km and 1 1/2 hours later, I kid you not, the roads are really bad and every couple of kilometers people were being dropped off at their houses along the way. The bus was so full that women were passing the kids and shopping out of the windows to their husbands!

We stayed at Mama Hilda's (James was getting annoyed with Katie who kept referring to it as Madame Hilda's by accident, he said it sounded like we were staying at the local knocking shop) which is a lovely homely place where you eat every meal together with the other guests, family-style. Good job as Chugchilan is tiny and very poor. There are no restaurants, just one shop with a shelf of fruit varying between 1 week and 3 months old and a couple of bottles of coke:


On Friday morning we were up early as we had been told about a lovely hike to a European cheese factory. Now that is worth getting up early for!! The weather was perfect and the whole walk took us through scenery like this:





We must have been very keen for the cheese because we were told the walk would take 2 1/2 hours and we did it in an hour 20 mins!

Mozzarella in process

We bought a big lump of emmenthal and a quarter of lovely soft Andean cheese and couldn't wait to get back and get it eaten (we haven't had any decent cheese since the last cheese factory we went to in Costa Rica, 7 months ago!).

On the way back, we passed the cloud forest and more stunning scenery:


We were back at Mama Hilda's for about 3 and through lack of anything else to do in Chugchilan, drank a fair few beers and played lots of cards with fellow backpackers!

On Saturday we started out on a walk down into the gorge and to walk along the river. Unfortunately, we went wrong somewhere (still no idea where!) and ended up walking an hour steeply downhill in the wrong direction. Luckily, everywhere you look in this area is stunning so we weren't too upset!

When we finally got back to the starting point, we stopped for a little cheese break (delicious!) and then set out in the other direction to a lovely viewpoint of the valley:

This was typical of the food we could have eaten if Mama Hilda hadn't been cooking up a storm for us:!

Typical pig on the top of a bus...