Mindo

Hello again. As promised, here are some Mindo pictures. They are a little out of chronological order, but I'm sure you will understand. This is the waterfall we repelled down. It's on private property, and the guys who own it are super nice. We didn't repel down the whole thing, just from where there's that sort of ledge in the middle-ish. It was about 40 meters. Here I am with my friends beforehand. Surprisingly, I wasn't really that nervous. But some of the others were. So we decided to put on some war paint (aka mud) before we climbed the rest of the way up.















Here I am going down the waterfall. It wasn't too hard. I slipped a couple of times, but I didn't get hurt or anything. The view was amazing. The waterfall is beautiful. You can kind of see the bottom there. I think that little white blob is my friend Caitlin.




















We went horseback riding too. That was pretty fun. The whole area is breathtaking. Mindo is in the cloud forest. I'm not exactly sure what qualifies something as a cloud forest, but there were definitely a lot of clouds there. And trees. We saw a toucan on the ride. At the end, we stopped at a guy's house where he had a bunch of hummingbird feeders up. I saw so many hummingbirds--probably 6 or 7 species at least. They are so cute and amazing! It was really cool.




















Sunday morning we woke up early and went birdwatching with a guide. That was amazing as well. We saw four species of toucans, a quetzal, some parrots, and various other birds. About 500 species of birds have been spotted in Mindo alone. It's a hotspot for birds. Absolutely incredible.

Another super fun activity we did was zip-lining. We went on a cable from one place above the rainforest canopy to another. I wasn't really nervous about this either. From the cable to the trees is a long way down, but it was a beautiful view. Here I am on one of the cables. It's probably a little hard to judge distances in this picture, but the cables ranged from 125 meters long to 500 meters long.





















Another thing you could do while zip-lining were a couple different poses with the help of a guide. This one is called superman. Look ma, no hands!! It was great for seeing the forest below, because I was looking down the whole time. This part was particularly cloudy, but I still had a good view of all the vegetation. It was incredible!!!















Needless to say, it was a pretty action-packed weekend. I definitely enjoyed it. Hope you are doing well. Cuidate!