En Cajas, No Se Puede Nadar

Parque Nacional Cajas is a really beautiful wildland near Cuenca: like many things in Ecuador, it´s ¨megadiverso¨, meaning, essentially, that God took about four distinct bioregions and stuffed them all into one area. The park spans everything from tropical forests to bucolic pasturelands to haunting, windy páramo, and has 157 different species of birds.

I had a very good time hiking through two different parts of the Park (the grassy páramo and a semi-tropical paper tree forest), with another tourist and an excellent guide. Both of whom were pressed into service when I came thisclose to falling off a cliff and tumbling down into a volcanic lake: my foot hit a rock on an otherwise straightforward path, I fell in the wrong direction, and it actually was touch and go for a moment there. My last thoughts, had they not been able to pick me up and set me back on the path, would have been ¨what the hell: I hitch-hike in Puerto Lopez, I swim with pirahna, I don´t even stumble on Laguna Quilotoa and this kiddie trail is what does me in?¨ All three of us were a bit rattled, but fortunately, I didn´t get hurt. For the rest of the hike, though, everytime we came even a little close to any kind of water, the guide kindly reminded me that ¨you´re not allowed to swim in Cajas¨.

Near-death experience aside, it was quite a good hike: we saw a number of birds, including hummingbirds that live in one of the coldest parts of the park. They´re black to gather heat into their bodies, they eat insects because there aren´t enough flowers to be their whole diet, and at night, evidently, their body temperature goes down to 8 degrees celsius--so close to dead that you can just grab them where they sleep and they´ll be too catatonic to notice. We also saw some pretty neat flowers, including the little round ones in the picture: they are unique to Cajas and don´t grow anywhere else.

After the hike, we had lunch at a trout farm, the main gimmick of which was that the day´s catch of trout is actually dumped into a fountain in the middle of the restaurant. Every now and again, one of the staff comes out of the kitchen with a net and a bucket, and scoops up a dozen trout while the diners watch. In Ecuador, I pretty much have to think of fish as a vegetable, and I admit that these guys were tasty little vegetables. As my brother would say, it´s probably the suffering that makes them delicious.