Vilcabamba - Sacred Valley of Longevity

Nestled in a verdant valley tucked away in the Southern Andean highland is a location long revered by indigenous people. Vilcabamba has been termed the “sacred valley of longevity,” whose average inhabitants are said to live 100 years or more. The oldest has reported ages from 120 to 134 years old, yet these claims have not been substantiated scientifically. The native people live a simple, hard-working life and subsist on a diet of non-fatty foods. Vilcabamba is one of five places on earth where people live to 100 on a routine basis. 

The people’s longevity is also attributed to drinking the clustered mineral glacier water that hydrates the human cells. There are two rivers in the valley that flow all year. This mountain water contains valuable minerals and nutrients, and also creates deep and rich topsoil. These reasons, coupled with an excellent local climate, maybe why the local people of Vilcabamba live so long. The sacred valley of Vilcabamba is best known for the good health and longevity of its inhabitants, as well as a rumored lost treasure.

After the Inca Empire was crushed by the Spaniards, one last refugee group settled in an unknown location called Vilcabamba to wage guerrilla warfare against the European invaders. Spanish forces eventually found the refuge city of Vilcabamba and captured its ruler. In 1572, the “Inca problem” was finally put to rest when the Inca rebel Tupac Amaru was taken to Cuzco and executed. The last known flicker of Inca resistance was finally snuffed out. 

The Spaniards had hoped to discover even more vast treasures of the Inca Empire upon capturing Vilcabamba, but this was not to be. Few of the precious relics, en route to free the captured Inca ruler Atahuallpa, have ever been recovered. Much of the treasures of the Inca Empire are still rumored to be buried somewhere in the Andes. It was to find the lost city of Vilcabamba that Hiram Bingham set out on his famous expedition in 1911. He discovered Machu Picchu instead.

Getting to Vilcabamba

Bus transportation is excellent in Ecuador, and several buses per day run from the neighboring cities of Loja and Zumba to Vilcabamba. The town of Vilcabamba is located in the province of Loja, only 30 miles (42 km) south of Loja city. The drive from Vilcabamba to the disputed border of Peru is beautiful all 78 miles (125 km) of the way, but the border is impossible to cross. Visitors must return the way they came.

Product You May Interested

1. Crush Food Cravings with Odd Water Hack and Melt 62lbs
2. Flavor Pairing Ritual Supercharges Women’s Metabolisms
3. The best Keto Diet Program
4. Unlock your Hip Flexors, Gives you More Strength, Better Health and All Day Energy.
5. 21 Days Flat Belly Rapid Weight Loss System
6. Fan Victor – The Ultimate Fantasy Sports Plug-in 
7. 7 Instant Confidence Technique with Women Program

The Wall of Tears, Ecuador

The Wall of Tears is an historical site just five kilometers west of Puerto Villamil on Isabela Island in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. A penal colony existed on Isabela from 1944 to 1959 and the penal colony was marked by abuse, and considered prisoners as slaves. One of the tasks entrusted to the prisoners, so they would have to do something. The wall construction was with volcanic stones, and Prisoners had to carry heavy stones from several kilometers. On this tour and during the construction of the wall, many fell due to insolation and lack of food. Moreover, many lives’ lost because the wall collapsed, and many prisoners were buried in makeshift graves along the way. The result of this construction is what nowadays is famous as the Wall of Tears. The wall is said to have been the cause of thousands of deaths during its construction, call it the wall of tears because it is said to emanate eerie cries and have a heavy energy surrounding it.

Isabela worked as a US military base but after the end of World War II, the forces withdrew. Therefore, the Ecuadorian government decided to use the, by then, remote island to take the most treacherous prisoners in the country and found what they called a penal colony. Thus the facilities abandoned by soldiers of the United States for that "prison" were used. But the horror of the story begins 1946 when it was decided, as a sentence, that criminals pay their verdict with hard labor. The Wall of Tears never finished being constructed , it really did not have greatly purpose being nothing more than to cause misery to hold prisoners in an activity, and it is an irresistible formation of about 100 meters long, 3 meters wide and 5-6 m high, which is now a site to visit the island Isabela.

Thus, definitely the history of the penal colony of Isabela and the Wall of Tears is not the gladdest history of the islands. The Wall of Tears, named for the suffering and pain of their builders, still stands all alone on Isabela Island, blocking nothing from anything and complementary each day with the beautiful landscape that grows around it. Peoples can actually walk up to the top of the wall and get an idea of how high it is and how easy it would have been to fall off with a little wooziness from the tropical sun. The penal colony on the island is long gone, but the memory of the cruelty inflicted their lives on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fly Through Human Powered Sky Bike at Mashpi Lodge in Quito, Ecuador

Sky Bike is tucked away amongst the cloud forest in the protected 3,212-acre Mashpi Rainforest Biodiversity Reserve, around 3 hours northwest of Quito, in Ecuador, is Mashpi Lodge and a classy and contemporary lodge. You can described as a “luxury cocoon in the clouds”, Mashpi Lodge is perched 900 meters above sea level surrounded by magnificence rainforest crisscrossed with waterfalls between dramatic, verdant hills, and a profusion of plant species, from ferns and bromeliads to hundreds of orchid species, visible through its floor-to-ceiling glass windows. The Lodge, built with the latest techniques in sustainable building, is designed to blend beautifully with its surroundings that are inhabited by a staggering 500 species of bird, hundreds of amphibian and reptilian species, and animals such as monkeys, peccaries and even puma.

