By Brent
After completing our time outside Quito, Ecuador, we traveled to the city of Mindo. Mindo is known for canopy tours where you can zipline from one point to another, whitewater tubing ("rafting" seems a little generous since it's just seven inner tubes tied together with rope), and birdwatching. Apparently birdwatching is a big enough deal here that people will fly to Ecuador, take a bus to Mindo, and then pay upwards of $100/day to wander out into the forest looking for rare species.
We were told to take a bus to Mindo, then look for a shop called "The Beehive" that would be set up on the main road. When we got there, there was no sign for the shop, and the only reason we found the place was because a gringo was outside cutting wood for shelving. We thought maybe he was Ingo (the owner). Turns out he was Joshi (pronounced "Yoshi"), another WWOOFer, and neither Ingo nor his wife Genny were even there at the time. That would be pretty typical throughout most of our stay at El Gringo Alto (The Tall Gringo).
Joshi on the back of Ingo's SUV on the ride to the farm
Eventually Ingo and Genny showed up and we had lunch before starting work rennovating the building to make it into a real coffee and gift shop. We arrived to a building with nothing but a bar and some random furniture on Tuesday. They wanted to open the shop on Friday, but had no lights, no shelving, no menu, hadn't taped the windows when varnishing the frames, and most of the signs were either not made or not hung up.
Ingo had been in Quito that morning picking up new bees (he's also a beekeeper), so he returned to the shop with several new hives, all of which were sealed so the bees couldn't get out. Throughout the day, he started noticing more and more bees had escaped and were in the car, so we decided to leave town a little earlier than planned. Eight people were there, and the car was already too small to fit everyone inside, so the people with the worst reactions to bee stings got first choice of the outside seats - Dana and I were on the roof, and Joshi was on the rear bumper for the 45 minute ride home through the bumpy cloud forest roads.
Installing lights at The Beehive
By Friday morning, all the major work was finished - Dana spent a day and a half washing the varnish off the window panes, I hung lights and ran wiring, built shelves, and helped with a wine glass rack that hangs over the bar. Dana built and painted a chalkboard menu and a sign to put in the street with a list of offerings, and at the end of the week, the place looked amazing and we had to celebrate with the largest bottles of beer we could find.
Ingo decided the large 600mL bottles weren't classy, and obviously the smaller the bottle, the classier the drink. That means only the ritziest places can sell 225mL beers. He then felt guilty selling such small bottles of beer, so we had to finish what was left.
The Beehive - notice how shiny the windows are
In the mornings, there were several chores that needed to be taken care of before breakfast. One was to feed the pigs - Chunk was the adult female, and there were seven piglets. Her favorite food was the old bananas that had been left to rot in a large plastic jug. After fermenting for a couple weeks, they'd be fed to the pigs.
Chunk after feeding time
While we were there, the male piglets had to be castrated. Dana was tasked with bringing a piglet over for the process and holding him down for it. Turns out if Chunk doesn't have a fresh container of food in front of her, she tries to bite people stealing her babies; if she's eating, she has no idea what's going on around her. The piglets also don't like to be picked up by people, and they can SCREAM.
Another morning chore was to let the baby and mother goat out of their pen. While you were down by the goats, you also fed the chickens and checked for dead chicks that had been trampled in the night. It was slightly morbid, but usually you didn't find many dead chicks.
Whenever you went to feed the chicks, they would surround your boots and peck at you. There would be food everywhere around them, but your boots were new and interesting, so you had to make sure you didn't crush any of them.
At one point, Ingo decided the chicks were ready to leave the small chicken area and be out in the open with the full-grown chickens. Before that could happen though, we had to make sure they were all vaccinated against chicken diseases, which involved catching all ~200 chicks and giving them an eye drop before setting them outside.
The process actually wasn't that terrible, but Ingo wanted them to be inside at night, and they weren't smart enough to use the ramp to the door to get back inside, so we had to catch them all again - this time without the aid of walls and corners to keep trap them. We eventually gave up and started only catching them at night when they were all in one place sleeping. Maybe they'll eventually figure out how to go in the way they came out of the coop on their own.
These were the chicks when we first got there.
The goats were also down by the chickens, and at night we had to lead the mother and kid back to their pen. The baby would get picked on by the other members of the herd, so those two had to be separated and locked up at night. We'd lead the mother back with a handful of corn just out of reach until she got into the pen, but the baby wouldn't follow very easily. Instead, we carried him.
Obviously, Dana hated having to carry the baby goat back to the pen at night.
The rest of the goat herd included Marcus, the alpha male who was a jerk, a handful of females, and Jackson. Jackson had been bottle fed and didn't really fit in with the rest of the herd, which meant he got a lot of pity points from the volunteers and the family. He had only one good friend while he was there, and that was a sheep who had died shortly before we arrived. As a result, he followed people around a lot more and was often given extra corn because he was so friendly.
There were also two giant dogs - Tank and Dozer - and a pair of cats living on the farm. There were fish in two ponds at the lower part of the farm as well as a llama named Grace.
One of the jobs we had was very similar to portaging in the Boundary Waters. We had to hike up a steep trail for about 10 minutes, grab some 2.5 meter boards, and walk back down to the farm. These wood runs were typically the least favorite activity of most of the volunteers, but I actually enjoyed them. They involved some harder physical work, and you actually got to sweat a little in the process.
The first three trips almost killed me. I tried carrying two wide boards down on my second load, and by the bottom of the hill it was all I could do not to collapse at the bottom. I did a third so I could say I did three trips on my first day. By the end of our stay, I was able to carry two of the larger boards or four smaller boards with no problems. Amazing what a couple weeks can do.
