We really need a break from the STRESS! - Van Life Ecuador
we're leaving cuenca and going on a two-week adventure before we return to cuenca for snow's return dentist appointment because of the emergency dental detour we're backtracking to see several big points of interest we missed in this area of ecuador like banyos el pylon del hablo which is possibly the most epic medieval waterfall ever code epoxy earth's second highest volcano kilatoa a massive turquoise volcano crater lake with a cool indigenous vibe gimbrazo the planet's closest place to the sun and furthest from the earth's core home of the oh so cute and all the while we'll be showing the countryside small towns along the way the fascinating indigenous culture ecuadorian food these crazy winding landslide muddled andean roads and of course anything we interesting we encounter along the way like today we have a three and a half hour drive to an amazing i doubt you'll guess it but please leave your guests in the comments right now farms day i found this place on the google maps and well we've been traveling through all this beautiful south american countryside with all these different types of farms and fincas and we thought what an opportunity to see an ecuadorian alpaca permaculture farm up close one look at the reviews and we can't wait to get there we have pulled out of cuenca we are heading back up into the rural farm areas of ecuador unfortunately we will have to go back to cuenca in about two weeks for a follow-up dentist appointment if you missed our last episode our visit to the amazon got cut short and our plans kind of got tossed up in the air and all mixed up because i had to have an emergency dental visit so we had to drive all the way to the city and now we'll be doing some backtracking to go get the things we missed between here in the amazon and our first stop is literally going to be a farm we hope so we've been driving on this flat spot for a couple of miles now and you would think that we were just driving through a valley but no we're driving at 11 660 feet elevation there's a flat spot on the top of these mountains huge farmland up here is crazy no trees hardly at all all right we're coming through the town center of another town did you catch what town this is el tambo and one of the things that we've noticed about ecuador in total and in this area specifically is there are is a lot more indigenous dress and as you come through these little towns a lot of them have murals and different paintings and things that kind of depict a dog just ran out in front of us they have a lot of pictures murals things like that that kind of depict what the town or the city or the community is good at so for example this one they make a lot of clothes sewing also in this area is famous for their trains and so it's just kind of unique when you can identify kind of what they specialize in i also love as you come through these little towns the little city centers are mixed with farms and agriculture so if there's a little patch of grass you might see some corn growing there or maybe a cow grazing just past a bowl and you can see these are kind of simple and rustic houses but the vegetables and the produce are absolutely beautiful so yeah really enjoying the scenery countryside that ecuador has to offer now the big question is is snow gonna eat a cooy are you i guess the big question that's that's something we haven't decided it's something that's really kind of up for debate some of our some of you guys have been telling us to try it some of you've been telling us no don't try it you gotta tell them what cool is for the ones that weren't following back then and if you don't know what cui is it's it's a what is it it's a guinea pig you eat guinea it's a little guinea pig i don't know if i can do it and so we're kind of conflicted it's kind of a delicacy here it used to be sort of a normal thing but nowadays it's more of a delicacy but we do see him roasting on the side of the road all over the place and uh so i think snow's a no no what do y'all think should kirk try it or not yeah yeah we'll give you guys some time we'll get your feedback and uh we definitely need a vote should kurt try it snow is a definite no i can do it guys we had guinea pig as a pet when we were little i can't do it something you guys may have noticed is number one snow's driving number two the road has kind of gone away in terms of quality at number three we're up in the clouds and the rain so never fails timing for me bailing on the driving hopefully we won't have her drive that long with the tooth and all but we'll see it's a short drive today so we'll see how it goes but the irony all right i'm not going to vlog much about this other than to say here we go again another foggy rainy chattery road lots of potholes and we're also starting to see lots of fresh mudslides along the way nothing big and major but it's another day in the clouds in ecuador all right it looks like they've just cleared the opening but this is a huge slide the biggest one by far we've seen almost all the way across the road they just had like a half a lane cleared around the curve and there it was yeah this is crazy here comes a big semi slow down buddy and there's even some more smaller mud slides up along here we just need to be cautious and on the lookout we're almost to our campsite so we're almost there so fingers crossed all right whenever we get an open view the clouds clear it is green lush and pretty up here guys but unfortunately we haven't been getting too many peaks and it looks like this little peak is just about over right up here around the corner so we can kind of see down into the valley into our destination alusa so we're headed down to the valley and the next thing is is to make sure that we get secure our camp spot find the camp find our camp spot all right we don't see many train tracks in ecuador but this little town right here is kind of famous for their train tracks all right this is a little bit of it tricky entrance we came in through this town and now they've kind of got us winding down through snaking down through these little houses and narrow road and along this mossy wall but it's starting to open up now and look a little more promising for a while we weren't sure so things got a little sketchy on our drive down to the campsite that we wanted and it was a long narrow curvy dirt road and when we got to where we wanted to camp uh there didn't seem to be anybody there it looked closed there was no way to contact the place so you missed all the excitement of us having to back down that road maybe 400 yards curt yeah down a windy road curt directed and i drove and we made it to our second option we drove down there and we just got settled in and it started raining pretty hard so we'll have to show you this place a