Picture time!! Father's day mountain edition...

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!!!!!! Dad, when we talked yesterday I forgot to ask you if you'd opened my gift! If you haven't, it's in red wrapping paper in my room. Don't open it until we're able to talk on Skype again! To celebrate father's day, I'll post some mountain pictures that you'll go crazy over!

We left Cuenca on Saturday morning and visited the Incan ruins called Ingapirca. It was a city that only religious leaders were allowed to live in, and all the stones were set perfectly without mortar. This was our first time at 10,000 feet so it took a little bit of adjusting. On the way down we drove ABOVE the clouds! That looked strange.We then headed off to Salasaca, an indigenous community with very sweet and hospitable people who took us on a hike and entertained us with folk music before we went to bed. On the way to Salasaca we saw Chimborazo, the highest mountain on Earth (higher than Everest due to the equatorial bulge)! We went to a church service on Sunday morning, and because of the altitude I couldn't catch my breath to sing the songs! From the church we could see Tungurahua, an active volcano. They said you can see lava sometimes at night. The church was way down in that valley in the picture.We then went up, up, up some more, all the way to 12,000 feet! Wow.. and I thought it was hard to breathe before! Oxygen please! It was snowing on some peaks we drove over. We saw some RIDICULOUSLY AWESOME peaks, and I took a video because pictures just won't do them justice, but for some reason it won't load onto this blog. Here's one pretty bad picture I took of one... it looks so small in the picture!We went up to look at a lake... it was beautiful and really blue. From the way it was positioned I'm thinking it's in the crater of a dormant volcano. On the way up we passed a bunch of indigenous villages... the women wear skirts and tights and hats with feathers in them, and many of the sheepherders were little girls around 9 or 10 years old! They have alot of sheep, dogs, pigs, cows, and llamas. It looked like everyone in one of the villages had gathered around one plaza, and on closer look we realized it was a bullfight! (as of the beginning of this month it's illegal to kill the bull, but it was still sad and who knows if they actually follow that rule way up here) Now we're at Hosteria Papagayo, an old hacienda-turned-hotel about an hour outside of Quito. It's at about 10,000 feet so it's freezing at night but it feels great in the sun. I have to go now because we're about to go exploring and petting some llamas! I'll update you soon!! Adios!