When I returned last night, the head receptionist, who incidentally is bald as a badger's bum, called me over to tell me that I had a 06.30 pick up scheduled for this morning. Great another tiring day ahead! 

I put all my clothes out for the morning, cagoule, zip up wooly jacket, umbrella etc and sorted out all the extras, Walkman to blot out Liza, camera, Kindle in case it's raining so hard that I don't go walking etc.

All the blurb warns you about heavy downpours, loads of mud and the need for good walking shoes. I only had my trainers unfortunately.

I went down just before 6.30 and waited for my verbose fellow hotel guest to appear. No show! The driver came to pick me up and it appeared he was only expecting me. Marvellous!! There were two others in the bus, a mum and daughter from Holland who naturally spoke excellent English and Spanish. As a nation we are generally not great at other languages, is it that we're lazy, is it the way we are taught or are we just generally crap? I try but I still end up resorting to my French and German that I learned at school, my Spanish is from Dora the Explorer and my Turkish is dismally poor, as our Turkish teacher could not see the need to teach us any ' werbs' , and as anyone knows, you can't form a sentence without a werb.

The weather seemed to be holding up once again, thank goodness and the journey up to Bellavista was pretty uneventful. Apart from the driver having a penchant for overtaking on blind corners, that is. Wendy, look away now!

The last 10k were on a narrow unmade road winding up through the cloud forest, complete with potholes and landslides. I appeared to be sat over one of the rear wheels and felt the full brunt of every rock, so much so that the 34FFs were doing a great impression of Newton's Cradle!

At last we turned into a little hamlet of charming little wooden houses and huts, thatched with palms and we were met by David, who was to be one of the walking guides. He showed us the dining room and also a place where we could swap trainers for some stout wellies -  excellent! Breakfast was to be at 9am, then the 3 hour walk would start at 9.30. 

I had understood from the information provided, that you could wander around on self guided walks and do as much as you could or wanted to. I wasn't sure that I would manage three hours of a steepish and slippery climb. However I agreed to give it a go, I'm probably only going to be here once in my life. David was over the moon because the weather was sunny and warm. He told me they only get about 10 days completely free of rain. Yesterday had been torrential rain all day. Lucky me!

All around the buildings were humming bird feeders, I have never seen so many different shapes, sizes and colours of humming birds, they are stunning. They are also pretty laid back about being near people, so it made taking photos so much easier. Some of them are a  'booted' variety with fluffy white feathers around their ankles - do birds have ankles?? and look like they're wearing little white fluffy boots. Cute as can be!

Breakfast was fresh fruit and scrambled egg with madeira cake and jam. I nearly made the same mistake as the Dutch girl who thought the cake was bread and piled her scrambled egg on top!! Not a great combination!!

It was at breakfast that I met up with the couple from the City Tour on my first day, you know, the ones whose daughter had died ........ except it wasn't their daughter, it was their dog! Oops, my mistake!

This is Hebe and Graham Smith. A lovely well travelled couple who are a pleasure to talk to. Hebe said to me  'Your friend was here yesterday...' At this point I felt it only right to state my position and hotly denied any friendship.  Hebe went on to tell me that Liza had not stopped talking nearly all the way round and when David asked everyone to be very still because he had just spotted a rare toucan, she ignored him, kept yacking which scared it and it flew away!

Luckily Hebe and Graham are on the Mary Anne tomorrow as well, so we have a pact to rescue each other, or to maroon her on a desert island! The other plan was for Graham to pop out into Quito and get some of the readily available drugs. We thought maybe we would plant them in her hand luggage and then shop her to airport security.  She'd probably only get about 15 years but they'd let her out after about a week, just to stop having to listen to her!

Anyway, I digress. The walk did prove quite taxing and there was a lot of climbing up uneven, rough hewn steps in the mud and tree roots. However, with a bit of a shove from behind and a friendly helping hand, I made it round. David proved to be an excellent guide, very knowledgeable about birds and the local flora. Most people had amazing cameras with terrific zoom lenses and binoculars. My binoculars were in my case in Quito and my camera wasn't really up to zooming in on tree creepers, thirty feet up a tree. So I felt a bit inadequate at this point. David had one of those green dot pointer things, so he was able to shine it up near the bird and then say if it was left, right, up or down from it. That certainly helped but without the binoculars it wasn't possible to distinguish their colours, everything looked black, apart from an orangey woodpecker at the top of a tree that everyone got really excited about. It had a long name, as do they all, but orangey woodpecker will have to suffice!

However, back at the centre after lunch I managed to photograph some Blue Winged Mountain Tanagers at the nectar bowl who were a stunning canary yellow and blue. Also a masked blue something or other which I must find on the internet! As you can tell I'm no ornithologist. (Just checked and think it may be a Masked Flowerpiercer (!) - probably not, but no doubt my birding friends will enlighten me!!

For anyone who would like to view a short video about Bellavista go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dQJ4cZzgoA4

We left about 3pm and I have spent the evening packing for Galapagos with the aid of a beer and a packet of Ruffles. I am leaving my laundry and warm clothing here at the hotel for when I return. There's no point dragging them all the way to Galapagos if they're not needed. So, once again it's an early start, a 6.30 pick up and a 9am flight. It will take 3 hours as we have to touch down at Guayaquil near the coast. Bit nervous about these flights as I have no idea how good or safe Equador Airlines are. Also the weather is foul out there, we are enveloped in black cloud and it's chucking it down.