Quilotoa

Quilotoa is dog friendly if you can figure out how to get there and it's so beautiful that you should try and figure it out.

Here's what we did...

We drove with Chuki (in a friend's truck) to Latacunga and then from Latacunga you basically just go up the mountains to the west. We stopped to ask someone walking on the street about every 30 minutes or so, just to make sure we were on the right path. You arrive at Quilotoa (you literally can't go any further up) and there is a guard. He didn't say anything about the dog, even though it was a National Park. We paid our $2/person and parked. There are a couple of restaurants and some little stalls where you can buy warmer clothes, but not much. There is a bathroom (in the restaurant) and you can buy water up there too.

The hike itself is a lot of fun. It took us about 30 minutes to go down and then less than an hour to come back up. We packed a picnic lunch that we ate at the bottom, by the water. You can hire a horse to take you back up, although I'm not sure how you would do that with your dog. The ladies that have the horses made it seem like it was no problem, they would just walk Chuki on his leash while we were on the horses. Chuki would not have been happy with that, I'm sure. Plus the hike back up isn't too difficult.

There's another option while at the lake. You can hike all the way around the lake. This path is certainly less busy, but it is supposed to take you about 6 hours. If I would have had my way, we would have hiked around. All I can advise though is to arrive early if this is your plan. By the time we left the whole crater was covered in clouds. It might be cool to hike in clouds, but then again it might not.

We didn't stay the night while there but I do know that this hotel, Quilotoa Crater Lake Lodge, looked very fancy and was right next door. I don't know whether or not they accept dogs. I do know that Black Sheep Inn does accept dogs, although I think they're farther away from the actual crater. When we were going to go to Quilotoa a couple of months ago I had called and asked if we could bring our dog and they were really helpful and said yes, of course!

That was that! It was relatively simple! The hard part is figuring out how to get there. I do know that you can go by bus. What I don't know is if your dog can come in the bus.

A side note - there are a lot of owned but unleashed dogs at Quilotoa. None of them were aggressive but one of them did steal Chuki's big knuckle bone out of his crate when we were getting ready to go.

Have fun and bring your camera!