Saturday, February 11, 2017, Hacienda and Cooking Lessons

This  would be our last day in Ecuador and, since our flight was not scheduled to leave until midnight, Alejandra decided that our day would not start until noon. We were okay with that. We drove about an hour to the Hacienda Sierra Alisos, in Tambillo in the foothills of the Ilinizas, a pair of volcanic mountains. We passed a horseback rider on the way in, which made us feel like we were in the Ecuadorian equivalent of cowboy country.

After lunch in the hacienda, some of us decided to ride bicycles, since the bike trails had been described as "flat," or "plano" in Spanish. They were flat only in comparison to the Andes Mountains. Most people ended up walking up to a pair of adobe houses on a hill overlooking the main hacienda, which was also adobe. Sarah and Mark, who have an adobe house in Tucson, were especially interested in the Ecuador version of adobe architecture. One of the houses was rammed earth rather than adobe, meaning it was made with forms rather than adobe blocks.

We had a tour of the farm's dairy operation and watched cows being milked and calves being fed. There seemed to be about 50 cows on site. The milking practices were similar to what I know about milking in the United States. The farm also contained pens for guinea pigs and rabbits.

We drove back into Quito for a private cooking class at the Plaza Grande Hotel. We made seviche and ice cream, the latter involving lots of dry ice. We ate a traditional Ecuadorean dinner of meat, beans, corn and rice. The food was delicious.  A man dressed in a strange purple costume, looking disconcertingly like a purple Klansman, served us our dessert, smoking from the dry ice used to cool it. On the way out, in the hotel lobby, we saw men dressed in tuxedos and women dressed in gowns getting ready  to go to a wedding at the nearby Jesuit church. We said goodbye to Alejandra, and then Jorge drove us to the airport for our uneventful flights home.

Despite the tribulations of this trip - partial blindness, seasickness, altitude sickness, and the heat and humidity on the Galapagos - we loved Ecuador. The people are friendly and the climate in the mountains is perfect. Our stay with Selso and Sylvia's family in the Magdalena indigenous community was very special. We resolved to spend the next year improving our Spanish so that we could return next winter, spend some more time with them and get to know them better.