In January, Quito is a rainy and cold
city. Other than the two days that Ramanan was sick and we were house
bound, it has rained almost every day. And once it starts around one
in the afternoon, it doesn't really stop. So we have very flexible
daily plans and always have a place we can run to when it starts to
pour.
As most of you already know, I love my
flora and so we headed to the Botanical Gardens in Carolina Park a
little early hoping to beat the rain. It cost 3 dollars, which I
thought was a little on the expensive side but I wasn't complaining
about the cost at the end. The garden highlights the flora of each
micro-climate in Ecuador ( paramo, tropical jungle, cloud forest
etc.). The garden also had two different orchid houses, as well as a
carnivorous plant house.
Orchids are one of my favourite flowers
and Ecuador is the place to see them, with more than 4200 species of
orchids, the highest orchid diversity in the world. Although now is
not the season to see most of them in bloom, but there were enough
there to keep me happy.
Midway through our visit, (you guessed
it) it started to pour and luckily we ran into the carnivorous plants
house. We saw some really colourful bromeliads, a type of plant that
grows on trees and rocks and is native to the Americas. We were
stranded in there for a while but some good photos came out of it
though. So we escaped the rain again and it was another well spent
day in rainy, cold, Quito.
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