Que Lindo, Mindo

Que Lindo, Mindo

Wednesday, July 23, 2008 at 9:39pm

I love the challenge of thinking of some cheasy, somewhat catchy title for my posts... "Que Lindo, Mindo" means "How Pretty, Mindo"... and it rhymes if you didn't notice. I should be an Ad Exec, like Mel Gibson in "What Women Want".

Anyways... Mindo...
Mindo can be describes in two words...
Mariposas... aka Butterflies

Cascadas... aka Waterfalls

However, the waterfalls at Mindo were more like this...

After a 10 minute truck-bed ride, we reached the top.

We had to cross a big chasm to get to the waterfalls.
It looked a lot like this one:

Well, actually like this one:

It was a pretty canopy top to look at from the basket on a string that carried us from one side to the other.
Here is Katrien (my Belgium friend, one of 3 of us) in the basket.

We had to walk for quite awhile...
Jenny (my French friend) wasn't the happiest about the long walk.

Here I am telling the girls, "Don't eat that! It will kill you in 30 seconds."

I know a lot about poisonous plants of South America. I wasn't a cub scout for nothing. Plus, I like to tell girls what to do. Liberal, atheist foreign chicks love it when guys tell them what to do.

We also had to cross a river by rope...

Okay, not really. There was just a random rope in the path.

We walked for about 25 minutes before we reached the first waterfall.

We had to cross a bridge to see the waterfall really well.

Once again, Ecuadorians don't care about the safety of their tourists. At some parts there were big gaps in the walkway.

I was proud of myself (quite prideful) for not falling or slipping on the way down to the waterfall (one of the persons in our group fell - it was quite funny). However, when I decided I wanted a picture of me on the rock with the fountain in the background, I slipped.

I hate a wet sock & shoe.

Luckily my backpack was on or I would have really hurt my head on the way down.

Then we headed to the next waterfall. It was really big and had a spot for swimming. So I decided to make my way towards the swimming hole.

Here I am not sure if I want to dive in. It was pretty dang cold.

Here I am having trouble breathing in the water because it was so DANG cold.
I was only in the water for about 15 seconds. I had my full of Ecuadorian waterfall swimming adventures.

I was exhausted after a long day of walking and swimming.