Getting Above It All

On October 10, 2017 By Isobar ExpeditionsIn South America4 Comments

One of the favorite things that we did during our time in Ecuador was to climb up a twelve story tower in the rainforest to watch for wildlife. Like most days that we spent at the Napo Wildlife Center in the Amazon, we were woken up at 4:30 am to have a quick breakfast and jump into a canoe to paddle to our destination. Obviously, the best times to see wildlife anyplace is at dusk and dawn when animals are most active and the same is true of animals in the jungle.

Once we beached our canoe, it was a relatively short hike through the forest to reach the observation tower. Standing at the bottom of the tower will certainly test any potential fear of heights, but it was an easier climb up the stairs than we had at first anticipated. We climbed up through the tree tops as well as the fog and arrived to see an amazing view of the jungle below us. It didn’t take long for the group to start spotting birds. The goal was to act as a team, each of us looking through binoculars and zoom lenses searching for motion that might be from an animal. Once someone saw something, our guides would point their telescopes at it and determine what we were looking at.

We were able to see so many amazing animals from macaws, toucans, and various monkeys. Overall, during our time in the jungle, we saw over 52 types of birds, 5 different monkeys, 2 tree sloths, as well as caimans. We weren’t able to take photos of everything because of the denseness of the forest, but we will treasure our memories of seeing them forever. We had several wonderful adventures during our time in Ecuador, but this day was definitely one that was extremely memorable.

Giant River Otters

On October 5, 2017October 5, 2017 By Isobar ExpeditionsIn South America2 Comments

When you think of otters, you usually think of cute sea otters playing like puppies in the water. Giant river otters are definitely not as cute, although they do play and wrestle with one another. During our time at the Napo Wildlife Center in the Amazon rainforest we were fortunate enough to see a family of giant river otters on two separate occasions. They spent most of their time growling at us as we watched them from our canoe, but they still chased each other and rolled around on the ground playfully. Perhaps it is the harshness of living in the environment of the jungle that makes them a little more fierce and not as cute as other otters. They are also larger than most other otters, apparently as large as 70 pounds, which that adds to their impression. They are considered to be endangered, so seeing them is quite rare and we were very fortunate to have that opportunity more than once. We took a lot of photos and videos of them, but it probably won’t truly demonstrate what it was like to sit in a canoe just a few feet away from these fascinating creatures.

Laguna Quilotoa in Ecuador

On October 3, 2017February 20, 2018 By Isobar ExpeditionsIn South America7 Comments

Volcanoes are a common sight when you visit Ecuador and we decided to visit several of them during our visit. Although many of them are still active, Quilotoa hasn’t erupted for several hundred years. One if its last eruptions was violent enough to create the enormous crater or caldera that has since filled with water that is 800 feet deep. You can either hike around the rim of the crater or hike down the steep trail that takes you down to the lake. We ended up doing a bit of both, but we didn’t go all of the way down to the lake itself. If you want to, there are kayaks for rent if you want to go out on the sulfur laden water, but that didn’t sound too appealing to us.

The trail down to the lake is actually deep sand and not an easy hike going down and even harder going back up. There are mules available for $10 per person if you don’t want to make the difficult hike back up the side of volcano. The spectacular views more than made up for our exhaustion when we made it back to the top. Fortunately there are a couple of restaurants on the rim, so we were able to stop and have lunch before deciding to hike partially around the rim. Going around the entire rim would have taken us about three hours, so we only made it about a third of the way before turning around and heading back.

Visiting Quilotoa is only about an hour and a half drive from Quito and we would definitely recommend going there to anyone who travels to Ecuador. We arranged our private tour through the tour company, Happy Gringo, and our driver picked us up from the hotel. Since the tour was private, we were able to customize it to our needs, which was quite convenient. This was the first of three volcanoes that we hiked on or around during our time in Ecuador, but it was also one of the most memorable. The colors of the water and the sheer size of the caldera are quite impressive to see. We were fortunate to have beautiful weather, although hiking the trail can be very dusty when it isn’t raining.