Day 23-26: Farm Life

27 June - Day 23 - headed to the farm
The bus left right on time and although I had this huge cloud of dred hanging over my head, all seemed fine... well, until a boy vomited all over his seat and we had to stop and it took the conductor 40 min to clean it up. Damn, but soon after we were on our way and although the seats were terribly uncomfortable before I knew it we were at our stop. Canoa - a small beach resort on the coast of Ecuador. Here's the view from my 7:30 am Spanish class.

Not too bad, heh?

Well the sun refused to come out and with the drizzle I started to wonder if it is my destiny to be cold all summer.

Here's the lovely town of Canoa...

We walked up to the church at the end of the road...

This doggie followed us around all day.

Long, long stretches of beaches...

It was too cold to go in the water, at least that was my excuse and after seeing this guy, I didn't need any more excuses!

The other student and teacher met us for lunch after their bus arrived. We were in Canoa from 7:30 in the morning til 5pm when we all piled into the back of a pick up and headed to the farm. While we were waiting I made friends with a mama dog... she and I cuddled for a while, I'm sure the other people thought I was nuts...

She kind of reminds you of Winnie, huh?

After a 40 minute bouncing ride in the back of a pick up we arrived at the farm and headed to our room. We were told that the two students had to share and that there would be two more joining us the next day, so four in our cabin. I walk into our room and there is a bunkbed, a bed in the loft and a double bed. Like the bold prisoner I would be I claimed the top bunk.

Here's the view from our deck.

It's a vegetarian farm so after our dinner of rice and a bean mixture with a cabbage onion salad thing I headed back to my room to chill for a bit while Sandra squeezes in her Spanish lessons for the day.

The trickling of the river combined with various insects and frogs is a chorus composed in heaven. Lots of male frogs croakin' for a date.

I decide to clean myself up to discover that there is no hot water. Brrr. I return to my room, climb to the top bunk and see something scurry across the loft floor which happens to be at the head of my bed. I am like,

WTF and peer up there to see this...

Um, hello??? What are you doing? What ARE you? My pillow is right under this loft, oh great! I take my camera to the main house to find someone in charge and show them the photo and it is a super hippie dude and he's like "awesome, I've been here for 10 months and haven't seen one of those yet, let's go see if it's still there!"

Of course, the mousey, rodent, opposum thing was gone by now, so I'm glad I snapped a photo so that people didn't think I was crazy! Great, how am I going to sleep.

28 June - Day 24 - what have I gotten myself into?

Oooh, that nights sleep was creepy! I was going to move to the bottom bunk, but when I shined my flashlight down I saw an enormous spider hanging out by the other bed...

We started with a big bowel of fruit and oats and I think because the papaya was covered in oats the taste didn't repulse me.

After our morning of 4 hours of Spanish and some rice and veges for lunch we had our tour of the farm.

This place is amazing really. I couldn't live here, not after seeing 40 spiders and a rodent thing staring at me, besides the sun hardly ever comes out and everything is damp and muddy, but the concept of the farm is fantastic.

Did you know that there is a poop pyramid? Everything, well almost everything, is kept in a natural cycle. They rotate crops and plant a variety of things as not to deplete the soil of nutrients.

So the big effort is to keep the cycle in balance - what comes from the earth, goes back to the earth.

Ok, so back to the poop pyramid (of this farm, at least). Apparently the best poop out there is worm poop, so it ranks #1 in the pyramid. #2... guinea pig poo - yeah - who knew. Now the South Americans do eat guinea pigs (cuy), but remember this is an organic VEGETARIAN farm, so the cuys are spared, but their poop is used to fertilize the soil. #3 on the list... horses, ok, I can see that, we've all stepped over horse poo before and it's not a terrible poo - kind of grassy. #4... cows - yup I can see that too, #5... pigs and last but not least... humans. Yes, they recycle human poo here at the farm. It's cool actually. The toilets are dry composting toilets - so you just go to the toilet - throw the paper in - natural, fragerance free paper of course, and add a cup full of saw dust to dry everything out and keep the smell down. When the toilet gets full they use the compost mixture to grow something. Oh, crap (no pun intended) I forgot where the chicken poo goes in the pyramid... I think before horses.

Keeping the cuy happy, happy animals make happy poo!

The methane sac fascinated me... they shovel in pig poo and the sac bloats with methane which they use to heat the water tanks for showers (of course this part was broken which is why we didn't have any hot water) but the concept is good. The liquid left is filtered and filtered again and bottled as fertilizer. Reusing at it's best - well when it's functional.

Start with a pig... feed him and wait for some poo...

Put the poo in the methane sac and wait for it to expand with the gas... use the gas to heat water, the pipe leads the liquid to the filter and wait for the fertilizer.

