ECUADOR: MINDO, PART I - PARADISE AND BUTTERFLIES

 March 17-19, 2022

We had a two-hour flight from Panama City to Quito, Ecuador, arriving at about 7:00 PM. We passed quickly through immigration and customs, but we couldn't find our driver on the other side. After about half an hour, he arrived and found us. After two long drives with him, we understood why he was late to pick us up. More on that later.

We set out for Mindo, a small town of about 3,000 people located northwest of Quito in the Andean foothills of Ecuador. It is set in a cloud forest, or a tropical mountainous region that gets frequent, heavy rainfall and has a persistent low-level cloud cover at about canopy level. Forget the details; just the name "cloud forest" was enough to make me love the place.

Although just 70 miles, the drive took about 2 1/2 hours on winding, sometimes unpaved dirt roads that climbed first to the high elevations of northern Quito and then dropped into the valley where Mindo is located. There were many speed bumps that enforced a low speed limit. We drove through one area where the road was more or less washed out by a landslide, and for the last hour the road was narrow and very dark as it was often shrouded by tree canopies. We later talked to a couple whose driver had done the route in half the time. "Cautious" doesn't even begin to describe our driver.

On the other hand, he didn't speak much English, so the l-o-n-g drive was a great opportunity for me to speak a little Spanish, which was fun for me. I'd been reviewing my Spanish (learned 40+ years ago) before the trip, and I think I did fairly well at keeping the conversation going.

We finally pulled into the parking lot of our hotel, Las Terrazas de Dana, at midnight. Staff was waiting to welcome us, haul our luggage up to our rooms, and give us instructions. We were exhausted and fell into bed immediately. In the morning, however, I realized that we had arrived in Paradise.

Our room was large with a queen bed and two doubles, tile floors, and a sliding glass door that opened onto a private balcony and gave an expansive view of the lush valley we were nestled in.

So how did we end up in Mindo? Aside from the fact that is is one of the most visited places in Ecuador, it is also one of the best birding sites in the Americas, and birding is Bob's passion. He had arranged for a private guide to take him birding on that first day, and Terry was gracious enough to go with him.

I'd had enough driving and sitting, so I stayed behind and Geneil stayed with me. The men left at the ungodly hour of 5:00 AM for a two-hour drive to a birding site, and I slept, gratefully, until 7:30. Geneil and I met for breakfast just before 9:00 AM at the table on the balcony of the main building pictured below.

This photo of our two side-by-side rooms was taken from our breakfast table. The partition between our balconies could be opened.

I would later learn that Ecuador is one of largest producers of cut flowers in the Americas, but for now I just enjoyed the lovely bouquet on our breakfast table.

We had a very good breakfast of yogurt made on the premises with mix-ins of fruit and house-made granola, then a dish called tigrillo that is a patty made of fried plantains (which I thought were potatoes) and vegetables topped with an over-easy egg. Delicious. I tried it twice more on the trip, but it was never as good as it was at Las Terrazas de Dana. There was also hot chocolate and juice.

This breakfast was a wonderful antidote to the food famine of the previous day, and I felt sorry for Bob and Terry eating whatever had been packed for their long drive (which turned out to be dry bread with a few slices of meat for a sandwich).

Our hotel was outside of town down a long dirt road, so we called a cab to take us to our first destination, the "Mariposas de Mindo" butterfly sanctuary. 

We paid our $7.50 admission fee (Ecuador uses U.S. dollars as currency), listened to a five-minute presentation on the life cycle of butterflies, and then entered a large netted area with hundreds of butterflies of dozens of varieties fluttering around and resting on plants.

I never got a good shot of these butterflies when their wings were open. The outside wing pattern is their camouflage, and the inside is a brilliant aquamarine blue. I think these are blue morpho butterflies, one of the largest butterflies in the world and common in rain forests.

They have a wingspan of up to eight inches!

Visitors can dip a finger in banana juice and coax a butterfly onto their finger.

So many different kinds!

I assume these next two are the same species, but look at the variation in markings. Incredible.

Butterflies do the diversity and acceptance thing pretty well.

The preserve actually "grows" their own butterflies. We saw this man using a small knife to carefully scrape eggs off a plant stalk and into a plastic cup.

The eggs hatch into larvae and get fattened up . . .

. . . until they are ready to spin their chrysalis. (NOTE: A cocoon is made by a moth; a butterfly makes a chrysalis.) The chrysalises are gathered and pinned according to species on boards inside a wire mesh box. The chrysalises are almost as miraculous as the butterflies. Some look metallic, like the ones at the bottom of the picture on the right . . . 

. . . and some look exactly like fallen leaves.

Eventually the butterflies emerge. How did those wings fit inside that tiny chrysalis?

Here is a glimpse of the iridescent blue inside the wings of the blue morpho butterfly.

I had to laugh at this sleeping dog. That's what heat and humidity do to me too.

In addition to the butterflies, Mariposas de Mindo is rich in exotic flowers.

We went back to Mariposas de Mindo the following day to give our husbands the opportunity to see the butterflies. Who would want to miss the opportunity to get a blue morph butterfly to sit on your finger?