Friday 2 March 2012Since carnival weekend, the Fridays have been turned round and today is, instead, a free day. Consequently, Anya, Eva, Gabriel, Bo and I left for Quito after breakfast. We made good time and managed to book into one shared room in the hostel, with Eva and I sharing the only double bed in the room.Eva, Anya and I combined our laundry and handed it in to the nearby hostel (who had done it for me twice, even though I hadn't been a resident but h...

Friday 2 March 2012 Since carnaval weekend, the Fridays have been turned round and today is, instead, a free day. Consequently, Anya, Eva, Gabriel, Bo and I left for Quito after breakfast. We made good time and managed to book into one shared room in the hostel, with Eva and I sharing the only double bed in the room. Eva, Anya and I combined our laundry and handed it in to the nearby hostel (who had done it for me twice, even though I hadn't been a reside...

Thursday 1 March 2012 Bo, Eva, Gabriel and I planted tangare trees near the old volunteer house: replacing either the ones that had not made it or starting two new (but short) lines this morning. We were only able to plant 20 of the 30 planted allocated to us. Usually, each pair (one person with the machete and the other with the fence post hole digger) plants between 15 plants each but in this case we pretty much ran out of clearable space. Th...

Wednesday 29 February 2012 Well, we woke up to no power (still) and no water. Today's scheduled task (which was to plant trees in the reserve) had to be postponed to get down to the more urgent problem of fixing the water supply. It wasn't just the volunteer house that didn't have power or water this time, but the main house which was also entertaining the second of a four set of Danish guests at the reserve. Most of us were therefore tasked with creating w...

Tuesday 28 February 2012 Anya and I volunteered to go collect seeds this morning. This involves a 2 ½ hour trek up to and past the second campsite, following a hand-drawn map (not to scale!) of where to go to collect any seeds or young plants. Along the way we were to spot previously labelled numbered signs and note any fruits and flowers there on a clipboard. We set off late as Joel, the fashion photographer, did not come prepared with water, rain gear ...