Part two!

I suppose it's about time to update this thing.
Besides, we are in Ecuador! We have crossed into the second part of our journey! Man. It felt so good to enter this country.  Even though it was a hot n sweaty bus ride and a two hour delay at the border, I was in some kind of bliss. I've had a good feeling about Ecuador since I started researching for this trip. And actually, ever since high school when Gabriel, an Ecuadorian exchange student who came to study at Canby High School, did a PowerPoint about his home country in Ms. Haberlach (now Mrs. Noel)'s digital arts class. We rode through these lush green mountains, so many different shades of the color. I watched out my window brimming with excitement for a couple hours until the cherry was Drawwwped on the cake in the form of the most amazing sunset I've ever seen. As we wound through the mountain peaks  we were given 360 degree views of the sky. In the west shone neon oranges and reds, on the east marshmallow creme clouds settled below us in the midnight blue of the valley. It was breathtaking. I couldn't help but to think how my dad would have Loved it. I'll always remember how he'd go to the edge of the yard some nights to watch the sunset.  After a bit longer, we arrived in Loja to catch another bus to Vilcabamba to meet (surprise....) Paisley!! We are stoked to be traveling with her until she heads home on the 8th.
Well, we fell asleep and missed our stop and got the bus driver to drop us just outside of town and walked down the main road to find our cute garden hostel off the plaza.  The air is sweet here, you guys. Tropical flowers are just all over peekin through all the green.  It sounds like a sketchy situation we were in, but the stars were twinkling, the streets quiet, the town small, and the cows mooing. It felt good.
In vilcabamba, we took a great hike into the Podocarpus national park to find ourselves a proper waterfall. Which we did! It was a 3 hour uphill to get there, but complete with great valley views.  The waterfall was just what I dreamed of.  We climbed down the steep decline to its pool, and I immediately stripped off my clothes and got. In. That. (COLD). Water. We took turns getting the balls to stand under the fall itself, and reveled in the paradise we had found ourselves in.
At the end of that 6 hour affair, we got ourselves some bomb dinner, and watched some live music over a few drinks for our last night in vilcabamba.
On Sunday, we bussed ourselves to Cuenca, a remarkably European feeling colonial city about 6 hours north where we settled in and found some dinner.  About an hour later, lava belly came back in full force.  There's no need to go into the gritty details on the blog, but I did pass out for the first time in my life, and we decided I needed a trip to the hospital, which we took.  Luckily, it was only a few blocks away, but not so luckily it was a military hospital where the doctors didn't seem to give a hoot and mostly just laughed at us while trying to describe symptoms.  They ended up looking at Wikipedia so I got pissed and anxious and left. Thankfully, in the morning I was feeling a bit better and we got some tests done and got some medicine to take care of this bug which turned out to be an intestinal infection.  Serious shout out to my girls.  That was one of the worst nights I've ever had physically, they put up with some unpleasant things for me.
After taking it easy yesterday and getting 10 hours of sleep I am feeling a hundred times better and we took some busses to get here, to montanita! It's a beach town here in Ecuador that has a good rep for good beach times, so we wanted to get here in time for some kind of Halloween festivities.  To get here, we got to drive through the Cajas national park and we got to feast our eyes on some lake spotted mountains and drive through clouds.  Yepppp.
Driving out of vilcabamba, I started to realize how little time it feels we have left on our trip and my mind started to go to work on how I'm gonna plan a return.. Oooops... But really. The next couple weeks are gonna be great, I know it!
-em