El Gato Diablo

I am not a person that dislikes animals. Bugs, maybe. Animals, no. After all, I am studying Ecology, which involves its fair share of fauna. I also have the pleasure of having the most adorable dog on the planet, despite her occasional viscousness. However, I am convinced my host mom's cat, aptly named Gris, is the spawn of the devil. I'm not usually a fan of cats, and living with this little guy only serves to reinforce my prejudices. The only cats I've really enjoyed having relationships with were the ones that came with funny captions right beneath them.

Who couldn't love that adorable ball of fur?

In the beginning, it wasn't so bad. Gris kept his distance, I kept mine. We had a mutual indifference towards each other. However, about a week later, he began to show his dark side (which now I'm thinking may be his only side). Occasionally while my host mom was out, I would hear these weird, other-worldly noises coming from the living room. The first time this occurred, I was rather frightened and ran to see what was going on. I soon found out these are just the normal sounds of a devil cat. Sometimes I think it's calling to a mothership full of terrible alien felines. I've never heard anything like it before, and I hope to God I never have to hear anything like it again.

As time went on, Gris began to make his daunting presence known in my life. I found him perched on the keyboard of my laptop once, happily changing all of my previous computer settings. He would hop onto the table while I was eating, which my host mom never really discouraged. Personally, I found it gross, but I didn't feel the need to object as long as he wasn't bothering me. However, Gris started to strengthen his advances. No matter what meal I was consuming, whether early morning breakfast or my solitary dinner around 7:00, Gris was there. From sniffing at my cereal milk to positioning his little cat butt right in my face, Gris became an omnipresent pest. Just this evening I found him waiting on my usual chair, sitting there and just begging me to push him off. Over and over, I gently lower him off the table onto the floor, but he's quite a persistent devil. As my Spanish teacher says, "Weeds never die," (the translation of which I can't quite remember).

Occasionally his tail will wind up in my dish, or he will knock my notes over while trying to scratch himself on everything I own. Gris has transformed the dinner table into his very own fighting arena, his confrontation coinciding with almost every instance of my hunger. Every meal has turned into a showdown, where I carefully guard my juice and food, simultaneously avoiding clawing, rubbing, and intimidating stares. Hopefully Gris will soon realize that I have no desire to be friends nor enemies, and that my only wish is peaceful indifference.

I'm patiently waiting for Gris to wave his flag.

Did I mention my host my has a mangy yappy dog, too?

Cows, Bats, and Waterfalls

This past weekend, we ventured off to La Hesperia, a dairy farm in the cloud forest of Ecuador, about two hours away from Quito. To be honest, I wasn't expecting much more than a few cows and a lot of clouds (I mean it is called the cloud forest). However, after three days at La Hesperia, I can say it was definitely a weekend full of adventures.

It doesn't get too much greener than this.

After a three hour drive through mountains and traffic, we arrived at the foot of what seemed like an easy climb to the farmhouse. Forty-five minutes later, we arrived at the top, dripping with sweat and rain from the steep hike. Okay, maybe it wasn't that grueling, but I was definitely out of breath when I finally made it. Luckily we had a handy guy with a jeep drive up the hill with our bags so we didn't have to lug those all the way. Once we arrived, we had a bit of free time to explore the farm. We wandered a bit, said hello to some cows, and found a bunch of orange trees. Being the curious ecologists that we are, we decided to take one and share it. By far, it was the sourest orange I have ever tasted in my life, and we all immediately spit it out. We then learned our lesson about eating wild fruit before asking someone about it.

Don't be fooled by it's luscious hue.

Since this past weekend was technically an educational field trip, we spent about an hour roaming around the yard of the farmhouse with Kelly and Jaime, our two lovely professors, and talked about various plant families. This mostly prompted us to scream out "SPORE!" and other fun plant terms when hiking the next day. I did learn quite a few plant families, and can now proudly tell the difference between Asteraceae and Melastomataceae (and even more impressive, I can spell them!). We had a lot of free time Friday night as well, which we utilized by playing Bananagrams and Mafia for hours a time. Mafia clearly brought out the best in our group, between countless accusations and scheming.

One of the million bromeliads we always seem to find.

Contrary to popular belief, this guy is not as

cute and cuddly as he looks.

Possibly the cutest little cow anyone has ever seen

Saturday was our only full day in La Hesperia, and we started it off with a bang by waking up to milk cows at 7am. It was an optional activity, but when else am I going to get to milk a cow on a real dairy farm in Ecuador? The farmers there were really nice and showed us how to milk them, which turned out to be really fun. Recently the farmers have started using a pump to milk the cows instead of doing it by hand, which we saw was a lot more efficient. After a delicious breakfast of eggs, bread, and fresh jam, we spent most of the day on a six hour hike through the cloud forest with Kelly and Jaime, where we learned about some more plants and got to see quite a few up close and personal. Jaime caught a snake at one point, which I got to play with, until it freaked me out by trying to slither up my sleeve.

We soon became pros at seed dispersal. Mostly by

throwing the sticky ones onto each other's shirts.

Kelly had mentioned that we would be "crossing a stream" at one point in our hike, and suggested we wear canvas shoes that would dry easily. Little did we know, we would be crossing that same stream multiple times, and even making our way up and through it for a decent portion of our hike. To say the least, I was soaked and covered in mud, but it was definitely worth it. The cloud forest is beautiful, and we saw so many different types of gorgeous green plants. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to swing on the vines hanging from the canopy like Tarzan.

Heliconiaceae, my new favorite plant family

Saturday night was also really interesting, as we got to watch Jaime study the bats he had caught in nets outside the farmhouse. He caught about eleven, and examined and measured each one. We saw two or three different species, including a couple of pregnant females. Some think bats are the cutest things in the world, but I still think they're kind of creepy looking. They do have cool rhino-esque things on their noses, though. We then ended the night with a couple more rounds of Mafia and card games, as per usual for our group.

Cute, right?

Today was left more or less up to us, as we were given about three hours of the morning to roam around the area. After waiting for the rain to clear by playing cribbage, we decided go hiking in search of the waterfall we had heard existed somewhere nearby. We asked one of the farmhands to lead us, but he would only show us where the trail was, and warned us it wasn't very well maintained. We figured we would be fine, and thought nothing of it. Soon we were sliding down mudslides, waddling on our hands and knees over roots and under branches, and doing our best to avoid dangerous caterpillars and fire ants that lurked below. After one mistaken trail, we headed off in a new direction, and found a lovely pool in the stream, where we splashed around for awhile. We then continued on to where we believed the waterfall to be. Proving to be a much more dangerous path than we had thought, we had to use a found rope to repel down one of the cliffs, then reattach it at another location to use again to avoid falling into the rocky stream from the one-foot-wide ledge of the eroding cliff we were walking on. I have to say it was pretty scary, and probably more than a little dangerous, but it was so worth it once we finally made it down. We headed upstream a bit, and found ourselves smack dab in the middle of a gorgeous cascading waterfall. It was amazing to say the least, and definitely worth the treacherous hike to get there.

Now just imagine a crazy awesome waterfall

a little ways downstream.

(These are the times I need a waterproof camera)