Things to Do in Ecuador in May

May catches the Mindo Valley's cloud forest in that narrow window where the heaviest rains have backed off but the canopy stays saturated and teeming. The Andean cock-of-the-rock leks are active through the month. Watching a male flash his impossible orange crest at a rival, backlit by mist rolling through the trees at 1,300 m (4,265 ft), justifies hauling binoculars across an ocean. Mindo sits roughly two hours northwest of Quito by road. The temperature shift from the city's dry plateau into the forest's perpetual humid envelope hits you like walking into a greenhouse someone forgot to ventilate. Over thirty hummingbird species work the feeders and flowering heliconias. Orchids push their blooms along every trail edge. The dawn chorus before 6 AM layers so many calls that even experienced birders describe it as borderline overwhelming. The forest smells like wet earth, decomposing leaves, and the faintly sweet rot of fallen fruit on the trail. May tends to give you drier mornings with cloud building after noon. The early hours, when the birds are most active anyway, are your clearest window.

The canyons around Banos run full in May, fed by months of highland rain draining off the eastern flanks of Tungurahua volcano into gorges cut from black volcanic rock. Cashaurco canyon, the most popular route, drops you through a series of natural water chutes and rappel points where spray hammers your helmet and the basalt walls are slick with moss and mineral staining. The water temperature hovers around 12-14 degrees Celsius (54-57 degrees Fahrenheit). Bracing enough to make you gasp on entry. Tolerable once the adrenaline takes over. May's flow levels tend to sit in a productive middle range, strong enough to feel the current's force pulling at your harness but not so swollen that operators cancel runs, which happens more regularly in March and April. Banos itself sits at 1,820 m (5,970 ft) in a valley walled by cloud forest and waterfalls. The town's main streets smell like melting sugarcane from the taffy-pulling machines that line the sidewalks. After a canyon descent, the volcanic hot springs that give the town its name stop being optional. They become medicinal.

Tena sits at the edge of the Ecuadorian Amazon at roughly 500 m (1,640 ft), where the Andes collapse into jungle and the rivers carrying highland runoff become some of the best whitewater in South America. The Jatunyacu River, the standard Class III to IV run, pushes serious water in May, and the rapids hit with enough force to swamp the raft bow and throw spray six metres (twenty feet) into air that already feels like breathing through a warm towel. The jungle closes in on both banks, parrots screech from the canopy overhead, and the water itself runs the colour of milky coffee from the sediment it drags off the mountains. Everything down here smells different from the highlands, thick, warm, laced with wet vegetation and red clay and the sweet decay of the forest floor. May's river levels are good for rafting, high enough for exciting rapids but receding from the dangerous peaks of March and April when entire sections close. Full-day runs typically include a riverside lunch and enough calm stretches between rapids to spot monkeys and toucans in the overhanging trees.

May falls in the warm-wet tail of the Galapagos calendar, when sea surface temperatures still hover around 24-25 degrees Celsius (75-77 degrees Fahrenheit) and snorkeling is comfortable without a full wetsuit, a luxury that vanishes once the cold Humboldt Current reasserts itself from June onward. The seas are calming compared to the choppier conditions of February and March, which means fewer cancelled panga landings and less seasickness on overnight crossings between islands. Sea lion pups born earlier in the year are at their most curious and playful, tumbling through the shallows at places like Isla Lobos and Espanola with zero wariness of snorkelers. Marine iguanas still carry traces of their breeding-season colour on several islands, giant tortoises are active in the highlands of Santa Cruz, and blue-footed boobies are nesting along rocky shorelines. The Galapagos smells like salt, sun-baked lava, and the unmistakable fishy musk of a sea lion colony, and the volcanic landscape feels more lunar than tropical. May sits in the shoulder season, which means slightly thinner crowds at visitor sites compared to the July and August peak.

Quito's Centro Historico spreads across forty blocks of colonial churches, cobblestone plazas, and carved wooden balconies that creak under your weight, and May's mild temperatures, around 21 degrees Celsius (69 degrees Fahrenheit) by midday, make walking the whole thing comfortable rather than the breathless slog it becomes at altitude in warmer months. The food in the old town leans heavy and warming, which makes sense at 2,850 m (9,350 ft) where the evening chill bites through a cotton shirt. Locro de papa, a thick potato and cheese soup served with half an avocado floating on top, appears on nearly every corner menu and tastes like the Andes distilled into a bowl, earthy and rich and filling enough to carry you through an afternoon of cobblestones. Street vendors along Garcia Moreno sell empanadas de viento, deep-fried cheese pastries dusted with powdered sugar that shatter when you bite into them and leave grease stains on whatever you are wearing. The churches, La Compania and San Francisco chief among them, smell like four centuries of accumulated incense and beeswax, and the gold leaf interior of the Jesuit Compania catches candlelight in a way that no photograph has ever managed to capture.

Cotopaxi, the symmetrical snow-capped cone that dominates the skyline an hour and a half south of Quito, reaches 5,897 m (19,347 ft) and is one of the highest active volcanoes on Earth. May marks the start of the clearer season when the summit reveals itself for more than fleeting moments between cloud banks, and the paramo grassland below the snowline looks like Scottish moorland transplanted to the equator, golden tussock grass rippling in the wind against black volcanic scree while wild horses graze the lower slopes. The standard day hike climbs to the Jose Rivas refuge at roughly 4,864 m (15,955 ft) through terrain that thins your breathing after twenty steps and drops the temperature below freezing even with the equatorial sun overhead. Below the paramo, Limpiopungo Lagoon sits at 3,800 m (12,470 ft) reflecting the volcano on calm mornings, and Andean gulls and lapwings work the shore in the sharp highland air. Start early, before 7 AM ideally, because cloud tends to swallow the summit by late morning and the afternoon rain that follows turns the descent trail into a muddy slide.