Mindo Day 3 - Butterflies, Tubing, and Orchids

Wednesday June 1

After what has become the normal breakfast of exotic juices and fruits along with hot chocolate and a nice hot berry tea we hiked up the road to see the Mariposas.

This is a Butterfly breeding and conservation center that hosts many species of Butterflies in all stages of development. You are able to watch their transformation through the last stages into their final form in a matter of minutes. This one is just coming out pupa stage and drying it's wings.

What may make this sanctuary unique is that we were encouraged to scoop up banana and attract, or just lift up, the Butterflies. Tara has the record with nine which I was not able to get a picture of.

Riley scooped up no banana and was all but frightened to death by these most delicate creations of God. This is the same girl who flew upside down over the jungle in a position called, what else, the Butterfly.

Tara also had this great idea for a picture.

After the Butterflies we walked back to our place where Riley and Tara cooked up some mini bowtie pasta that they found at the market the day before. I went with the Kind Bar lunch while Patti opted for Clif. We then motivated to go tubing down the river that runs behind our hostel. While the rapids are only Class 1 with two drops that might have been barely Class 2, the tubed contraption that you hold onto ups the experience a little.

I have no pictures of us so you will have to use your imagination with the one above. Before we started we did get our safety briefing, maybe just as providence would have it. Neither the guides nor the driver spoke English, but we did not know that until we arrived at the put in. There happened to be a guy at the put-in with his girlfriend enjoying the river. That is until he was recruited by the tube guide to translate the 'Here is how to not become disabled, drowned, or otherwise die on our tubes' speech.

7 Tubes, 4 Huths, 2 Guides and off we went. Everyone had great fun with lots of shrieking from the girls. Big bonus, the pull-out was about 20 meters from where we were staying.

We made a stop by the Orchid House on our way to dinner. They have 250 of the 4500 known Orchid species in their garden. However, given the time of year that we were visiting, only the tiny Orchids were in bloom. When I say tiny, I mean our guide had to use a magnifying glass to show us the various specimens. Amazing, the intricacy in detail that our Creator had in mind with these tiny flowers was neat to see and hard to take pictures of, with my camera at least. I was able to capture this one banana leaf that was clearly on the other end of the size spectrum. From there we wandered off to eat.

Dinner for me was veggie pizza(which, writing this a day later, might be the cause of some GI issues). The girls and Patti split some cheese pizza and chicken pasta which seems to have treated them a bit better. After dinner we returned to the artisanal chocolate factory for one of their fab brownies and some real vanilla bean ice cream.  The brownie was nice and warm and the ice cream was a little bit frozen solid. After the 27.3 seconds we took to devour the delights I speculated that the super chilled ice cream we that way so you could linger looooooong over this treat...not!

Posted via Blogaway