In our second week in Ecuador, we flew south from Quito to the lovely town of Cuenca (we'll have a separate post about that city some day). From Cuenca, we booked a tour to Parque Nacional Cajas, a highlands park notable for it's glacier-formed valleys, hundreds of lakes, and ancient "polylepis" forests.
We saw many cool birds, a bunny, hiked several the lagoons, and walked up to the second-highest point in the park, known as "Tres Cruces," where there is a memorial to the many Spaniards who died while trying to cross the Andes (elevation 13,670 ft.). Interestingly, Tres Cruces is also on the continental divide; which means every drop of water on one side of Tres Cruces flows toward the Pacific, while every drop that falls on the east side goes into the Amazonian basin (and then the south Atlantic).
Cajas' terrain is known as a "paramo" ... basically, high-elevation plains and bogs. It's actually quite similar to some of the terrain we saw above the tree line on the South Island of New Zealand:
Pretty cool...
1 comment:
funny. when I glanced through the photos before reading the post, I thought, wow, that's strange that they built boardwalks like that in south america. not something I'd expect. looks like new zealand. ha. it was nz.
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