Into the wild

Back from a trip into Ecuadors volcano-region in the south of Quito, we're still recovering from the freezing temperatures in our first tent-experience during this trip on 3900 meters above sea level.
But first things first: About ten days ago, we headed to an extinct vulcano near Quilotoa which is now filled with blue-green water - an absolutely fantastic view when the sun hits the sea and it turnes from azure-blue to turquise-green! With about 3850 meters above sea level, the paths which went 150m down to the laguna were quite breathtaking (in every sense of the word) and the nights rather cold...

Afterwards we headed to the small city of Chugchilan and went on a 7h-hike to a nearby cloud forest - it was like a jungle in the middle of a sparse vegetation on 2800 meters where we saw different kinds of hummingbirds and other small animals. We also did horse riding down a nearby canyon and tried to stress the poor animals up the hill in a galopp (rather unsuccessfully) :)

After a harsh ride crumpled in a pick-up in the back of a car over a pass of about 5000 meters (which was reeeeally cold), we visited a small local market in Saquisili and headed right afterwards to the Cotopaxi National Park. At the Lake Limpiopungo in the park, we decided to put our tent and watch the vulcano clearing up its clouds in the evening. An amazing view!
The next day, after a VERY cold night on 3900 meters, we decided to climb the vulcano up to its base camp on 4800 meters - definitely one of the toughest hikes we ever made. Short of breath, with headache and dizziness we finally reached the camp after about 5 hours of walking. It was unfortunately quite cloudy & we soon decided to start our descent...3h later, when we reached our tent again, we were only able to cook some tea and immediately went to sleep afterwards.
We still felt a bit dizzy the next day when we put our tents together and headed back to Quito - our base-station for the next trip towards the Amazonas in a couple of days...