I Went to Mindo to Learn Wildlife Photography. The Wildlife Had Other Ideas

Three days in Ecuador's cloud forest taught me that owning a 70–200mm lens doesn't make you a wildlife photographer, howler monkeys don't care about your itinerary, and “mi perro no es peligroso” is apparently not enough to get a street dog into a hostel.

I went to Mindo because I wanted a taste of the Amazon without actually going to the Amazon. I'd just finished the volunteering part of my time in Ecuador and was starting the adventure side of the trip, but I needed to return to Quito for my flight to the Galápagos. Spending hours travelling east into the Amazon and then coming all the way back didn't make much sense. Mindo, west of Quito in the Chocó Andino cloud forest, offered something I could fit between the two.

More importantly, Ecuador was supposed to introduce a new challenge to my photography: wildlife. Until this point, I had absolutely no experience photographing it, so naturally I decided one of my first subjects should be hummingbirds.

Mindo seemed like the perfect place to try. The region is famous for its birdlife, and Mindo-Tandayapa has repeatedly recorded more than 400 species during a single Audubon Christmas Bird Count. I'd originally been told that more bird species were spotted here than anywhere else in the world, although the reality is more complicated. These counts are influenced by observation effort, and Mindo attracts a huge number of dedicated birdwatchers. Even so, people come looking because there is an extraordinary amount to find.

I arrived with my camera, a 70–200mm lens and absolutely no idea how difficult finding it would be.

INTERNAL LINK — Volunteering in Quito

Night One: Apparently I Know How to Fight Street Dogs

I checked into Cinnamon House and headed towards Mindo Lago that evening with another British traveller from the hostel. As we walked down a back road around dusk, we happened to start talking about one of the perfectly rational things to worry about when encountering unfamiliar animals abroad: rabies.

Almost on cue, a group of street dogs started barking and running towards us.

I don't remember consciously deciding what to do. Something instinctive in my brain apparently concluded that the appropriate response to several dogs charging towards me was to charge towards them while barking like a dog myself. So that is exactly what I did.

To my enormous surprise, it worked. The dogs stopped and backed away, leaving the two of us to continue towards Mindo Lago considerably more shaken than we'd been moments earlier.

The other Brit turned to me and asked, “How did you know that would work?”

“I didn't.”

It was an encouraging start to my cloud-forest adventure.

Hearing a Frog I Couldn't Even See

The reason we'd been walking through the dark was the Frog Concert at Mindo Lago. The name sounds slightly like someone has given a children's attraction an unnecessarily grand title, but once the forest gets dark, you begin to understand it.

There was noise everywhere. Frogs croaked, insects chirped and leaves moved around us, with calls seemingly coming from every direction at once. We wandered through the grounds while a guide somehow kept locating creatures amongst vegetation that looked completely ordinary to me. He showed us spiders, frogs and other animals of the night that I probably could have stood beside for an hour without noticing.

At one point, he lifted a leaf and revealed a frog that couldn't have been much bigger than my thumbnail. I'd been wondering for some time how he knew where any of these creatures were, but this one finally made me ask.

“How did you know that was there?”

He'd heard it.

That answer still blows my mind. To my untrained ears, the whole forest sounded as though everything within a mile was simultaneously chirping and croaking. Somehow, amongst all of that noise, he could distinguish the call of a frog the size of my thumbnail and locate the leaf it was sitting underneath.

It was probably my first proper lesson in Mindo. I was surrounded by wildlife, but that didn't mean I knew how to find it.

Wildlife Photography Lesson One: Hummingbirds Are Ridiculous

The following morning, I took my Canon and 70–200mm lens to Punto Ornitológico Mindo. This was supposed to be where my wildlife-photography journey properly began. I wanted to photograph hummingbirds and, if I was lucky, hopefully find a toucan somewhere along the way.

Punto Ornitológico certainly gave me opportunities with the hummingbirds. Sugar-water feeders attracted them close enough for me to photograph, and initially I thought that would make things relatively straightforward. I had a telephoto lens, I understood how to use my camera, and the birds were coming directly towards me.

It turns out that hummingbirds are tiny aerial psychopaths.

[PHOTO — Best hummingbird attempt]

They would hover where I wanted them and disappear before I could react. I'd use a fast shutter speed, find another bird, focus, shoot and check the photograph, only to discover blurred wings, a bad pose, missed focus or a feeder sitting prominently in the composition.

I spent somewhere between an hour and two hours trying. The sugar water could bring the birds directly in front of me, but it couldn't make me a wildlife photographer. Eventually I gave up without a single photograph that made me look at the back of the camera and think, I've got something worth sharing here.

At the time, that was frustrating. I'd specifically come to Mindo to challenge myself with wildlife photography, and I'd chosen one of Ecuador's great birding destinations to do it. What I was beginning to understand was that knowing photography and knowing wildlife photography were not the same thing.

