cotopaxi

One of the hardest parts of blogging about trips retrospectively is deciding where to start. I've decided to start with the part of the trip that was the most visually stimulating to me - Cotopaxi. Here we stayed at a lovely Hacienda called El Porvenir. To give you some sense of the trip, it went like this: Quito --> Mindo --> Cotopaxi --> Quito --> Isabela --> Santa Cruz --> San Cristóbal. --> Quito. Three of the stops were in the Galápagos Islands.

I did a fair amount of reading before the trip, but a majority of the research I did was on Las Encantadas and not the mainland. I was floored when we arrived at the hacienda. The bright white summit of Cotopaxi - the world's highest active volcano - peeked out behind the hills surrounding us. At night, the lights in Quito's valley twinkled. In the day, the sun's rays increased the intensity of the colors of man and land. The clouds touched the earth and piled on top of each other. The wind gave the land a constant voice.