El Condor - WWOOF site

Today we find ourselves in the middle of Vilcabamba, the village from which we springboarded to El Condor. After 10 days straight on the farm, we have arrived back here with pleasure in seeing other people, stomachs poised and ready for good cuisine, and an appreciation for our experience on the farm.

Although the work we did there was by no means easy, we can´t say that we did enough work to feel the full brunt of "pure" farm living. To start with, we were the only people consistently staying the night on the farm and remaining there through our 10-day stretch. The only other person that we really had contact with was a kind man by the name of Vicente, the caretaker of the farm. Apparently, the owner of El Condor recently passed away, and his two sons are living in the U.S. and attending university in a coastal city of Ecuador, so Vicente is the only one attending to the farm and the animals on it. He takes care of nurturing seedlings to be planted (like coffee, broccoli, alfalfa, and others), and he maintains the amount of plants already there. He uses the alfalfa and corn grown there to feed the chickens and guinea pigs that he has been raising.

We arrived on a Thursday, and while there, we helped do a few things on the farm; principally, we helped by arranging bovine fertilizer (cow poo) into piles along a very steep hillside where the (pregnant) cows had been grazing. Although the work wasn´t too hard by itself, going up and down a steep hill with full buckets of fertilzer proved fairly tiring after a couple of hours. Focusing on not touching my face with my gloved hand was definitely a mental difficulty. Other tasks included weeding thickly grown plants from the coffee patch and the upper garden with shovels and helping to mend fences with bamboo. However, on the whole, we can say that we probably had more free time than we did work time. We filled this mostly by studying our Spanish books on the porch or in the dining room and preparing/collecting various kinds of food.


Anyways, Vicente was there roughly every other day - or less - during our stay there, which was nice because we had days where we were free to simply sit and ponder about what hard, physical, farm labor SHOULD be like. His absence did, however provide an obstacle or two during our stay there.

Usually with WWOOF organizations, it is expected for them to feed the volunteers (us) during the stay there, but seeing as how they only offer foods that they grow on the farm, we made sure to bring in whatever extra food we would need from the stores in town. Anyways, after we had exhausted our two loaves of bread, avocado, and other staples(a few days in), we were primarily left with lentils, beans rice, and potatoes, as well as a few veggies we still had left. By this time it was Sunday, and we had already prepared and eaten a few of the foods just mentioned earlier in the week. We anticipated Vicente to come back on Monday to take down our shopping list so that he could run into town with his motor bike and buy us a few more staples on Tuesday to last us the week.

Long story short, he did not show up when we thought he would, and we ended up eating nothign but lentils, beans, rice, and potatoes for longer than expected, which had gassy results for both of us, as you can imagine... Once he delivered our food, however, we were unusually ecstatic about simple things such as german pancakes and toast; I never thought something so simple as toast would give me so much pleasure in life.

I would say that the things we enjoyed most were picking blackberries (and making an improvised cobbler out of it), collecting oranges and bananas for fresh juice and smoothies, hiking around just for the fun of it, witnessing inexplicably beautiful sunsets over the Andean mountain range every evening, and having a perfectly stress-free 10 days where all we really had to worry about was feeding ourselves (and the critters) and bathing, in that order. We are really glad to have had such a unique experience in Ecuador, and we can´t wait to have more similar experiences at WWOOF organizations in other countries as well.

For now, though, the rough plan is to travel to Cuenca tomorrow where I will start attending a language school for a month, and Kait will explore volunteer opportunities. We have already found very promising prospects on both of these fronts, so we are excited to see how things work out. Wish us luck!