Ecuador day 3: Cloud forest and Los Bancos

the best thing about being your own tour group is you get to choose exactly what you want to do and how much of it.  we spent a bit of the morning birding and left as soon as it started to slow down.  for a serious birder it would probably be considered a slow day, but for us we had a great time spotting feathered fellows, listening for calls, and trying to nab good photos of everything we saw. 

after a quiet lunch at an overlook on the Rio Blanco, Tina stopped at a fruit stand to check out some of the unique Andean fruits we’d seen all along the trip.  we picked up all sorts of stuff – piticaya, passion fruit, papaya, grenadilla, and tree tomato.  my favorite was hands down the tree tomato, which tastes something like a tomato with a hint of papaya mixed in.  my least favorite was easily the passion fruit.  Galo told us that the piticaya is a laxative, and after some empirical testing we can back that up.  I will also never eat it again while on vacation.

dinner at the lodge was great as always, with a bit of a surprise for dessert: