Having spent all night suffering with yet another of the constant stomach bugs I have been plagued with while in South America, I spend Wednesday resting and trying to put my internal organs back into some sort of working order. I am given a tea made out of 'hierba del perro' ('dog herb') which is known to be very good for stomachs. It does indeed seem soothing and helpful, and I sip it throughout the day and shelve plans to walk to the Cloud Forest itself for the next morning. The walk to the Cloud Forest is longer than the other tracks and, whilst i would not describe it as 'tough', it does involve fairly constant uphill climbing in humid conditions and at a higher altitude. It's not something to attempt while you are scuttling behind a tree every few minutes.
I am a little disappointed but not too much because I know I can do it on Thursday, before we go home. As the day draws on the bug seems to be waning so I cross my fingers and hope to awake bright eyed and healthy.
I awake bright eyed. I don't awake healthy. My stomach is cramping and aching and there is nothing about my insides that suggests that they are in working order.
Even so, I grit my teeth a little and get out anyway to see the birds.
I am well rewarded. We see more of my favourites, the bright blue tanagers, a 'whiskered puff bird', whose name alone is fantastic and who is, in reality, a small fluffy fat little brown bird with white markings, sitting like a little pom pom high up in a tree. Four bright parrots, blackly silhouetted against the bright morning sky, do a flt over for us, though they don't have time to stop and pose for our binoculars. We are visited once again by the beautiful motmot bird, with his red chest and his long blue tail with white markings. He has already been to see us the day before as I languished in my hammock, perching on the banister metres away from us without a care in the world.
The highlight though, as if to reward me for my pains, (literal and metaphorical), are the three big toucans, who fly close above us and perch in a tree, uncharacteristically low, so that they can be seen even without the binoculars or huge telescope which our guide normally supplies. They are bright green, with big black beaks with a line of bright yellow. They stay in the tree for a long time, happy to sit and caw. I did not imagine, before I came to Ecuador, that I would have such a chance to see these sites of birds in the wild, and so close.
We are so lucky.
I tell myself this as I limp back to the lodge clutching my stomach, to be treated with lemongrass tea, ginger tablets, bitter umeboshi plum - and prayer.
Having attempted a rather desperate bargain with God in which he keeps me well enough to see and appreciate his creation, the Cloud Forest - and then I can be as ill as my body dictates after that - we set off on our walk up to the Cloud Forest proper.
And actually I do feel better. God may have rolled his eyes at my melodrama, given that I am after all only one of the full 50% of travellers who get stomach bugs in South America and very unlikely to expire as a result of it, but I think he must have taken pity on my desperation to actually see the Cloud Forest, because my stomach does not even whisper, let alone explode, all the way until we get back to Quito this evening.
On the way up, we encounter another of my favourite birds, known locally as 'the lazy bird' because it doesn't make any kind of a proper nest, just seemingly lays its egg anywhere it likes on the ground. We see it there, after the bird has flown away, a small, delicate pink egg, unprotected and oddly close to the path, overgrown as it is to preserve the natural feel of the forest.
But the lazy bird has a secret, which makes it all a lot more sensible. The lazy bird is basically invisible.
If you saw the James Bond film in which his gadgets include an 'invisible' car, you'll know what I'm talking about. When the bird, which is a mottled brown with leaf like markings (you see where I am going here), sits among the browning leaves that cover the forest floor, especially in this part where the path interrupts the forest and new green shoots are less common, it is literally invisible. We 'see' it twice, once on the way up, once as we come back - the first time I only just make it out with the binoculars after a long and patient endurance on the part of our guide and his infrared pointer. Even then I only just manage to discern its shape among the leaves before it senses our presence and takes flight - and then I can see it. On the way back neither M nor I can make it out at all despite the guide insisting it is there. We stand for a very long time, unable to see it even with the handy infrared pointer. Eventually it flies off in frustration, an option which perhaps was beginning to seem tempting to our guide.
As we continue to climb it grows, to my surprise, more humid. Somehow I had expected the usual cooling of the air as the altitude increased. No such effect here. The trees grow denser, the air closer and hotter and the biting insects more voracious. Our guide turns to show us things, sweat dripping on his face. M swats at mosquitoes. I think fondly of South East Asia, with all its clammy, soaking, humidity and its tiny mosquitoes with elephantine appetites.
Above us, and to the right, vultures wheel above a tree, silhouetted against a peculiarly white sky, in a break in the trees. Something, below that tree, has died or is dying. We don't think about it. We watch the vultures.
We hear the loud, insistent call if the Cock of the Rocks bird, which we haven't been lucky enough to see, but which is enough of an experience simply to hear. It is a gutteral, almost hyena like 'ha ha haaaa' call, interrupted every now and then by a trilling scale. I try to video it, to capture the sound. As soon as I turn on my phone it stops. When I give up it begins again. The Cock of the Rocks isn't called that for nothing. It knows what it's doing.
We watch a huge butterfly, each wing the size of a mans hand, flutter down in front of us and perch, briefly on a leaf. It is black and white with lacy ridges and holes on its wings. It looks like a woman's party dress.
We see a huge caterpillar, so furry it's body appears about three times the size it is, perhaps part of it's defence mechanism.
As we move further up the birds grow scarcer as the tree cover grows denser. Birds need space, our guide tells us, though we hear the distant trilling of various kinds of wild turkeys, stomping around deep and invisible in the undergrowth.
The bears are ever present, we hear their huffing and the low gurgling they make in their throats, and see the flattened sections of forest which are their trails from fruit tree to fruit tree, but, at least on the way up, we do not see them.
We see the tracks of pumas, hunting last night in the forest, and a dead porcupine, the inside of which has been scooped clean by the creature (probably a puma) that killed it.
"I am sorry," says our guide, looking genuinely sad, and talking, apparently, to the porcupine. I am surprised, expecting a man so passionately knowledgeable about nature and natural processes, to be rather au fait with the necessary death and food chain mechanisms which sustain animal life. But then that is what characterises the Maquipucuna lodge in the cloud forest, that sense of real gentleness, of love for each creature.
"Mind out!" says our guide, stopping suddenly to gently pick up a large black beetle, and move it into a leaf at the side of the path, where it is put of reach of our trampling footfall.
Nothing is too small to be important. Nothing is too small to notice. Our guide points out crickets, a giant guinea pig and the tracks made in the night by armadillos with equal intensity.
We make it to the top. Its a mass of huge trees covered in a trailing lime green moss. It looks unreal, too beautiful and strange to be natural. It seems like a film set or a computer game.
On the way back we hear the bears again, this time closer. Ever eager to see bears, despite having worked here for over twenty years, our guide goes on ahead, fighting his way through dense, jungly, undergrowth to see if he can find a vantage point to see him from.
"Did you see him?", we ask as he fights his way back.
"Yes" says our guide, "he is angry. Those were mating sounds we heard before. What you hear now - it is anger."
"Why is he angry?" We ask.
"Because he wants to mate with the female," says our guide, "and he needs his privacy."
There is a pause.
"So... He is angry with the female?" I ask, "or with us?"
"With us." says our guide, simply, "maybe he will get aggressive."
"OK" we say, tremulously, "er...perhaps we should be getting back?"
"Perhaps" agrees our guide and starts making his way back down the track at a much swifter pace than we have ever known him move AWAY from the wildlife.
We don't need telling twice.
"Run away, run away!" whispers M in my ear, "run away from the horny, enraged bear..."
"Shhh" I tell him, "he'll hear you."
We slip, stride and slide our way back, pausing only at the bottom to 'see' the lazy bird.
And then that is it. Our time in the green and teeming cloud forest, 'my Ecuador', is up. We bid farewell to the gentle, expert staff, the beautiful, open, bamboo lodge and the preying mantis leaf insect which has been ineffectually trying to 'catch' us every time we pass its perch on one of the tables (where it is not even slightly camouflaged, but does (it hopes) stand a chance of netting a really, really big snack in the form of these huge insects with no antenna which are wandering around nearby).
On the way back our driver stops for us at the centre of the world, the monuments at the equator. We straddle the line which divides the northern and southern hemispheres (conceptually - because the earth moves, the point of exact latitude 0,0,0 also moves, and that line is only exactly true on 21st June every year).
Standing at the equator is something which we couldn't muss doing, having travelled to Ecuador. But the tourist shops and museum buildings seem just a little inauthentic to me, even, dare I say it, dull.
Poor equator. It never really had a chance.
What could possibly be more exciting, or match the thrill factor of a horny bear?
Or a butterfly the size of my hand?
Or a humming bird whizzing past my ear or dribbling nectar on me while I eat lunch?
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