practice post - the Ecuador trip

Jan 23, 2022
Hola los amigos y la familia!

Yes, Serge and I are down in Ecuador to visit the farm for a few days. We have not escaped covid, although vaccination, booster, and negative PCR might suggest otherwise. Ecuador takes covid VERY seriously. Temperature scanners are at every entrance to malls and other large venues, and you have to show your vaccination papers to get in. Same thing at restaurants, and when in public, masks are worn All The Time, even walking outside. And you see a lot of double masking and KN-95's. Walking back to the hotel, I even saw one woman, I kid you not, wearing 2 surgical masks under a N95 mask! It will be interesting to see if this vigilance continues in Otavalo and Apuela.

The hotel we are staying in for a couple of days is very near the city center. In fact, if you look hard you can see the Quicentro sign (hint it is the turquoise blob between the middle two brown apartment blocks).
We can walk there in 20 or 30 minutes (note, walk there, walking back is straight uphill, not what I wanted on my second day at altitude!), and yet someone near here has enough backyard for chickens. I know this because there is a rooster that gets up about 2 hours before dawn... What is Ecuador without roosters!

Yesterday was spent spent quite casually. Our only requirement was to figure out how we would arrange our PCR test for getting home. After that, we drifted down to the Botanical Gardens. Oh wow. The Quito one might not have the square footage of Montreal's, but they make up for it in sheer variety. Mostly in orchids. Ecuador is in the top 10 countries for biodiversity, and 1 in 5 plants here is an orchid. Mind blown.
Yes, there is an orchid called Dracula...

They also have a large collection of bonsai. Yes there were a lot of what I consider the 'usual' (what I've seen at the Montreal Botanical gardens) juniper, pine and so on, but it was interesting to see that they have expanded the technique from traditional Japanese plants to local varieties, leading to flowering bonsai like the third picture.

The next picture is Serge standing next to a tree fern, a plant that predates the dinosaurs and still grows here. Ecuador can be very traditional!
Finally, the last picture was taken in the 'dry thornbush' display. It is the freakiest cactus I have ever seen.

That's it for now. We are off to Otavalo today

Hasta luego!
Karen

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