Remember my French friend Fanny from Couchsurfing in Quito?  Well, by the time I made it to her end of Ecuador, she’d started her internship, and I got an invitation to stay with her host family for a week at their house in Machala.

Fanny and her coworker Paolo worked for an agroforestry business that taught local farmers responsible practices.  They’d give workshops to the farmers, who would be gathered around someone’s living room.  Having nowhere else to go, I tagged along for a few of them.

This was real-deal farm life: one day, as I was just about to be bored, I looked out the window and saw a dead pig lying on a table.  A couple of men came up and started rinsing it with steaming water.  They started to shave off all its hair, and all of a sudden I saw it no longer had a head (I’m glad they were standing in the way of my view!)  Then they brought out machetes and hammers, reducing the pig to a pile of meat you’d find at any butcher shop, and fired up the grill.  I like bacon as much as the next person, but it was pretty grisly to see actually happening.

(I don’t have a picture of that, but I do have a picture of this monstrous grasshopper, which is scary in its own right.  Hand is included for scale.)

Luckily, the squeamishness had passed by the time Rosa, the owner of the house that held the meeting, invited us to go out back and help ourselves to fruit from her arazá tree.  Arazá is soft and yellow and looks a little like a passion fruit, but it has the consistency of a peach and slippery seeds embedded all through it.  When we came in with piles of fruit, she made a cocktail out of it for us, blending it with ice, homemade cane alcohol (most definitely moonshine – kept in a big jug under the sink!), regular milk, condensed milk, brown sugar and vanilla.  It tasted a little like melted ice cream.  YUM.

From Machala we were further invited to Paolo’s family’s farm for the weekend.  They have a big place with cows, pigs, chickens, banana trees and cacao plants, one of those places where so many members of the family are milling around that you can’t even tell for sure who lives there.  I love those.  We spent the afternoon at a volleyball game (volleyball is huge in Ecuador).  This was the place to be – it seemed like the whole town turned out to see the game.  A brass band played cumbia music in the background, stray dogs wandered onto the field and had to be chased off, roosters crowed from the hills where people watched the action on the court from their front porches.

On the way back we passed by a cockfight – a circle of men yelling and cheering, roosters in the ring kicking up clouds of dust and more in cages stacked along the sides.

That night there was an outdoor dance held on the same volleyball court where we’d watched the game earlier.  The whole town was dressed up and dancing to a live cumbia band that had come in from Peru.  Fanny and I were a little out of place in our grungy hiking shoes but we did the best we could.  I was practicing my best steps with one of the local guys, trying to copy the girls on stage with the tall white boots, when I heard a voice over the loudspeakers, announcing that there were visitors from France and the US that night.  It was nice yet embarrassing…everyone turned around and stared at us, asking what in the world we were doing!

The crowd

The band (apologies for the horrible quality of both of these photos, btw!)

The next day I went with Fanny and Paolo to another of their workshops, getting a chance this time to talk to some people there.  People were asking us everything.  Their nosy questions were hilarious – I’m surprised they didn’t ask my bra size or if there were any abnormalities in my medical history!  Here are some I remember:

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-What country were your pants made in? (What?  Um…China?)

-Have you gained or lost weight since you arrive in Ecuador? (Gained, unfortunately.  Gringas love fried, sugar coated cheese empanadas.)

-Wow, how tall ARE you? (Five nine.  I know that’s freakishly tall for a woman in this country.)

-Is your hair color natural or is it dyed? (Dyed long ago.)

-You believe in God, the Virgin and the Baby Jesus, don’t you? (My answer was yes, out of convenience.  People stress over the state of your immortal soul if they hear that you’re not particularly religious.)

-Is that the Bible you’re reading?  (Why would it be the Bible??  Uhh, I mean, I left my Bible at home.)[/box]

Then there was the part where we rode horses and milked cows and hiked to the glorious waterfall above, which I suppose you shouldn’t leave a farm without doing.

Vacas!

I got laughed at for my milking skills

 

I thought they’d been expecting me, so I didn’t know what to do when the car drove off into the hills and I found the place empty.

Earlier that day, over lunch (a plate of chicken and rice served at a card table on the sidewalk of the nearest town), I thought about what the Eco-Farm might be like.  Based entirely on the stories a couple of friends had come back with after WWOOFing in Argentina, I pictured a noisy, free-spirited group of volunteers weeding gardens or constructing a chicken coop or perhaps cheerfully stirring big pots of vegetarian food on the stove, indulging their inner hippies with morning yoga sessions.

But the main lodge was dim, cool and deserted, and I wondered if I’d showed up on the wrong day, or maybe at the wrong place.  I set my bag next to the long wooden table in the middle of the room and looked around.  I saw a kitchen to the right, and some stairs wound upwards to the left.  Everything seemed orderly, but…where was everyone?

“Hola?”  I called, and two guys appeared from around the corner, bored expressions suggesting that they weren’t surprised to see me.  The first wore a long white tunic over baggy pants.  Around his neck hung a string of prayer beads, and one longish lock of hair stuck off the back of his buzzed head.  The other was entirely bald, dressed in floor-length orange robes.  A black dog sat at their feet, tail thumping the floor.