little bit later but for now what are you up to kurt well after another white knuckle drive through the through the fog and mudslides i'm gonna make a little lunch it's a late lunch it's about two o'clock but we're gonna have a little spaghetti something soft for snow's sore teeth teeth yeah yeah and we're gonna try to get a hold of the owner to see if we can get this situation figured out because it'd be nice to be able to do some stuff here it's beautiful but we'll see yeah good news everybody so the second camp there's nothing terribly wrong with it except for the owner is not here and was unable to give us the wi-fi password so we kind of depend on wi-fi quite a bit plus the first original place curt had scoped out and was super excited about well we just whatsapped with them and they said come on down they'll open up the gate so that's good news the big thing on the wi-fi guys in case you're wondering is we have to do some research so we don't exactly know where this stuff is how much your tickets how to access of all the logistics and we've got a big journey going on here for the next yeah the next couple of days we got a lot of things you need to research so wi-fi was important plus i think kurt was a little bit more excited about the next place vanna she could care less as long as she can sit on the dash but we're packing up and moving we were only here about 10 minutes so now that we're going back to our original campsite you get to see the road that i had to back down this is it which in a car or even a pickup truck or an suv not a big deal in a 23 foot long giant van this was a tricky backup but uh here we are we're at this beautiful little farm stay we had a great night's sleep but honestly as you guys know it was raining and cloudy on the way in but good news the sun actually decided to show itself today and we also have other good news monica the owner the developer the creator the muscle behind the scenes is gonna tell us a little bit about this place so you guys are in for a treat i can't wait for you to see this i've already been walking around and kind of got a tour and i kind of dork out on this kind of stuff so i hope you guys enjoy it so this is monica so monica what is the name of this place this farm is called eagle condor farm why'd you name that and what's this place all about it's um it's based on an ancient prophecy of the eagle and condor which is a 500 year old prophecy where the northern or westernized culture and the southern cultures or indigenous cultures we're going to reunite and share knowledge again and that's what this is about we found this as a farm stay place you have a farm and you have a stay so let's talk about the state park first literally i opened up um my old garage studio apartment here um in the first structure i built which is a waddle and dab natural building technique um garage and we're going to talk about waddling dog guys because we've been talking about mud huts for a while as we've passed them and we've been humbled so we'll talk about that later um so i lived in the garage apartment and since i've unoccupied it three years ago i did a bathroom addition and um i made it an airbnb okay so airbnb yeah and so and people find my lodging space um on my website okay on google and on airbnb and then you also welcome overlanders yeah i do limited space though right and call first for sure i have you know the option to camp okay so there's a fire pit and uh picnic table access um you have access to the whole farm you can walk around i have alpacas people like taking photos with them and yeah you know um i have geese and ducks um and it's just a very peaceful place i've got a lot of native birds you hear them all the time and it's it's nice and a place to connect and kind of decompress you started talking about the farm let's talk more about the farm this is like some kind of polyculture or permaculture what do you what do you how do you describe it and you give us a short view of what that looks like yeah it's um it's it's from the inception it started as a permaculture permaculture so i just had raw land with um some fruit trees that um that were already here so i basically inherited this land in 2010 when my father passed away and i was living in los angeles working as a full-time nurse and i came across permaculture and i fell in love with it and i i decided to further my education in australia i got my teacher training certificate and i did a second permaculture design course and then i just practiced my final design project which was approved i started to execute the design um slowly over the last nine years yeah this property and it's been great it's been really intense but also fun you know i have food forest i have swells on contour i have vermiculture i have banana circles i have grey water systems black water evo transpiration septic tanks i have uh everything designed in zones and i have um polyculture so i have a variety of annual and perennial gardens and food forests and i have ducks geese alpaca and um dogs cats and chickens my goal was to not get into debt so what i did was i spent the first two years straight here um doing the the basics which they teach us in permaculture is the access point so the whatever you're gonna walk on and whatever the cars or the tractors are gonna be on and um and the swales because you're doing a lot of earth moving and that was to you know swells are to recharge the groundwater and to grow trees on so it did take me nine years because i was going back and forth after those initial two years i started to spend time in the states as a travel nurse and then come back here and spend the money doing another big build or project so you were working and building this and you were working in another country and building at the same time yeah i've been non-stop working for nine years wow absolutely amazing then i finally hit a plateau i and now that i have the lodging and i have um the last structure that i built um is a earth bag structure a two-story earth bag round structure i live on the top floor and on the first floor is a cafe i have a small farm to table cafe where i can do my workshops and also just serve meals for the hosts i do a breakfast included a home to tail table breakfast and i um you know i can make food from there and sell to the public as well so what's this about the workshops i started to finally host workshops last year because i have i had now lodging and i had um i was more organized to do it i'm planning on doing uh which was the original plan to do two permaculture design courses per year one in spanish uh for ecuador and spanish-speaking people uh locals and a second one for foreigners in english okay and so you were telling me earlier earlier that sort of part of your mission is to bring some of the technology or the techniques from