The actual farm visit was next - you know- where they grow things... watermelon, papaya, peanuts, cilantro, yucca, corn, cabbage, etc.. etc..

Milo, one of the farm pups, decided to enjoy the farm with us. What a happy dog! The only bummer part about being a dog here is that there is NO MEAT!!!

29 June - Day 25 - I didn't miss my calling... I'm not a farmer

Time to milk the cows! Sounds exciting, huh? It's gross. I love milk, all dairy really, but after having udder smell on my hands all day I'm not sure when I'll be able to stomach milk again. Ok, here's how it went... To get the milk flowing, you let in a baby cow with the mama and let the baby suck for a few minutes, then you tie up the baby so that it can't get to the teats anymore... well the udder is dry and you need it to be slippery and this is an organic farm so you just dip your hand into the milk in the bucket and rub it on her teat and there you go - well milk isn't a fantastic lubricant so you just keep dipping. I'm going to stop there and let your mind do the rest...

Here's Danielo, see that fantastic stream of milk coming from her teat? Yeah, that's a lot harder to accomplish than it looks!

Here's me pulling on her teat...

Another couple on the farm was there just for tours so while we were in Spanish classes they were making Yucca cake. I love pan de yucca and fried yucca, but yucca cake turned out to be too gooey of a weird texture to really enjoy...

Here's what yucca looks like when you pull it from the ground.

The farm may be organic and vegetarian, but they sure do use a lot of palm sugar to make things taste better.

Oh, back to our morning milk... Ok you take the bucket of milk and put it through a strainer and then back into the bucket... notice I didn't say anything about washing the bucket or boiling the milk... So you now have strained milk and you add some enzyme packet and mix with your hands!

Here's Sandra mixing up the dirty milk into dirty cheese... we tasted it later and it was vile.

30 June - Day 26 - isn't it good luck when a monkey pees on you?

Horseback riding day... It's been a long time... 30 years to be exact since I've been on a horse. I had a bit of a bad experience back in Girl Scout camp and haven't trusted horses since. Well it's time to get over my fear - so I ask for the most tranquilo horse and hopped on.

Whew it's not so bad up here. We head out to look for some monkeys and after an hour of the slowest moving horse ever and my butt aching we make it to this little shack.

I am in a serious deja vu moment from my trip to Hsipaw in Burma with Kelly and Adria! It's the same damn shack, but instead of chicken head soup bubbling on the stove it was this...

Boiled peanuts! Ha, this is even funnier because Laura and I argue about boiled peanuts, she likes them and I think they are the devil's food!

You need to hear this short funny story... So we are in this house and just finish our lunch that we packed... ok you should see this lunch -

Rice, plantains and veges wrapped in a banana leaf...

Ok so after lunch we are hanging out in this little shack that belongs to this old woman who looks 187 years old, but come to find out later is actually only 93. So the word for pain in spanish is dolor and since they use US currancy the word is dolar. These two words are really difficult for me to say correctly... Ok, so the two other foreigners are sitting there with me and the old lady walks up to me and keeps saying what I think to be "un dolar" and I'm like - WTF - is she asking us for money? I don't have any money with me. Oh, this is embarassing. I look to the other couple and ask if they think she's asking us for money and they say yes! Oh great, now what. I just said no entiendo, lo siento... finally she just walks right up to me, I'm sitting and she's 4 feet tall so we are even level and she starts rubbing the tattoos on my arm - OH - she's asking me if my tattoos hurt! Whew. I tried to tell her in my broken spanish that it hurt nothing like the 6 children she gave birth to in the middle of the woods! I don't think she understood me.

Later, after we left, the other foreigner says to me - whew I'm glad I didn't have a dollar because I would have given it to her and she would have thought I was nuts. Whew is right.

We headed up to the monkey following an Ecuadorian man with a machete. We are all looking up at a group of 4-5 black monkeys (no one knew which kind of monkey) when all of a sudden I see this monkey lean over the branch and I'm like whoa, is it throwing up on us and then I realize, hey, that's not his head that's his BUTT! Oh my god the monkey is peeing on us!! Get out of the way... Luckily we only got a little spray, but it's good luck right?

Sneaky little bugger.

Got back on the horse to head to the "water fall". After seeing it I might call it something else.

I'm glad I went to the farm but it's not high on my awesome list. I did enjoy spending time with the farm pups and I even let a mangy little kitty sleep on me during my spanish lessons.

In a former life Perla was used for fighting, so her ears and tail were cut, and she's blind in one eye. Soooo sad. She was rescued and now lives on a vegetarian farm, but is very loved. She and I had some good quailty time together.