As much as I carried boards off the hill, Dana went on the most wood runs in a single day - she made 9 trips, and carried two of the larger boards on trip 8 one day. The most trips I ever did was 7.
The wood was all located a ways away from the rest of the farm because that's where the trees had been felled. The boards were all cut by chainsaw - there was no tablesaw, no mill, nothing, just a barefoot guy with a chainsaw for a couple months clearing sections of land for wood. The most amazing part was that if the boards were 26cm wide at one end, they'd be 26cm wide at the other end and everywhere in between. You couldn't even see that it was cut with a chainsaw on most of the boards. The guy was incredibly good at what he did.
One of the projects at the farm that used the wood was building a second small house for WWOOFers to stay in. The other was The Pit.
The Pit is what Ingo wanted to use for curing ham (probably Chunk, specifically). It was going to be 2.5m x 2.5m x 2.5m, and built of the wood we hauled down the hillside. We spent a fair amount of time just digging the hole, and we still had to finish building the wooden walls inside the pit out of the boards from the wood runs.
Dana took the first long shift either of us had in the hole. After spending three hours down there, she'd made pretty good progress. Later that day, three other people took over and made less progress in three hours than she had.
Eventually, the hole was deep enough and we had straight enough walls to start building the inside structures. I cut notches into the boards with a chainsaw that seemed to burn through bar oil at about the same rate it burned through gasoline, and we started the assembly process.
Chainsaws don't usually leak that much oil, do they?
Eventually, there will be boards across the top and all the way around the sides, plastic sheets will cover everything, and then dirt will be added on top of everything to help regulate temperatures inside the hole. With luck, the roof might even hold up to the weight...
While I was working on the hole, Dana was up in a banana/coffee area using a machete to clear brush. The small field they cleared took roughly 100 man hours, and there were still two larger areas left to clear before the project was completely finished.
Dana with her machete
Ingo also had us help with the bees on his farm. One of our last days there, we spent an hour helping him check the hives and feed them sugar water (if you feed the bees, they can increase their population much more quickly than if they have to forage for food). We got full bee suits and everything, so I didn't swell up like crazy from them.
Overall, the work on this farm was pretty good. Some days went more smoothly than others, but there was plenty of variety, and you were never bored. The worst job was trying to rebuild the greenhouse that had been torn apart by the wind.
The first people to work on it had mounted the plastic only on the ends, and the sheet would catch the wind every time there was a big gust. It was very well anchored on a bamboo pole on one end, so when the wind ripped it off, the pole came off the greenhouse frame.
Once we got the sail under control, we assembled the other side correctly, and it was much easier to deal with than the first part. After several days of frustratingly slow progress, we did manage to get everything together, and the greenhouse looks fantastic now.
On a related note, Truper makes terrible tools. Everything we used from that company either broke or did not work for what seemed to be its intended purpose. For example, there was a trowel one of our hosts bought, and the first time we used it, we stuck it into the ground and pried it back to lift dirt. The handle bent with almost no resistance in loose dirt. A generator we were using to fix the greenhouse broke multiple times while we were there, and finally Ingo took it in to get repaired. Ingo also owned a cordless drill from Truper that had some problems with the charger and the clutch, so even if you could charge the battery, you could only unscrew things - you couldn't drill a hole or tighten a screw.
When we weren't working on the farm, we were able to enjoy some time in a hot tub that had been built by several volunteers. Water flowed in from the spring above the farm, and a fire was built in a 55 gallon drum that had been lowered into the small pool. After a little while, the water was nice and warm. We spent a few nights in there relaxing sore muscles.
Unfortunately, we did not get a picture of this, but one day, the water stopped working at one of the faucets. All the water is safe to drink at the farm, so we just moved to a new one until someone had a chance to look at it and figure out what happened. Dana said she was running the water and it suddenly got super cloudy, then stopped flowing all together.
Ingo was understandably not thrilled to hear about that, and the next morning he decided to take the faucet apart to see if he could figure out what had happened. He got the nozzle off and looked inside, and there, just at the point where the line came out of the cinder blocks was the head of a minnow about the size of my pointer finger. It had apparently gotten sucked into the water intake and pulled through something like 600 yards of 1/2" pipe (with several 90* bends) until it got wedged on the back side of the faucet.
By far the best part of living on this farm was getting to know all the people who were there at the time. I mentioned Joshi earlier, and he was here with his girlfriend as they traveled through South America. We also got to know a Swedish guy named Adam who was incredibly positive and had a great sense of humor.
Adam relaxing in the hammock outside the dining room
Unfortunately for the animals, Adam seemed to be a bad omen for them. Within one week of his arrival, he'd buried several animals including one chick (eventually he realized they were dying often enough that it wasn't worth the effort and we just threw them into the woods), Grace's (the llama) mother, Jackson's friend the sheep, Little Miss Piggy (had leg problems and was put down soon after Adam's arrival), and Mark the baby goat (the other survived).
Mark the goat was named after an English volunteer who was about three months into his planned nine-month stay. He was the expert on everything that needed to be done at the farm while Ingo was away (Ingo was only at the farm for part of a day while I was working there). Mark was great to have around, and he and Adam were really good friends. They actually were traveling to the coast together for a while, so we didn't see Mark during our last week at the farm.
We were also joined by several Americans during the last week of our stay. Chris and his girlfriend Logan were from Georgia and Virginia, and Micah was from Montana. Right before we left, we also met two Australians who had been traveling for several months and were on their way north.
Meg and Reny making cookies
On our way out of town, we stopped for one last coffee at The Beehive and said goodbye to the family. Hopefully we'll make it back down here someday to visit them. It was a fantastic farm, and if anyone reading this is looking for a good WWOOFing farm, we would definitely recommend El Gringo Alto.
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