What I'd Do Differently Now

If you're visiting Mindo specifically for photography, a telephoto lens is absolutely worth carrying. My 70–200mm gave me the reach I needed, but hummingbirds also demanded fast shutter speeds, better autofocus technique, patience and, more than anything, practice.

Walking Into the Jungle With an Inca Kola and Questionable Navigation

After failing to get the hummingbird photographs I'd imagined, I headed towards the trails at Yellow House to look for something larger. Hundreds of bird species have been recorded around the property, and I convinced myself that somewhere amongst all that cloud forest there must be a toucan willing to cooperate.

There wasn't.

I spent around four or five hours walking through the forest, tackling hills in heat and humidity that were very different from the conditions I was accustomed to. I'm an experienced British hiker, so I wasn't particularly concerned about walking roughly 10 kilometres by myself. What I hadn't properly accounted for was how different hiking in an Ecuadorian cloud forest would feel.

I had no GPS and was relying on a paper map that I was struggling to read. My preparation for several hours of hiking had also somehow resulted in me carrying little more than a bottle of Inca Kola.

Somewhere amongst the trees I could hear howler monkeys. I'd stop, search the canopy and see nothing. I'd continue walking, hear them again, stop and search again, and still find nothing. After a while it genuinely felt as though they were laughing at me.

It was another unsuccessful wildlife-photography expedition. I knew the animals were around me; in some cases I could literally hear them. I just couldn't turn any of that into the photographs I'd imagined before arriving.

Am I Going to Die From This Caterpillar?

Several hours into the hike, I stopped for a rest and felt my ankle itching. I reached down to scratch it and touched something spiky.

There was some kind of hairy or spiny caterpillar sitting on my ankle.

I jumped up and screamed.

It's important to understand that I grew up in London. My knowledge of tropical insects could generously be described as limited, so my mind immediately began considering whether I'd just been poisoned by some Ecuadorian death caterpillar in the middle of the forest.

Suddenly, hiking alone with no GPS, a paper map I could barely read and an Inca Kola as my principal provision seemed slightly less sensible than it had when I'd started.

I hadn't been poisoned. I survived, and the caterpillar probably had a considerably less dramatic afternoon than I did.

Eventually I found my way back out of the forest. Whether I'd successfully guided myself through an Ecuadorian cloud forest or merely failed to become permanently lost in one is probably a matter of interpretation, but I was counting it as a win.

The $4 Lunch That Beat the Tourist Restaurants

After four or five hours in the forest, I needed food. I walked into a restaurant for one simple reason: there weren't any tourists inside.

I'd learnt while travelling that this was often a decent way of finding a cheap local lunch. In Ecuador, that frequently meant an almuerzo, an inexpensive set lunch usually involving soup followed by a main plate with some combination of meat, rice, plantain and salad.

For around $4, that was essentially what arrived: soup followed by half a chicken cooked over what looked like an oil-drum grill, with rice, plantain and salad.

After spending hours walking through the cloud forest powered primarily by Inca Kola, it was exactly what I needed.

While I was eating, the rain arrived. This wasn't the persistent drizzle I was familiar with from Britain. One minute the road outside was dry; the next, rain was hammering down so heavily that it looked as though the street was slowly turning into a river.

Then, almost as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.

I Tried to Smuggle a Street Dog Into My Hostel

That evening, I went out for a couple of beers. As the amount of alcohol increased, something extraordinary happened to my Spanish: I became considerably more confident that I could speak it.

I spent much of the evening talking to locals and playing with a friendly street dog who wandered around carrying a stone in his mouth, apparently waiting for someone to throw it for him. His enormous ears reminded me of Dobby from Harry Potter, so I naturally decided his name was Doby.

Eventually I decided I'd finished drinking and started heading back towards Cinnamon House. The rain had returned, Doby was still with me, and in my drunken enlightenment I decided there was absolutely no reason he couldn't come back to the hostel and sleep on the sofa.

We attempted to sneak inside like two teenagers returning home after curfew.

We didn't get far.

A woman working at the hostel confronted us in Spanish, and unfortunately the language skills I'd apparently developed after several beers had now disappeared. I tried to explain that it was raining, that Doby was a good boy and that everything would obviously be fine.

Mi perro no es peligroso.

Eventually, she resorted to using her phone to make the situation sufficiently clear for the drunken Englishman trying to smuggle a street dog into her hostel. Either I stayed or the dog did.

I looked back towards the rain and reluctantly chose my own comfort over Doby's.

I still hope you're doing alright, mate.

The Mindo Tarabita Looked Even Less Safe Up Close

The following morning, I joined two British twins from the hostel who were travelling around South America before emigrating to Australia to work as nurses. Our plan was to spend the day exploring Mindo's waterfalls.

