Today we woke up early and ate breakfast in the restaurant below in the hotel. Then we headed straight for the airport. We took a flight from Cuenca to Quito which was pretty much an hour. We arrived in Quito and went straight for the Equator. Mitad Del Mundo was the center of the equator founded by indigenous people that we visited. The French came to Ecuador in the 1700s and they found the equator using their fancy equipment but was off. We met up with our tour guide and she walked us around. There were many exhibits to look at. We looked at many indigenous displays. She told us that all of the huts were made from nature and that 3 to 4 people share one hammock as a bed. She explained the meaning of Quito which is "Qui" for middle and "to" means earth. Ecuador only has 2 seasons and all year have 6am to 6pm sun time. We did many fun activities such as trying to center an egg on a screw and attempting to walk in a straight line.
Then we drove to Mindo and dropped of our luggage at the Sachatamia Lodge. Next, we got lunch in town. Then we went zip lining! The bus could not make it up the hill so we had to take taxi's. Zip lining was so much fun everyone had a great time. It was so amazing and sort of scary at the same time. Then we went back to the hotel and a couple of us worked on our blogs together until dinner. We finally ate dinner and heard 2 presentations. Cass and Nick were the first presenters and talked about the cloud forests of Mindo. Mindo is the capital of bird watching, has 170 different species of orchids, and over 100 species of amphibians and reptiles. Cloud forests have thick clouds and range from 3,000 to 10,000 feet in elevation. There are high levels of condensation trapped within biomass and in soil. There are cloud forests in Costa Rica, Mexico, Japan, Spain, Ethiopia, and Singapore all with different species of biodiversity. Tourism impacts cloud forests in many ways due to recreational uses of humans. Threats to cloud forests are habitat loss, habitat degradation, mudslides, fire, flooding, and climate change. Victoria was the last presenter she presented on the treadmill of production. Which is a theory that describes relationships between social actors and their cumulative influence on sustainability. This was a result of WWII and its economic change. There are 3 key components of this corporations, the state, and the citizen. Corporations increase profit and decrease human labor costs. The state is the base of power, provides jobs for the citizen, and collects taxes from the citizen and corporations. The citizen prevents environmental degradation and social dislocation and puts pressure on the state. Ecuador uses a lot of transnational funding which is not very beneficial to the citizens. |