“Is this the farm?”

“We’re an ashram, really,” the guy in white told me.  “Do you know about Krishna?”

Excuse me?  Well, OK.  “Is anybody else here?” I asked, dodging the Krishna question.

“You’re the only one right now,” he replied.

“What are you guys working on?”

“We don’t really have any projects going on at the moment.”

The Hindu god Krishna (img: Balaji.B)

The orange-robed monk turned out to be from Colombia.  He seemed nice enough, but a speech impediment on top of the already mystifying paisa accent killed any potential conversation.  The guy with the lock of hair and the prayer beads was the one who ran the place, and therefore our official host.

He showed me to my small room on the second story.  “Good, then.  I’ll let you settle in.” he said, and left.

I weighed my options, wondering what I was supposed to do.  Should I go downstairs?  No, the small talk had faded.  Offer to help out with something?  No, they said there wasn’t really much I could do.  Stay here?  But I didn’t want to be antisocial.  No option seemed any less awkward than the others, so I decided to ignore the whole situation and play a game on my iPod.

Several thousand points later I heard an unfamiliar voice coming from the front door.  A new guest?  I peeked over the balcony.  Sure enough, somebody else had showed up, a Finnish girl whom the host guys showed to a room before quickly fading back into the woodwork.  She’d been living in Chile, it turned out, and knew about the whole Hare Krishna thing.

It was then that I heard circus music.

Faint at first, then growing louder and louder, and then a chiva appeared in front of the lodge.  A chiva is a brightly painted, customized bus that usually has its own nickname.  I’d only ever seen them taking groups of tourists and pub crawlers around big cities…so, what was it doing here, and – question of the day – why was it nearly empty?  Aside from the guy driving, there was just one girl sitting in the back row.

 A chiva. (img: jlascar)

“Is this the guesthouse?” the man asked.  He was a Texan called Lucho, and his passenger was Clara, a French girl who had come for the farming and yoga like I had.  Hearing that the farm was also an ashram didn’t seem to faze her, but Lucho looked suspicious of the whole setup.  He said he was going to take a drive and see if he couldn’t find a different sort of guesthouse, and would we like a ride in the chiva?

The three of us climbed in the back and we set off down the dirt road, circus music blaring.  Lucho checked in at a place down the road and we all decided to go for a beer.

I’d imagined the hippie farming experience to be a sort of detox, an atmosphere where I might experience a week in the life of a teetotaling vegetarian who does yoga every morning.  But I’d already accidentally showed up at an ashram only to take a ride on the world’s most unexpected party bus, and and didn’t I deserve a drink after all that?

Ecuador’s beer of choice.  (img: alfinaldeesteviaje)

So we sat down at a nearby restaurant built on the bank of a stream.  It was lively inside, actually almost full, and the waitresses were bringing out big metal platters piled high with delicious-looking fried trout.  One of them passed by our table.

“How much is the trout?”  I asked.

“Oh, we don’t serve that,” she replied.

“What do you mean?” I asked, looking at how every other person in the restaurant was eating trout.

“We don’t have any food in the kitchen, but if you want to go catch something yourself, we’ll fry it up for you.”

Really now?  A restaurant that doesn’t serve any food you don’t bring through the door in raw form?

“Oh.  Just some beer then,” I told her.

Lucho then dropped us off back at the ashram, where our host waved us over.  “The ceremony is just starting,” he told us, leading us to a small temple I hadn’t noticed before.  Inside was an elaborate altar, a statue of Krishna surrounded by decorations and offerings.  Above it hung a carved sign (kinda like this one, I don’t have a picture of the real deal:)

Hare Krishna mantra (img: CoreForce)

Our host directed the three of us to sit on donut-shaped pillows in front of the altar, blowing into a conch shell to begin the ceremony.  We watched as he held up various offerings to the Krishna statue, a flame, a flower, dinging a miniature bell in between each. Then he pointed to the sign and began to chant.

“Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna…” I wavered.  Since there were only four of us, I could hear my own voice, and I felt foolish.  I tried to tell myself that this was a good opportunity to learn about a religion I knew nothing about, but…I couldn’t help but feel a little silly!

I spent dinner sitting silently opposite the orange-robed monk, who also led our morning yoga session.

After yoga came the moment when I was supposed to say whether I wanted to go or stay on.  They were nice people, but when I thought about the chanting and the way we were summoned to meals with a conch shell despite there being only three of us, I said I’d be on my way.

Clara and I walked back towards the nearest town with our host.  He was dressed in regular clothes this time, but had a blue bag hanging sling-like around his neck.  He kept one hand in it the whole time and I could see him passing the prayer beads through his fingers as he walked.

He thumbed a ride for Clara and me from the next pickup truck that passed by, waving goodbye with his free hand, and that was that.

Have you ever showed up somewhere that turned out different than you expected it to be?