the western culture here as well as bringing some of the the the customs or cultures or technologies or traditions that you have from ecuador uh to the western world as well yes so so permaculture has its roots in indigenous um practices as permaculture has evolved too we've also you know incorporated different techniques that let's say um let's say that are not used in this area as far as the local uh wisdom uh which is very rich and um and ancient um there's a lot of things that i've learned here techniques and things i i have not picked up in permaculture design courses and a lot of it is just ancient wisdom herbs different things for different ailments for humans and animals i've learned how to manage parasites in my alpacas for example i mean huge for me because animal care is important as we all know in a farm but i don't have a lot of access to local veterinarians who are familiar with alpacas yeah so i've had to take on a lot of that own that that stuff on my own i can't wait to go out and touch them and pet them and play with them i hope they're like that but tell me more about the alpacas the alpacas well i i've always alpacas are extremely uh adorable they're very goofy too and very curious and intelligent they know their own names um i basically came across an alpaca um when i went to uh a big farm fair with with animals being sold and i saw this uh mellow pack i fell in love with them and bought them home i didn't know anything about alpacas but i said okay i'm going to learn so i dove into reading about them but what i what i started with was the fact that in permaculture we any element that we incorporate into the design plan of the farm is it has to have more multiple purpose or use so that it makes sense so an alpaca for example when you bring in an alpaca i thought alpaca is valuable for its fiber so it's hypoallergenic it's um very soft and warm and you can it comes in a varied colors and so my plan is to do alpaca workshops from a to z so from shearing all the way to young making so that's in the works and then also people just love alpacas they've become very popular and over the recent years and so for tourism people want to come and take photos of them they also provide a um compost so poop right their poop is very valuable they poop gold yeah they cook gold so you can you can make a compost tea out of their poop you could also just use their poop directly into the soil and gardens because it's not hot and so you don't have to make it decompose and um they are sold for meat as well in in the andean cultures um they're they're very low cholesterol lean meat so it's actually very healthy a lot of diabetic people are into eating alpaca meats um because it doesn't seem to be you know very fatty and stuff and um also their grass becomes the grass that they eat becomes poop which is green gold and becomes their fur so there you go yeah that's the the magic of alpacas magic of alpaca all right so i have one more question for you monica and that is tell me a little bit about the sustainability of this place like you know is this truly self-sustaining and how um yes that was always the goal is to reach um nothing is 100 sustainable um however the goal is to to to get as far along that path as possible and so at this point um now that i've built the number of structures i have my my my living structure and my cafe my lodging which is also a garage and a house that for my worker that helps me take care of everything here um i and i grow everything i grow either is sold in the cafe sold locally in the local restaurants um i i personally you know used to consume and or my animals so i grow everything all the grains for my chickens um the alfalfa and for my alpacas and for my for my geese everything is pretty much grown here and consumed here um let's see i don't have you know dairy or that kind of thing so which i don't consume a lot of but that you know i buy outside of here but uh i have you know annual gardens that that i consume from and then it's a closed loop system because nothing is get is wasted so i either um any of the vegetable waste or animal waste you know goes right back into the system so it goes to the to the compost pile or it goes to the worms or it goes to the chickens um and even my paper and carton that kind of stuff gets composted so yeah there's very little waste here um i also have solar down in the cafe space composting toilet in the garage for the campers i have the gray water system so the water gets used again i collect rain water as well and then the i you know i'm creating replenishing the groundwater over time with the swale systems as well as i don't contaminate with my black water evo transpiration tanks they're kind of like wetland sort of systems for black water yeah so everything is nothing's contaminating anything here and you know even the animals that pass away we bury them here and you know they become part of the soil of the soil and everything is just becoming a tighter and tighter closed unit which is really nice and we've reforested trees we planted over 2000 trees gifted by the government at the time when the government was doing a reforestation project so we did two two layers of windbreak trees around the entire perimeter of the farm we have a spring water we have spring water for irrigation so we're not using the city water um and of course that we have the rainwater collection so we're pretty much getting very close to a high percentage of sustainability financially sustainable with the lodging i i think as a as a tourism project this is great um also which is bringing in people from out of town and travelers that come through here and they um they provide an income for me as well so that's also becoming more and more financially sustainable so little bits and pieces of in revenue streams everywhere right fruits the the fibers from the al palace the vegetables and also the classes the teachings that you do and then you also have the tourism aspect as well so yes and ultimately it's it's really has been about lowering my costs too because the more sustainable i become the lower my costs get and now with the tourism aspect and the lodging the more the inc the income is increasing so it's it i'm i'm well on my path to financial sustainability so yesterday kurt was pretty much flying solo here at this vinca i was recovering from my dental mess still a little sore today but much much better it's time to leave this little place but i told kurt i was not leaving until i walked out here to get a closer look at the alpacas let's go see them if you like this video be sure to subscribe to our channel and hit that notification bell so you guys know when we put out new videos and don't forget you can always follow us over on instagram to see what's going on in between videos cheers guys
2022-05-28 12:29
