After our funny days in Loja (laughable, not comic), we headed south to vilcabamba Ecuador. Known as the “Valley of Longevity” for it’s numerous residents over 100 years old, vilcabamba is a great town for hiking. We arrived on a Tuesday, and stayed until Sunday night. We stayed at Hosteria Izcayhluma, on several recommendations, and it was awesome! Great breakfasts, amazing food, beautiful scenery (it’s located on a hill), and German ownership (really clean and easy).
Vilcabamba is a great little town, and there is some amazing hiking around it. We did three different hikes – a short Chaupi village hike, the kind-of-crazy Mandango hike, and a shorter San jose village hike.
The Mandango hike is the signature Vilcabamba hike. It’s rated mostly difficult, about 4 hours long, and has some beautiful scenery. Here’s how it goes:
- One hour scrambling up the side of a hill from 1500m in the valley to 1930m at the top of the hill. This takes you to the first cross.
- About 15 minutes traversing a ridgeline to the next hilltop, including a steep (10 meter) scramble which is vertical – more rock climbing than hiking. This brings you to the second cross. It’s also the turnaround-point, if you feel the hike is too tough.
- About 90 minutes walking along a ridgeline. It’s between 2 feet and 5 feet wide, and during the afternoon is buffeted by winds. The sides of the ridgeline are pretty steep – very close to vertical – so about 20 feet from the center of the ridgeline, the ground is about 1000 feet below the ridgeline.
- About an hour (give or take) descending from the ridgeline through a farm, some cows, donkeys, and a riverbed. This brings you to a rock quarry, where you rejoin the paved road.
So that’s the hike – it’s strenuous, beautiful, and really interesting.
Did you know that I’m terrified of heights? Like a 10 foot drop next to me puts my hands in a cold sweat. So I had some trouble with this hike, but since I knew nothing about it before we started it, it was a lot easier for me – I was just surprised. And Stef helped me through it, too.
I survived it (obviously I’m still here), but I still get a little woozy just thinking about it.
We had a lot of fun hiking and resting and meeting people in Vilcabamba before we headed to the Peruvian border.
@Brett, thanks! We haven’t seen too many more ridgeline hikes like this. However, there certainly are a lot of villages in the mountains, and there are a few ways you can have some experiences like that:
1. The easiest – ride a local bus between villages. Speed limits and lane markers are really just suggestions, not rules, and the drivers are all protected by Dios (at least according to the signs on their buses), so they take all kinds of risks.
2. Moderate difficulty – do a mountain bike ride down a volcano; fun and exciting!
3. The most involved – go to a trekking town like huaraz, cuzco, or Arequipa Peru, mendoza argentina, or anywhere in chilean or argentinian Patagonia and do a multi-day trek. Some of them go across mountain ranges, and some into canyons (we trekked into colca canyon in Arequipa; we’ll be publishing a post on it in a couple of weeks). These are great, and you get some amazing views and experiences.
Great stuff! I’ve been thinking about South American Altitude a lot lately, and that photo on the ridgeline made me GRIN.
You mention that the Mandango hike is the area’s marquee event. Have you found a lot of ridgeline tightropes like this…as in, too many to keep track of? I’d like to guess that there must be countless such trails from village to village. Maybe?