Getting there involved the Tarabita de Mindo, which wasn't quite the cable car I'd pictured.

The tarabita was a small yellow metal basket suspended high above the cloud forest. The barrier sat somewhere below my waist, and once enough people had climbed aboard, the basket developed enough of a lean for me to decide that appreciating the panoramic view wasn't particularly important.

I closed my eyes.

I'd also looked at the machinery powering it and thought, Is that a car? It turns out my observation wasn't completely ridiculous. The tarabita uses an automotive drivetrain as part of its operating mechanism, including an engine, gearbox and driveshaft connected to the system pulling the basket across the valley.

I'm sure someone with considerably more engineering knowledge than me could explain why this was perfectly safe. At the time, I wasn't particularly interested in hearing the explanation.

I just wanted to reach the other side.

Five Waterfalls Became Two and an Underwear Swim

Our original plan was to see five waterfalls. Then we started walking.

The trails involved repeated descents towards the waterfalls followed by climbs back up through the heat and humidity. All three of us were struggling, and after the second waterfall, completing all five began to seem considerably less important.

At Reserva Río Bravo, we reached a pool beneath one of the waterfalls and decided getting into the water sounded much better than continuing to sweat our way along the trails.

There was one minor issue: none of us had planned to swim.

One of the twins and I eventually decided that underwear was functionally close enough to swimwear and climbed into the pool.

It was freezing.

After spending the day struggling in the heat, the water was a shock, but it was exactly what we needed. We never completed our planned five waterfalls, and I don't remember feeling particularly bothered about it. Two waterfalls, a freezing pool and an improvised underwear swimsuit had made a considerably better memory.

I Failed at Wildlife Photography. Mindo Was Still a Success.

I arrived in Mindo wanting something that felt a little like the Amazon without making the much longer journey there and back before my flight to the Galápagos. I also arrived wanting to challenge myself as a photographer.

By almost every photographic measure I'd set myself, I failed.

I didn't get the hummingbird photograph I wanted. I didn't photograph a toucan. I could hear howler monkeys somewhere in the trees but couldn't physically find them. My first serious attempt at wildlife photography produced very little wildlife photography I actually wanted to share.

But I didn't leave Mindo feeling disappointed.

I'd guided myself, successfully or unsuccessfully, through cloud forest in a country I'd never visited before, in heat, humidity and terrain completely different from the conditions I knew as an experienced British hiker. I'd seen hummingbirds, heard howler monkeys, swum beneath a waterfall and survived what my city brain had briefly decided was a potentially deadly caterpillar.

Most of all, I kept thinking about the guide at Mindo Lago. He had heard a frog no bigger than my thumbnail amongst a forest full of noise and knew exactly which leaf to lift. I could barely distinguish one animal from another.

That experience probably taught me more about wildlife than any photograph I could have taken.

I had arrived expecting my existing photography skills to transfer naturally to wildlife, but animals couldn't be positioned and wouldn't wait while I worked out my settings. A hummingbird wasn't going to try again because I'd missed focus, and a toucan didn't care that I'd travelled thousands of miles hoping to photograph one.

I had to learn patience, how animals behaved and, perhaps most importantly, that failing to get the photograph didn't mean I'd failed to have the experience.

Years later, that's what I remember about Mindo. Not the photographs I didn't get, but the tiny frog I couldn't hear, the monkeys I couldn't see, the ridiculous yellow basket hanging above the forest, the freezing water and a little street dog wandering around town carrying a stone in his mouth, waiting for somebody to play with him.

Mi perro no es peligroso.

My dog isn't dangerous.

I hope you're okay, Doby.

Planning 3 Days in Mindo

If you're travelling through Ecuador, I'd give Mindo more than a rushed day trip from Quito. Three days gave me enough time to experience the cloud forest after dark, attempt bird photography, hike independently and spend a day exploring the waterfalls without trying to compress everything into a few hours.

My 3-Day Mindo Itinerary

Day 1: Travel from Quito → check into Mindo → Mindo Lago Frog Concert

Day 2: Punto Ornitológico Mindo → Yellow House cloud-forest trails → local almuerzo → evening in Mindo

Day 3: Tarabita de Mindo → waterfall hiking → Reserva Río Bravo → return towards Quito

Continue My Ecuador Journey

Mindo was only the beginning of the wildlife side of my Ecuador adventure. From here, I returned to Quito before flying to somewhere I'd dreamed about photographing for years: the Galápagos Islands.

INTERNAL LINK — Volunteering in Quito

INTERNAL LINK — How Safe Is Ecuador for Solo Travellers?

Have you ever travelled somewhere specifically to photograph an animal and completely failed to get the shot? Tell me what escaped you in the comments — I could do with knowing I'm not the only one.