Yoga Retreat

One of my favorite things I’ve been able to do in Ecuador is attend several yoga retreats. A couple of teachers from our school are yoga instructors and they have hosted a handful of weekend retreats. These are some of the most enjoyable weekends I’ve had here, enjoying nature, reading quietly, and of course practicing yoga. I still haven’t mastered a completely unassisted headstand yet, but I’m getting close.

This was my second to last retreat before leaving, and this time we went to El Monte Eco Lodge in the cloud forests of Mindo. I enjoyed the significantly warmer temperature and the myriad of bird calls awakening me each morning. Plus, while Justin favors the beach, the forest is my happy place.
El Monte was actually the location of the first yoga retreat I ever went on in Ecuador, so it’s fitting that’s it's also one of my last. Nestled back in the forest, you can actually only access the lodge by use of a wooden plank pulley that hauls you one at a time, over the river. To do this, you must just shout across the river until someone at the lodge hears you. Then they come to the bank and send over the pulley, and haul you back. One at a time we crossed, with backpacks on our shoulders and yoga mats across our laps. Cars stay parked on the other side, and so this really adds to the feeling of quiet and privacy once you cross over to the lodge.

The lodge also feeds you three square meals a day, which are healthy and delicious. Our dinners, seated at the open-air dining table, were candlelit and we dined to the sounds of the forest around us as the sun set and moths, bats, and leaf bugs started encroaching around us. At first they may sound like something you don’t want around you when you’re eating, but I actually found it pretty neat. A few times you get dive bombed in the side of the head by a blind both, but you just shake your head and he clumsily flies away to leave you to your banana cake.

There were only 10 of us on the retreat this time, and we had the whole place to ourselves. We went for a nice nature walk on Saturday morning, where we saw dozens of palms and bromeliads, leaf cutter ants, birds, tiny tree frogs, and one fluorescent green iguana.

The yoga was relaxed and restorative, not too many arm holds or headstands this time, but a lot of prolonged stretching and meditation, which was lovely. All of the yoga is done on the open-air deck, which allows a 360 degree view of the forest, and provides the ambient sounds of frogs croaking and birds and insects chirping. The lodge keeps a small fire burning all day, and the smoke from the sandalwood helps to keep the no-see-ums at bay, though not totally. Most of us left with at least a few of the telltale red dot bites around our ankles, but a small tax to pay, I think, for the beauty of the place.

On Saturday afternoon, after a core vinyasa class, some of the other girls and I pulled our mats
around the smoky firepit, and had a silent sustained reading session. The air was warm, there was the gentlest of breezes, and soon we had all nodded off to a pleasant afternoon nap, right there on the deck. We were suddenly awakened by one of the girls gasping, “Toucans!” We all ambled up off our mats to see the spectacle - a flight of about 15 toucans, crossing over the forest canopy to settle in for the evening. They flew one at a time, and were recognizable by their impressive beaks. I wouldn’t call the flight graceful, but more of a torpedo-like dive. I can’t imagine with a beak that heavy they are built for sustained flight, but rather more short bursts of energy from one tree to the next. They resembled flying bananas, actually. To see a toucan in the wild, and not on a cereal box is an incredible experience. But to see a whole flock of them soaring right over your yoga mat - now that’s breathtaking. The show lasted about 15 minutes, until all the toucans had relocated to the other side of the trees, and we could go on with our evening. That night, after another yoga session, we gathered around the smoky scented fireplace, and shared a bottle of wine. Our entertainment this evening was the march of about a thousand tiny ants, on some sort of secret mission, relocating what looked to be larva from under the wooden plank floorboards to another location across the deck.

We had one final breakfast and yoga class on Sunday morning, before heading back to Quito. I left Mindo feeling restored and regenerated, and geared up to power through the last six weeks of school.