The slow pace bike let take the peoples to much more than you’d have streaming by on a zip line or bouncing along on the suspension bridges common to most canopy walks. But then pedaling up the last bit of the parabola reminding the powering the craft after all.  The wonders of sky bike will delight the worldliest nature lover surrounded by a profusion of plant species, from ferns and bromeliads to hundreds of orchid species, several newly-discovered. A staggering more than five hundred species of bird including some 36 endemics are likely to inhabit the forest, fluttering through the canopy.

It is situated close to the lodge is a Sky Bike that permits visitors to explore the beauty of forest canopy from above and through. The sky bike is dangled from a 656-foot cable car and it is stretched between two points in the forest crossing a gorge above a river at an insane height of 196 feet. Sky bike has the capacity of two people and one of them uses the pedal the push the bike along at leisure. The Sky Bike at Mashpi Lodge is similar to the Sky Cycle a pedal-powered roller coaster located in Washuzan Highland Amusement Park in Okayama city in Japan. The Sky Bike also lets tourists to view the wildlife up close on their terms. Animals are often less afraid and appear more tame when humans appear in unexpected places, which Masphi guests have been doing on the Sky Bike since 2012.

The current bike is the result of five prototypes inspired by an article in Popular Mechanics. One of the special things about the Sky Bike is that you control the pace of your excursion and can zoom through the forest for an exciting ride or take a more leisurely approach and admire the sights. With an offering like the Sky Bike, it’s no uncertainty that the Mashpi Lodge is itself a distinctive place. National Geographic even considers the glass-walled getaway.

Blue Lagoon Galapagos Islands in Ecuador

The Galápagos Islands are an archipelago of volcanic islands distributed on either side of the Equator in the Pacific Ocean, around 906 kilometers (563 miles) west of continental Ecuador, of which they are a part. The Galápagos Islands and their surrounding waters form an Ecuadorian province, a national park, and a biological marine reserve. The islands have a population of more over 25,000, and their main language is Spanish. These attractive islands are so popular for their huge number of endemic species and were studied by Charles Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle. His deep observations and collections contributed to the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

These impressively beautiful islands are found at the coordinate’s 1°40'N – 1°36'S, 89°16' – 92°01'W. Because straddling the equator, islands in the chain are situated in both the northern and southern hemispheres, with Volcán Wolf and Volcán Ecuador on Isla Isabela being directly on the equator. Española Island, the southernmost islet of the archipelago, and Darwin Island, the northernmost one, are range more than a distance of 220 kilometers. The IHO (International Hydrographic Organization) considers them wholly within the South Pacific Ocean, however. The Galápagos Archipelago consists of 7,880 kilometers of land spread over 45,000 kilometers of ocean. Moreover the largest of the islands, Isabela, measures 2,250 sq mi/5,827 kilometers and makes up close to three quarters of the total land area of the Galápagos. Volcán Wolf on Isabela is the highest point, with an elevation of 1,707 meters above sea level.

Moreover the group consists of 18 main islands, 3 smaller islands, and 107 rocks and islets. And these islands are located at the Galapagos Triple Junction. The archipelago is located on the Nazca Plate, which is moving east/southeast, diving under the South American Plate at a rate of about 2.5 inches per year. It is also atop the Galapagos hotspot, a place where the Earth's crust is being melted from below by a mantle plume, making volcanoes. It is projected that the first islands formed here at least 8 million and perhaps up to 90 million years ago. Though the older islands have disappeared below the sea as they’ve moved away from the mantle plume, the youngest islands, Isabela and Fernandina, are still being formed, with the most recent volcanic eruption in April 2009 where lava from the volcanic island Fernandina started flowing both towards the island's shoreline and into the center caldera.

The history tell us, that the first recorded visit to these islands occurred by chance in 1535, when the Bishop of Panamá Fray Tomás de Berlanga went to Peru to arbitrate in a dispute between Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro. De Berlanga was blown off course; however he ultimately returned to the Spanish Empire and described the conditions of the islands and the animals that inhabited them. Therefore the group of lovely islands was shown and named in Abraham Ortelius's atlas published in 1570. The first crude map of the islands was made in 1684 by the buccaneer Ambrose Cowley, who named the individual islands after some of his fellow pirates or after British royalty and noblemen. Though these names were used in the authoritative navigation charts of the islands organized during the Beagle survey under Captain Robert Fitzroy, and in Darwin's widespread book The Voyage of the Beagle. As the time passes, the new Republic of Ecuador took the islands from Spanish ownership in 1832, and afterward gave them official Spanish names. The older names remained in use in English language publications, including Herman Melville's The Encantadas of 1854.

Bainbridge Rocks of Galapagos Islands

The Bainbridge Rocks are a group of small rocky islets off the southeastern coast of Santiago Island, in Galápagos Archipelago. One of these islets is a volcanic crater, composed of compacted volcanic ash. Sea water had permeated the walls of this eroded crater, forming a spectacular turquoise colored salt-water lake that entices huge flocks of flamingoes. This is also a great snorkeling site which trail leads to a coastline with gorgeous tide pools and grottos full of fauna. The Galapagos Islands are an archipelago of volcanic islands adjacent to the equator in the Pacific Ocean, around 1,000 km from the South American continent and part of Ecuador. The exciting isolation of the islands and the adjoining marine reserve, situated at the confluence of three ocean currents, has led to the development of unusual animal life and massive number of endemic species that piqued the interest of Charles Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle in 1835. His observations of the flora and fauna on Galapagos Islands led him to grow the famed theory of evolution by natural selection.