Now been here a week and thank goodness I´m picking up some spanish.. finally! Throwing in the odd broken sentence and saying hello to everybody on the street like a merry traveller. Mostly met with friendly reception (probably because I´m not in the city!). Nowhere near being able to blab a conversation though.
I´m now at hacienda Picalqui which is near a village called Tabacundo, 1.5 hours north of Quito, about 6kms north of the equator. Wow I´m in the northern hemisphere lol.
The surroundings here are awesome. I´m in the Ecuadorian Andes, amongst rolling hills and a few volcanoes to boot. At the hacienda, the view of the mountains can be seen almost 360 degrees. Even the trees are interesting, some really tall skinny ones and some with wierd textured trunks.
I´m volunteering at the hacienda (farm) for a week or two. Work there can be quite labour intensive, but it´s always really nice to be out in the fresh mountain air. We are located at somewhere around 2800m alt I think. My lungs are already used to the air up here. Thursday, we went up to Laguna Mojanda (beautiful lake in a crater on Fuga Fuga volcano) for some reforestation work. The highest point there is 4000m and we worked just below that. Was puffing, but I think more from unfitness than the thin air up there.
There is a school group of teenagers, city kids from Quito at the hacienda for 2 weeks. Apparently every high school student has to do an obligatory stint at a hacienda in order to graduate. Most days I work alongside them. They are quite entertaining, even though I don´t understand what they´re actually saying lol. There are mostly boys in the class and they seem a little different from your typical 16 year old kiwi teenager... they help the kitchen ladies serving up food, always say thanks after meals and stack & take their dishes to the kitchen and sometimes get up at 6am to play soccer(!).
The food at the hacienda is good. Hearty and tasty, protions are bit smaller that I´m used to (well the whole world´s portions are smaller than a polynesian´s). Needless to say, it´s fresh, healthy and some organic. TOTAL change of diet for me lol! I ate fruit and veg so rarely before that I don´t know what most of the food that I´m eating or growing is.
I´ve been waking up early (not grumpy) about 4-5am most mornings. Earlier in the week I had a bad case of jet lag, but now it´s probably the mountain air and non msg sodium saturated food that´s waking me up. Although it´s winter the sun shines almost every morning. Here there are only two seasons; summer and winter. The only difference between them I think is in the afternoons - it summer it´s dry and windy, in winter it´s thundery and wet. And the thunderstorms here are really awesome! Totally loud and crazy.
