Chapter 3: Hacienda de Fantasmas y Plantación de Rosas

  The third day of our trip started early.  We collected our luggage and piled back into the bus.  Halfway through our ride to our first stop it started to rain, which made me realize I shouldn't have had the cup of tea with breakfast. I really had to pee. Eventually we arrived at the rose plantation, where they both grow a variety of roes and also cut them in preparation for shipment around the world. I took a multitude of pictures of the roses as we took our tour. I will put those pictures up here as soon as possible, check back!

   A little ways down the road from the rose plantation there was an hacienda hotel that we got to take a tour of, surrounded by gigantic Eucalypti trees.  walking up to the hacienda felt like approaching a house from a fairy tale. Everything about the house was...amazing. The place was built in the early 1500's and renovated since then. Weddings are held there and they aren't incredibly expensive either from what our tour guide told us. The kind of crazy thing was that although it was a very historic building, they had no problem with us touching anything or sitting on any of the chairs and such. Possibly because its been renovated and operates as a hotel now, but it was odd as that was a completely different protocol to the one usually found in historic sites in America.

                            (The Haunted Hacienda, I wanted to get a shot of it without the bus, but alas)


   After a lengthy tour of the grounds they served us fresh hot chocolate that was delectable. While resting for a bit our tour guide told us stories about how the hacienda is supposedly haunted. For example multiple guests have reported hearing heavy military boots walking by the bathroom in the middle of the night, even though there was no evidence of anyone being there. After consuming our wonderful chocolatey beverages and listening to ghost stories, we discovered a bust of Alexander Humboldt upstairs.  Apparently he stayed at the hotel once upon a time and is also a fairly important figure in South America, though I'm not entirely sure why.

                                                         (His Humboldt-ness)


  Lunch was fresh vegetables and potatoes and fresh cheese at a small place with its own garden and pastures for goats and llamas.  The establishment was run by a small group of Saraguran indigenous people. The hostess brought us outside when we had finished eating to show us how to make tints for dying cloths. There are small round bugs that live on cacti similar to potato bugs. You squeeze them to release a red tint, then add lemon juice to change the color. Before leaving they showed us a cultural dance that we got to be participate in. It consisted of marching around in a circle to the beat of a bass drum with bells clad on our shins.

   With our tummies full and our bodies tired from dancing we set off for our hotel that was about an hour away. The hotel was also an old hacienda, on the side of a huge valley.  In the distance on the rare occasions when the clouds part, you can see Mount Tungurauwa, the nearby volcano.

  Dinner was a three course meal of more Queso de Locro, chicken with fresh vegetables, and a chocolate mousse for dessert. For two hours after dinner we played mafia in Spanish so we could practice our Spanish and also so our bus driver could be included.  It was a ridiculously fun time: I pretended to be a private investigator, fireman, and lumber jack in different rounds.

   In each room of the hacienda there was a lit fireplace in the corner, but ours had died out by the time we got back. We tried relighting it, to no avail. Even without the fire we all sat around on two beds, completely exhausted, talking about nothing and everything.