Mining for Gold and Finding It...
Trip Start
Dec 11, 2008
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Trip End
Dec 11, 2009
Ramos Orcu, Loja, Ecuador
Thursday, December 10, 2009
We woke up at our beautiful campsite - with Salina barking at a family just across the river who had come down to wash some clothes. She just wouldn't let it go - she gets real protective when we are camping - and so we got up, made some coffee and started the day -meaning folding the tent up, and loading everything back up on the bikes.
We headed up the short stretch of dirt road, away from the campsite and river and back on to the paved road. We decided to stop at the small tienda just a few hundred feet back to get some water and drinks before heading back north on a beautiful sunny morning. In fact we could already start to feel the heat in this early morning bright sunshine, so we thought we really ought to get stocked up on drinks.
As friendly as the Ecuadorians usually are, the family that runs the tienda was a typical Ecuadorian extended family. They were beaming with pride when I told them that we decided to settle in Ecuador after visiting 15 countries and evaluating them all. We suddenly felt like we were now part of their extended family...so we asked them about the abandoned mining equipment and they explained that the company that was mining there just abandoned it - that they make so much money in gold that they don't care about cleaning up when they finish mining an area. So, I asked, "there is a lot of gold in this river here?"
"Oh yeah" said the old man, the one doing most of the talking with me. "We still mining here" and with that he asked his nephew, Luis, to take us around back to show us how to pan for gold...
Here is a video of that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7ZtZgCcj6k&feature=player_embedded
So, as you may have seen in the above video, after getting our speck of gold, we hopped back on the bikes and headed north. This would be our second time riding this stretch of road, but it always looks different when you are riding the other way. But this time we did not get lost at all...
We stopped in the beautiful old colonial town of Catamayo for a lunch of hamburgers - again remembering all the weird things Ecuadorians put on their hamburgers like crispy onion chips and cabbage...we couldn't find a decent cup of coffee though so we made our own and then headed out on the road.
We climbed to some pretty high altitudes again, the air getting thin and the clouds very close to our heads. We love to see the changes in vegetation and scenery - so frequent in Ecuador...
As I said, we had already been on this road before and so we knew how to bypass downtown Loja (which we had already visited a few times during our stay in Zamora) and head directly to our great campsite with the beautful views and abundant firewood. We decided to head straight there, stopping for supplies for dinner and breakfast at a roadside tienda that sold some great home made cheese and fresh eggs...
We got to our campsite about an hour before nightfall - its nice to know a great place to camp and not have to scout one out. So we pulled in and Salina scouted around, seeming to remember being there a few months prior.
We made a great dinner (no I can't remember what but probably pasta and hot dogs) and closed up the tent real good, because the air up there gets pretty cold during the night as I remember....
