Thoughts on travelling in Ecuador

So this week has been all about trying to figure out what to do next. My Spanish classes finish on Friday and my original plan had been to take a night bus down to Puerto Lopez to do some whale watching for a couple of days and then work my way up to Vilcabamba where my first research community is located. However. I phoned the fellow who runs Sacred Sueños and well... he doesn't remember me. At all, seemingly. Hmm. And here I went and bought a rain gauge for him in Canada and everything! In any case it seems that I have a few more days to wander in Ecuador than I expected to, so I am now going (belatedly) to the cloud forest in Mindo for this weekend and then heading to the coast on Sunday instead of Friday. I think that will be good. If, between my broken Spanish and his broken English, we actually came to the same place, I have booked a bird watching guide for Saturday morning. He has binoculars, which is good, because I did not bring mine.

I managed to send (for an obscene amount of money in total!) parcels back to Canada today. I hope that they get there, because they are birthday presents for my sisters (look for them in two weeks, ladies!) and some stuff that I would rather not lose. We'll see soon enough, I guess. I just wanted not to carry *quite* that much in my bag, was all...

I think that even if I end up only at the ecovillage for a week or a few days it will give me a sense of whether or not I am that interested in it as a research subject (and yes, this is me making lemonade out of lemons, in case you wondered). And if it doesn't work out for the two week gig I was planning, at least I have been reading in my guide book about the northern part of Peru, and well... there is a lot to see and do if I am not doing manual labour on an ecovillage three hours from nowhere...