Love is like a butterfly

la la la, any opp to sing (or quote) a bit of Dolly Parton is good for me.

So I have finished school in Banos and thanks to the efforts of the oh so lovely and patient Cristina, my teacher, I think I am much improved in the espanol department if I dont mind saying so myself.

So we vamosed from Banos yesterday bidding farewell to our host family. It was actually quite sad, the kids gave me and Ed bibles as farewell gifts (!!!) and then they all traipsed out into the street looking sad to wave us off.

So now we are in the gorgeous sub tropical cloud forresty tiny town of Mindo, where the birds are the size of insects and the insects are the size of birds. It took two long bus trips to get here, and during the first some kind person decided to relieve Eduardo of his wallet. How lovely for them to guess he really didnt want that 60 bucks and a credit card, its actually astonishing that they managed to get it as it was in his back pocket and he was sitting on it at all times, just proves that most of the time you travel on pure good luck alone.........

But life goes on and now we are revelling in the wonders of Mindo. We are staying out of town in a rustic wooden barn conversion complete with verandahs, hammocks, a river, friendly dogs, enormous brightly coloured butterflies and in the early evening the most astonishingly small and jewel coloured Hummingbirds who come down to the verandah to feed. They are all different breeds so they are all different sizes and colours. The smallest one would have been half the size of my thumb and moved at lightning speed. They actually look and sound like insects (maybe blowflies) when they flap their wings. As for the butterflies, they are the size of birds, and come in rainbow colours too. We walked out to a butterfly house this morning which was so nice, you can even feed them little bits of banana and let them sit on your hand, it sounded a bit lame in theory but in practice I was a convert!

Pablo, the groovy and laidback owner of the place we are staying at is taking us on a tour of the forest tomorrow to spot birds with a nice early start of 6am! It seems that birds are early risers, who would have thought??? And therefore we need to be early risers too. But hopefully it will be worth it, there are Toucans in the jungle here and I would give anything to see one, but I tell you what if they dont look just like Sam and Toucan from the Froot Loops box I think I will be disappointed.