Our third day in Mindo started with a breakfast at the restaurant. We found out that the staff would put out ripe bananas to feed and attract various birds to the front of the restaurant every morning so we decided to eat there instead of our balcony. There were so many colorful birds come and go among the feeders. We saw one particularly striking bird, the South American Yellow Oriole, that were all bright yellow except the black wings and eyes. After breakfast, we went to hike the waterfalls. To get to the waterfalls, we had to take a very old fashioned cable car across the valley and hike up a trail. There was a series of 4 waterfalls along the route. We met a young German woman who went swimming in each of the pools. We subsequently learnt that she was working in Quito hostal in lieu of rent during a year of travel after her high school. She had been to Colombia and Venezuela before coming to Ecuador. She was robbed in Colombia and was stuck in Venezuela before. We were just thankful that she had been lucky so far.
We went back to relax in our hotel before going out to hike the "Yellow House" trail which was mentioned by several tourists we met en route. They said they saw monkeys there. Unfortunately, we went too late to make it to Trail 4 where the monkeys resided. Instead, we hiked Trail 1-3 and reached a nice mirador overlooking the valley. Disappointingly, we failed to see any significant number of birds on these famous trails.
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