Rio Muchacho 15-17 September

(saturday 16th - afternoon) (written in Rio Muchacho and posted on Santa Cruz Island, Los Galapagos)
Yesterday morning we left Canoa for Rio Muchacho Organic Farm. The others were coming from Manta and ended up horribly late so it was nearly 11am by the time we left Canoa – I knew there was no point in rushing to leave the hotel in the morning – so it was good to have had a book handy. Although we actually spent most of the time talking to the guy who came to pick us up and mum actually understood quite a lot of what he was saying. He speaks quite slowly and very clearly which is great when you are learning, but not so great after about an hour of being leftured on the uses and benifits of excrement and organic farming. Thankfully the veg garden tour that followed was somewhat more interesting and in English.

But that was in the afternoon. The first thing we did when we arrived was eat. Mmm... that was a good lunch, and the presentation was amazing. All the food was served in big pottery bowls and we had pottery bowls and gourd cups and spoons. We get to make the cups and spoons tommorrow, so that should be fun. After the tours in the afternoon we had a ring making session and had great fun sanding down palm nuts.

Dinner was the same style as lunch and equally yummy, and the evening activity was chocolate making – from the bean to the cup. The fresh bean is actually really nice – although nothing like chocolate – and we discovered that chupar is suck, not chew, and that the actual cocoa bean is not nice chrunched fresh. We then roasted some beans that had previously been dried and burnt our hands cracking off the shells before hand grinding them with palm sugar (similar to brown sugar). The final stage involved cooking the powder with a bit of milk and eating the chocolate with banana – so good!

Our cabin for the night was also pretty neat with split bamboo walls and a thatch roof. I think we got the best cabin as we have out own bathroom (complete with composting toilet) and no mce in the roof (unlike the other cabin). So it was yet another good long sleep and I managed to drag myself out of bed for a run before breakfast. Breakfast. The best meal so far – a huge fruit salad with granola and tortillas de maiz (baked ground corn cake things with cheese inside – so good). The food on this trip has been so good the whole time; the food in the Amazon was just amazing, it had so much flavour and was so typical, the food in Manta was good, what we ate in Canoa wasnt bad (our highest food bill so far – about NZ$12pp for breakfast, lunch and dinner at the hotel restaurant, including fresh fruit juice or batido with each meal).

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