Quito the quiet city & into the cloud forest in Mindo

  We really enjoyed the wonderfully located city of Quito, it is a long thin city in a very large very steep valley.

We were continuing to be amazed at how quiet it is as the week progressed, it hardly got more frantic on Monday than it had on Sunday.

The total lack of car horns unless necessary made a total change from every other country we have been.

 Note the 'Madonna with wings' statue top left this is a main guide pont in Quito and can be seen from most of the old town.

 As you can one of the newer cathedrals, this one was finished in 1929.

 While this one is about 150 years older and has more embossed gold than we have ever seen in any other church.

 We followed the guide book to a view point that gave us a chance to see the whole city.

 It also housed the Ecuadorian equivalent of the Imperial War Museum, not somewhere we would have visited if it hadn't been for the view point but once inside well worth the visit as it had been done out in 1970's concrete brutalism.

 However the favorite view was the house with pigs on the roof. Pig with a view!!

 We have seen earthquake evacuation and Tsunami evacuation notices all along the coast. The building regs to prevent them falling down in an earthquake is however totally non existent.

 A view of yet another immaculate square.... Everywhere in Latin America has them.
After about 4 days in Quito we caught the two & a half hour bus to the small town of Mindo in the Ecuadorian cloud forest, here we went to another butterfly park.. (we seem to like them), this Owl Eye butterfly also has a snakes head (nose bottom left if you can't see it)

 However why we really went was not the butterflys but the hummingbirds. I managed to get a number of shots I was quite pleased with even if we did spend a bit of a while doing it!

 They also had orchids...!

However the video of then is more informative:- Hummingbirds video

 The next day we took a walk into the cloud forest, very green, very full of waterfalls and very up and down.

To get there this bloke drove a car engine attached to....

 This cable car, which swept us across the valley to the paths.

 The same afternoon saw a schools parade in town... It seemed a little silly to hold it in the late afternoon as that is when it always rains and this was no exception.

 Not that it seemed to make any difference to the enjoyment of everyone taking place and watching.

As usual by dusk the rain had stopped but the cloud forest certainly lives up to its name.