They looked nothing like guinea pigs, but you can’t have everything. Two wooded islands nestled in the middle of the lake. We could see nothing of Cotacachi, but I assumed it must be up there somewhere. Forested cliffs rose into clouds on the opposite side. We stayed in a somewhat rudimentary lodge on the shores of the lake. There was a priest conducting a ceremony in the room next door. ‘Well, my wife had a bit of an altitude headache when we came here last year. ‘Do you believe there’s any truth in these stories?’ I asked Javier. The Quechua people would bathe in its waters once a year to cleanse themselves of the spiritual grime that had accumulated over the previous year. The lake is believed to have healing properties.
On the trail around Cuicocha’s crater rim As for the ducks, they probably just flew there. Call me cynical, but I tend to believe the more plausible explanation that the island is shaped like a guinea pig. This explained why there are so many ducks on the lake. The first person to see it would become rich, while subsequent people would be turned into ducks. Another myth involved a golden guinea pig. One story of how it came by this name was that locals would leave a guinea pig on one of its islands every time a child was born, and the island soon became overrun with rodents.
In the local Quechua language, the name Cuicocha means quite literally ‘Guinea Pig Lake’. The lake is 3km in diameter and 200m deep, but it is said to be bottomless, reaching down into the centre of the Earth. The nearby mountain Yanaurcu (4,535m) is believed to be their child. When Cotacachi the mountain emerges in the morning clad in rivers of snow, the local people say that Imbabura has been visiting, and has decorated her hair with fancy ribbons. He was stricken with love, and demonstrated it by erupting (a smutty metaphor if ever there was). Legend has it that Taita Imbabura was hunting deer one evening when he saw Cotacachi standing in the moonlight. Maria Isabel Cotacachi is said to be the wife of Taita Imbabura (Imbabura being a 4,630m volcano which towers over the nearby town of Otavalo). Two islands in the middle of the lake are the remains of volcanic cones that rose after the eruption.īoth Cotacachi the mountain and Cuicocha the lake have many legends associated with them.
The lake was formed by a volcanic eruption 3,000 years ago, when its cone collapsed into a magma chamber. In his book Travels Amongst the Great Andes of the Equator, Whymper made no mention of Cuicocha, arguably the mountain’s most notable geographic feature. Our destination was Cuicocha, or the Guinea Pig Lake, a crater lake on the side of Cotacachi, another 4,944m mountain that we hoped to climb the day after.Ĭotacachi was first climbed by Edward Whymper, Jean-Antoine Carrel and Louis Carrel in 1880. The following morning we were on the road shortly after seven o’clock, with Javier driving us in his Toyota Land Cruiser. The island looks like a guinea pig if you look at it from a certain angle and concentrate hard (Photo: Edita Horrell). It’s an interesting read, however, about a couple of places in northern Ecuador that are rarely visited by tourists, but should be: the mountain Cotacachi and its picturesque crater lake. The following extract was reduced dramatically in previous edits, and I have now removed it entirely because it didn’t add anything to the plot. The editing process has involved a lot of chopping. My next job is to hire a designer to start working on the book cover. Alex will give the book a further polish with a round of line edits. I have now sent the book to my editor Alex Roddie – just recently returned from an adventure of his own to walk the Cape Wrath Trail in winter. The fourth draft involved another round of edits based on feedback from a team of beta readers. I passed another milestone last week, when I completed draft four of my book about our journey to reach the summit of Chimborazo in Ecuador starting from sea level, travelling only by foot or bike.