Hacienda Ilitio: week one

I’ve completed my first (of two) weeks working on an Ecuadorian permaculture farm. As it turns out, my fears in the last post about starving to death were completely unfounded—this week has involved some of the best overeating I’ve ever done in my life. I’m spending the weekend in Baños, which is a super-touristy town in the Central Sierra region of Ecuador. Plans for tomorrow include hiking and some Spanish lessons, plus writing and working on my archive of Semester in the West journal entries, which I’m going to be putting up on the blog sometime soon.

I’m too tired to post anything philosophical about agriculture, so, in no particular order, here’s a list of stuff I’ve done this week:

1) Spent twenty-five hours harvesting oats by hand. As a result, I now have four slivers and three callouses on my hands, plus a ridiculous farmer’s tan.

2) Milked a cow, then drank the milk from said cow less than ten minutes later.

3) Witnessed a burro escape from its fenced-in field three times in the same day. This is the same burro that apparently tried to eat its own child, and is consequently in solitary confinement with three horses that seem to think the burro is an inferior creature. Needless to say, this is the saddest looking burro I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something, because I love Winnie the Pooh.

4) Lived in the shadow of Mt. Cotopaxi, which is one of the most active volcanoes in the region, if not the world.

5) Eaten enough fried yucca and fried plantain to give at least three people heart attacks.

6) Baked bread without a recipe in a wood-burning oven.

7) Drank raw alpaca milk. Which is less fatty than cow’s milk, and consequently less delicious. But still. RAW FUCKING ALPACA MILK! So many foodie points.

8) Watched Sebastian, the owner/manager of the farm, make cheese from fresh milk. Then we got to take some of the non-aged cheese. Which basically tastes like if you took raw milk and then made it even more awesome by adding salt and stuff.

9) Seen quinoa growing in its native habitat. Quinoa is actually an incredibly gorgeous plant—bright red-pink flowery on really tall stalks.

10) Fallen in love. His name is Santiago. He’s very tall and handsome. I’ve been told that he’s half llama and half alpaca, but I’m still not clear on the difference between the two. Anyway, he’s white and gorgeous and I want to take him home with me.

Day one on the farm

When I signed up for two weeks of volunteering on a farm in the Ecuadorian highlands, I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d gotten myself into. I told myself I’d be sleeping outside, I’d be freezing, I’d be doing hard work all day, there wouldn’t be much food and I wouldn’t particularly enjoy it. I hoped it might be character-building and educational, but I wasn’t promising myself anything else.

As it turns out, Hacienda Ilitio is possibly the most gorgeous place I’ve ever been. It’s right in the shadow of Mt. Cotopaxi. There are fields and fields of grass, a herd of alpacas and burros, and some nice, sparsely furnished cabins with running water. We’re literally in the middle of nowhere, and I can go for long walks with mountains in the background and feel so incredibly pastoral that I don’t even mind the lack of internet.

Getting here was the most challenging thing I’ve ever done. Maybe challenging isn’t the best word, but I’ve never done anything else requiring as much blind faith in the goodwill and knowledge of other people, not to mention my Spanish skills. The directions I had for getting to the farm were essentially this: take a bus going towards Latacunga from Quito. You’ll go through a town called Lasso, and then there’s an intersection with a stoplight. Then after about a kilometer, there’s another intersection with no light that goes to another town. Get off the bus here, cross the highway and have a taxi take you up the road to the farm.

I figured as long as I didn’t screw up the getting off the bus part, I would be ok. I explained these directions to the bus assistant (not the driver, but the guy in charge of opening the door and collecting fares and such), who said he’d tell me when to get off. He did, in a place I suspected was too far down the road, but I listened to him. And thus, I found myself stranded on the side of a major highway in Ecuador with all my stuff and no idea where I was, nor how to get where I was going. After a five minute explanation to the police officer who (thank god) was stationed at the bus stop, he called me a cab, who arrived twenty minutes later and said he knew where the farm was. I got in the car with him and drove in what I thought was the completely opposite direction for almost a half hour, until magically, I arrived at the gates of Hacienda Ilitio. So now, although I have no idea where the hell I am, I am also here.

I’m cooking for myself for two weeks, and I suspect I’m going to lose a lot of weight, since all I packed was peanut butter, bread, jelly, lentils, quinoa, walnuts, Grape Nuts, oatmeal and dried beans. Plus, we’re over 10,000 feet above sea level and I’m going to be doing manual labor starting on Monday. However, the farm generously supplies volunteers with fresh milk and vegetables. So yeah, I had raw alpaca milk for dinner. Suck on that, foodies.