And they call this work

Well we're back in Quito after two and a half amazing weeks at Los Cedros in the Cloud forest. Remote is not the word. We had a 4 hour bus journey, half of which was on unpaved roads then when we got to the "town" we had breakfast and started out on the 4 hour up hill hike to the reserve. Luckily there were mules on hand to take our bags up and they caught us up at about the half way point, so we rode them for the second half. Gav was petrified, he didn´t want to get on the mule, either because it was a puny little specimen that didn´t look up to the job of hauling him up a mountain or because he´s a city boy who´s scared of animals, the only thing he´s ridden before was a donkey on Blackpool beach back in the seventies. Sadly Gav had the camera so there´s no picture of him on a mule.

The reserve is very remote, the only way to get up there is by mule, so all our supplies got muled up. All the water comes from a stream and they use the stream to generate electricity too. There was no mains sewerage so we were using compost toilets - nice.

Our job was to walk the trails for 4 hours a day looking for monkeys. It sounds perfect but it was rock hard, all the trails are on the side of the mountain we were exhausted by lunch time every day. You can see how steep it was from the pic of me climbing. There were a couple of waterfalls with pools that you could cool off in which were lovely . We never found any monkeys. It was great as there was only one other volunteer, so we pretty much had the whole forest to ourselves. Here's a couple of pics of us at the end of one of the uphill trails and Gav recharging in the pool afterwards.

We also did odd jobs around the reserve, Gav loved the morning we spent in the green house, he's missing his garden a bit.