Cajas National Park

What a lovely way to spend our last day in Ecuador.

Cajas National Park is a lovely stretch of grassy highlands just outside of Cuenca. We got up bright and early to catch our bus to the park. The system for that, as it turns out, is you take the bus to Guayaquil and just get dropped off at the side of the road. There’s a little tourist office where you register and select which hike you want to do. We opted for Ruta 1, an easy to moderate hike following lagoons and a forest.

The initial presentation of the park is a gorgeous lagoon. We took the long way around it. Savored the views of it in the foreground and different mountain ridgelines in the back. The path is very well maintained and marked. There are boardwalks for anywhere that appears wet, which kept our feet dry.

Then we disappeared into a forest. Like along Pasachoa, there are small pockets of trees straight below cliff faces. We wound around the trees and roots, making our way downhill towards more lagoons. There are a lot of lagoons and streams here.

The highlight of the hike was near the end, when we got a great lookout over the mountains, including one with jagged teeth out of the top. The lagoon in the area was ,again, pristine.

We wandered through some llama’s on the way back and waited along the side of the highway to be picked up by whatever bus came by. That took 45 minutes. We met Rico, a London music teacher, who shared some wisdom about self employments and the arts.

That’s the final adventure for Ecuador, at least for this portion of the trip. The country was lovely. But we are off to Peru now, for some absurd hiking adventures. We will see you across the border!